courtesy of Populist Records
One week from today Bandcamp will release the latest self-produced recording by Giacomo Fiore. Once again, the album will consist of a single composition, roughly one hour in duration, entitled “point/wave.” The composer is Catherine Lamb, and the piece is scored for a steel-string acoustic guitar and a Secondary Rainbow Synthesizer. The latter is an electronic instrument that Lamb developed with Bryan Eubanks. The device is a sophisticated filter than extracts lush waves of microtonal sonorities from a “background” of environmental sounds. Because all of these sonorities involve natural harmonics, Fiore’s instrument uses tuning based on just intonation.
For those not already familiar with this concept through past articles, just intonation is a tuning system in which all intervals are based on integer ratios. Which integers are involved is not explicitly specified. Traditionally, they have usually been relatively small, such as seven, eleven, and thirteen (that last being used to particularly intense effect in a solo horn passage composed by Benjamin Britten). In “point/wave” those integers are 3, 7, 11, and 31, from which are derived a gamut of fourteen pitches.
The Bandcamp download includes a two-page booklet with an essay by Fiore discussing how Lamb derives both melodic lines and chords from this gamut. It would probably be fair to say that the Synthesizer provides a “continuo” for Fiore’s guitar work. The latter draws upon individual pitches from the gamut, occasional extended to relatively limited simultaneities. The essay also describes the approach to making the recording itself, which involved Fiore working with Lanier Sammons.
I have to confess that the experience of listening to this recording brought me back to my interest in the “ambient” compositions of Brian Eno. One of my earliest CD purchases was of Eno’s “Thursday Afternoon,” a single uninterrupted 61-minute track that emerged from his work with electronic gear. Mind you, Eno was more interested in overlays and reverberations; and I do not think I ever encountered his venturing into just intonation. Nevertheless, this is music in which the nature of the background often takes precedence over anything happening in the foreground. (Lamb herself describes the piece as “the long introduction.”)
The attentive listener that approaches “point/wave” should accept from the outset that patience is of the utmost; but once that premise is embraced, Lamb’s composition makes for an engagingly imaginative listening experience.
No comments:
Post a Comment