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At the end of September 2019, the Hurdy Gurdy player from Guelph, Canada, named Ben Grossman came to Marseille to play in the premier of Guillaume Orti’s “… ence” at the Festival Les Emouvantes. He stayed the weekend and we organized a concert in a beautiful cave in the stunning Calanques National Park just outside of town.

Before that, I took him aside for a discussion à la Echo Chamber:- we covered the immediacy of prepared acoustic instruments compared to electronics; making sounds “acceptable” through extended techniques; how good improvisation resembles a enriching conversation; the problems with the term “experimental”; translating and the problems of using words in general, and even a little Rite of Spring.

Throughout the episode are extracts of some of Ben’s releases. Choosing which of his sounds to put where was particularly fun this time because one of the releases featured, “MACROPHONE: Aleatoric Solo Duets for Electro-Acoustic Hurdy Gurdy” is a double CD where the listener is actually instructed to play both disks simultaneously, setting each to shuffle or replay, so as to “create the experience of improvisation in a recording”. So I played around with the tracks and two combinations came up which I particularly liked, which you can hear at the beginning and at 32’50” of the episode.

The other performances that feature are taken from the cave concert – first, a part of Ben’s solo that he began in the belly of the cave, and the second, a trio with percussionist  Vincent Roussel and myself alongside Ben.

Thanks so much Ben for your time and the beautiful concert!

macrophone.org

organistrum:prototype from Loess Media on Vimeo.

https://vimeo.com/channels/922477

https://vimeo.com/channels/922477

 

https://vimeo.com/channels/922477

 

A little over a year ago I visited Justin Evans in Charlotte, North Carolina, for his residency showcase at Goodyear Arts. I originally got in touch with Justin after coming across his indescribable experimental podcast project Mystery Meat. We met at the Goodyear Arts building and recorded a little echo chamber.

I’m overjoyed listening back to our conversation over a year later. In part 2, we talk about, amongst other things, art & ritual as psychological tools to alleviate guilt, enrich life & bind an audience closer to be more of a community, often employing the purifying effects of noise.

But who is Justin Evans? He is a poet and electrician from Marietta, GA. He’s pursuing an MFA from Queens University and is the co-author of many local plays in his current home, Charlotte, NC and in his last home, Asheville, NC. He’s the former co-editor of the local lit mag Vanilla Sex, and current poetry editor of the Queens lit mag QU.

Music/Audio featured in this two-part edition come exclusively from various Mystery Meat episodes.

Thanks so much again, Justin.

 

I spent several days last summer with composer, improviser and spinet-player Christoph Schiller at his somewhat legendary studio in Basel. Given the concentrated subject matter, and the sheer length, of the discussions, I decided to make a three-part Echo Chamber special that deals overall with the question of freedom in musical composition:- composition as an emancipatory means to deeper reflexion and a more sincere gestural approach.

Toward the end of our three days of conversations, we focused on the problem of words; the problem of musicians trying to communicate between one another despite speaking different languages, ideas becoming lost in translation, and the difficulty of choosing the right words in even one’s own language.

We also look at the problems posed by the following quote from my late musicologist dad: “the more that people believe that music expresses or arouses emotions, the more they want others to agree.” This takes us onto the descriptive words used for music, and leads us to consider the deliberate theatricality of Baroque music amongst others.

The music featuring in this episode comes exclusively from the sublime album ‘Tse’ by Christoph Schiller in trio with Pierre-Yves Martel and Cyril Bondi.

Find about more about Christoph on his website.

PS Don’t adjust your sound system! There’s an intermittent buzz in the right-hand channel of these recordings, due to my faulty Zoom microphone. Sorry.