There is already music all around us. We are at all times swimming through an air filled with electromagnetic vibration. Why continue to ignore this situation? Why waste additional resources to create devices that produce the same signals already in abundance? Why work to filter and suppress the symphony the we exist in day in and day out? All that is needed is to open oneself, to reorient oneself to the vastness, and the sounds will be there.
It was in this spirit that the composers Alan Courtis of Argentina and Cyrus Pireh of usa were moved to hold a recording session in Buenos Aires, Argentina in the late winter of 2013. A series of coils were arranged in the recording space and connected to amplification apparatus such that they would receive the electromagnetic vibrations in the air. An opening was created and the signals already present were sonified and documented. The coils used in this process were connected using liquid circuits of Malbec wine, and hence the title of the resultant work Coils on Malbec.
After the session, the two composers spent one year treating the source recordings to electroacoustic processes, editing, and arranging until two themeless variations were created: Coils on Malbec which appaears on the A side of the record and Malbec on Coils on side B.
Academic formalism. Outsider weirdness. Beauty. Void. Walking through the unseen. Resignment. Turning to face what cannot be run from.
credits
released September 16, 2016
ALAN COURTIS is known for his over 300 releases world-wide including projects like "Unstringed Guitar" , "Geyzer Music" , a composition for "Ensemble of Newspapers" , etc. and also for his work with people with disabilities in projects like: Reynols, Mumbly Wolfs, Les Harry's, DNA? AND?, Amplified Elephants, etc. Courtis has toured extensively in Japan, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, all around Eurpoe, usa, Australia, NZ, & Latin America and has collaborated with musicians like: Keiji Haino, Merzbow, Jim O'Rourke, Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth), Pauline Oliveros, Phil Niblock, Nihilist Spasm Band, Yoshimi (Boredoms), BJ Nilsen, Otomo Yoshihide, RLW, Zbigniew Krakowski, Eddie Prevost, L.A.F.M.S., Makoto Kawabata, Jojo Hiroshige (Hijokaidan), KK Null (Zeni Geva), Daniel Menche, Mats Gustafsson, Uton, Kemialliset Ystavat, Rick Bishop, Culver, Aaron Moore, Lasse Marhaug, and also with the Icelandic duo Stilluppsteypa.
CYRUS PIREH was born in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, usa on March 22, 1981. Cyrus studied violin, electric guitar, saxophone, and percussion as well as composition, music theory, electroacoustic music, and electrical theory. Cyrus holds bachelor's and graduate degrees in Music Composition from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. As a composer, Cyrus' works involve sign manipulation with the purpose of keeping the interpretive field open. As a perfromer, Cyrus is interestd in the limits of the body and the self: always pushing towards a physical transcendence but working to situate that trancendence in the quotidian in order to live an every-day-life-transcendence. As an anarchist, Cyrus actively works to dismantle hierarchy and to heal the damages done by industry's division of people into performers and audience; producers and consumers. In music, it is not possible to obstruct one sound with another. All sounds combine to create one harmony. Humans in harmony liberate each other.
SHINKOYO is the ectoplasm connecting a group of composers, visual artists, improvisers, instrument builders, thinkers, scholars and conceptual artists exploring a new synthesis of sound and vision.
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