Phantom Images
Don’t let the beige artwork and that moody title mislead you: there are shitstorms brewing on this disc, and when they unleash, there’s no stopping them. This is play on the very cusp of chaos. - Simon Cummings, 5against4
Phantom Images celebrates the intertwining of improvisation and electronics. Its four tracks present innovative approaches to instruments, novel deployment of electronic processing, and what might be the strangest ‘orchestra’ ever recorded. The disc is at times serious, at times chaotic, at times sinister, but the underlying character is one of ‘play’: adventure, joy, exchange, even a certain mischievousness.
Katherine Young is one of the leading voices of her generation, a composer whose work often defies categorisation, floating between the worlds of performance, technology, composition, and installation. Here we see her at her most spare and unadorned—a bassoon and a collection of effects pedals—but from that setup she conjures an unexpected fluttering,
sputtering, clicking landscape, overlaid with trumpet-like fanfares and wincing cries. Chris Mercer, likewise, is an artist whose work is difficult to pigeonhole, shifting between acoustic ecology, invented instruments, and interactive technologies. But here Mercer has written… an orchestra piece. But this is no ordinary orchestra piece. Mercer plays all 46 instruments, and as a result this orchestra can do things that orchestras shouldn't be able to do. Cellos spontaneously morph into clarinets. Brass instruments sprout their own woodwind doublings. Brass players seem equipped with an enormous array of mutes and plungers. Pianos move seamlessly between sixth-tones and quarter-tones as though the instruments were being retuned mid-performance.
The third track features Charmaine Lee, an extraordinary improvising vocalist whose unique soundworld is both augmented and lacerated through her partnership with Sam Pluta, one of the most inventive, original, and well-respected improvisers working in electronic music. Their contributions are twisted and entangled, flipping between vocal and instrumental, analog and digital, ‘real’ and ‘processed’, flamboyant and intimate. Finally, Aaron Cassidy, a composer best known for his bodily, choreographic approaches to instruments and notation, presents his first purely electronic work to be released on record. Despite its digital materials, this is still visceral music. The result of a series of electronic, politically charged improvisations recorded in the early months of 2017, this work is raucous, unruly, volatile, and defiant.
1. Katherine Young: For Daphne and Delia II (2017) [12’00”]
bassoon and electronics
2. Chris Mercer: Phantom Image (2017) [19’46”]
studio orchestra
3. Charmaine Lee & Sam Pluta: quarks (2017) [8’43”]
voice and electronics
4. Aaron Cassidy: I, for example, ... (2017) [11’10”]
electronics
In 2015, through the support of the University Research Fund at the University of Huddersfield, the Centre for Research in New Music (CeReNeM) convened the ‘Speculations in Sound’ international research network, bringing together leading practitioners and scholars in contemporary music and related disciplines from several major academic institutions around the world. This disc is the first formal publication stemming from the activities of that network.
The inaugural Speculations in Sound event provided a platform for open-ended discussions across a collection of curiosities, uncertainties, limit questions, or rhetorical expressions of doubt proposed by the network’s participants. Many of the conceptual ‘nodes’ put forward for discussion in that event - for example ambiguity and freedom, collaboration, contested hierarchies, gesture, the irrepressible, non-geometrical rhythm, a universal instrumentarium - are present through the four pieces on this disc.
The central threads here in terms of method and medium are improvisation and electronics, but one might take a further step back and say that the unifying element between the four works is ‘play’: adventure, joy, exchange, even a certain mischievousness. These are pieces that are about discovering through playing, whether in the improvisational interweaving between the voice of Charmaine Lee and electronics of Sam Pluta; or through Katherine Young’s exploration of texturally intricate, unstable, and almost trumpet-like sounds from deep within an electronically processed bassoon; or Aaron Cassidy’s noisy, unruly layerings of politically charged digital improvisations from the early months of 2017; or through Christopher Mercer’s manic and wildly inventive ‘orchestra’ piece, in which he performs all 46 instrumental parts himself, assembling an otherworldly ensemble that could only ever exist on ‘tape’. The works here are shapeshifting, unpredictable, often overwhelming, sometimes snarled and gritty, but they also have an underlying ebullience, a joy in making, in discovering, in playing.
The other unifying factor here is simply geographic, and indeed we nearly titled the disc ‘Chicago’. This recording celebrates the rich musical exchange between Huddersfield and Chicago, not only through the Speculations in Sound network but also through several prior connections and friendships. Pluta is Assistant Professor of Composition at the University of Chicago, and is also a Visiting Research Fellow with the Creative Coding Lab at Huddersfield. Mercer is Lecturer in Composition & Music Technology at Northwestern University, just north of Chicago in Evanston, where Young also recently completed her DMA and where Cassidy taught as Lecturer in Composition from 2005–07 prior to moving to Huddersfield, where he now serves as Professor of Composition. Pluta and Mercer were featured composers at Huddersfield’s annual Electric Spring Festival in 2011 and 2016, and Young was part of a research student exchange programme with CeReNeM sponsored by Santander Universities. And there have of course been numerous other Huddersfield-Chicago exchanges in recent years - not least CeReNeM’s Philip Thomas and his work with the John Cage ‘Notations’ collection at Northwestern - that go well beyond the pieces represented here on this record.
Huddersfield is a post-industrial town of about 150,000 in the Pennine hills of the north of England. Chicago is a cosmopolitan metropolis of nearly 3 million in the heart of the American Midwest. And yet the aesthetic threads above - improvisation, experimentation, innovation through technology - are fundamental to both communities, and those threads create a vital link between these two very different places, some 6,000 km apart. This disc, then, is also a reminder that networks are, above all, about people.
Katherine Young: For Daphne and Delia II (2017) [12’00”]
bassoon and electronics
I made (nearly) all the sounds for this piece using the bassoon, a pickup, and some effects pedals. The setup is one that I utilise in live improvised contexts and that in recent years I have incorporated into notated compositions. Certainly, my approach to amplifying and processing the bassoon informs the way I think in all my work; the way I use electronics is rooted in the sonic details and physical experiences of acoustic instrumental performance. Amplification - which at first I used as a practical tool in order to be heard in rock, pop, and free-jazz contexts - I now use to enhance sonic detail, project spatiality, and create recontextualizing juxtapositions of acoustic and electronic sounds.
Like most of my music, this piece was produced through a working process reliant on knotty and recursive integrations of compositional and improvisational techniques. Plans are made; plans get changed; new possibilities emerge; new plans get made to get changed.
This piece is dedicated to consummate experimentalists and sonic sculptors Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire.
Chris Mercer: Phantom Image (2017) [19’46”]
studio orchestra
Instrumentation:
4 Woodwinds (playing ocarina, wooden flute, wooden slide whistle, panpipes)
6 Trumpets
4 Trombones
3 Pianos
5 Electric Guitars
6 Percussion (doubling as 6 zithers)
10 Violins
8 Cellos
I played the parts one at a time, section by section, recording each part in a precise room location between a stereo microphone pair in order to approximate the seating arrangement of a typical orchestra. Carefully matched digital reverbs enhance the sense of depth and cohesion in the space, placing each instrument group in the correct foreground/background relationship to the listener. The effect should be that of 46 musicians playing together in the same room.
But there's a twist. This orchestra can do things that orchestras shouldn't be able to do. Cellos can spontaneously morph into clarinets. Brass instruments can sprout their own woodwind doublings. Pianos move seamlessly between sixth-tones and quarter-tones as though the instruments were being retuned mid-performance; they add and remove "preparations" at lightning speed. Brass players seem equipped with an enormous array of mutes and plungers. Strange hybrid instruments emerge from familiar ones and disappear into yet others.
When these impossible things happen, they do so in the “correct” room location, as if they really were emanating from an instrument. In order to achieve this illusion, I limited myself to processing techniques that would maintain the instrumental essence of the original performances and realistic room reflections. Thus, most of the effects in the piece are achieved via spectral editing, micro-level envelope manipulation, and some good old-fashioned filtering and compression.
The term phantom image refers to the illusion of "center" in a stereo field. In this piece, the entire orchestra is a phantom image - 46 performances by a single person engineered to sound like an otherworldly ensemble in a real-world space.
Charmaine Lee & Sam Pluta: quarks (2017) [8’43”]
voice and electronics
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Aaron Cassidy: I, for example, ... (2017) [11’10”]
electronics
“I, for example,” says the nameless narrator in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground (1864), “would not be the least bit surprised if suddenly, out of the blue, amid the universal future reasonableness, some gentleman of ignoble or, better, of retrograde and jeering physiognomy, should emerge, set his arms akimbo, and say to us all: ‘Well, gentlemen, why don’t we reduce all this reasonableness to dust with one good kick, for the sole purpose of sending all these logarithms to the devil and living once more according to our own stupid will!’ That would still be nothing, but what is offensive is that he’d be sure to find followers: that’s how man is arranged.”
From “Our Delight in Destruction,” Costica Bradatan, New York Times, 27 March 2017
Katherine Young: For Daphne and Delia II (2017)
Katherine Young, bassoon and electronics
Recorded November 2017 by Sam Pluta at University of Chicago
Mixed by Eric Fernandez and Katherine Young
Chris Mercer: Phantom Image (2017)
All instruments performed by Chris Mercer
Recorded and mixed by Chris Mercer at the Ryan Center for Musical Arts recording studio at Northwestern University
Charmaine Lee & Sam Pluta: quarks (2017)
Charmaine Lee, voice
Sam Pluta, electronics
Recorded 30 September 2017 by Sam Pluta at The Lethe Lounge, New York, NY
Mixed by Sam Pluta in the CHIME Studio, University of Chicago
Aaron Cassidy: I, for example, ... (2017)
Recorded and mixed by Aaron Cassidy
Mastered by Richard Scott
Cover photography: “CTA Loop Junction Detail” by Daniel Schwen, © 2007. Used with permission under Creative Commons.
Design: Mike Spikin
Project management: Aaron Cassidy and Sam Gillies, CeReNeM for Huddersfield Contemporary Records (HCR) in collaboration with NMC Recordings
Published by Huddersfield Contemporary Records, 2018
Distributed by NMC Recordings
