Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Digital purchase includes PDF of the 16 page booklet containing a lengthy interview with Catherine Lamb by Che Chen, photos and the complete score to shade/gradient.
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Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
Deluxe LP housed in a 3-color letter-pressed jacket with a 16-page booklet containing the full score to shade/gradient and a lengthy interview with the composer by Che Chen. Limited Edition of 425 copies.
Includes unlimited streaming of shade/gradient
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Catherine Lamb’s work is characterized by an insistence on what she calls the “interaction of tone”. Precisely tuned intervals, played slowly at subtle volumes, blend and generate a host of difference and combination tones, phasing, beating and aural illusions. Her ensemble and orchestral compositions have been performed in grand halls and d.i.y. spaces alike, played by underground musicians and institutional ensembles including the BBC orchestra. Yet sometimes ideas must be stated in ways that reflect their most basic, unfettered reality and indeed, shade/gradient contains all of the elements of Lamb’s orchestral and ensemble music in their most intimate, radically distilled form.
Lamb met Mani Kaul by happenstance at CalArts, where she was a student and he a visiting filmmaker. Though best known for his films, Kaul was also a long time student of the great Indian dhrupad musician, ZM Dagar, and their chance encounter would introduce Lamb to the sonic and philosophical concepts of dhrupad music in the Dagar tradition. The score to Lamb’s shade/gradient bears a dedication to Mani Kaul, and the piece’s oceanic sense of time and emphasis on the most subtle shifts in resonance and intonation make the connection to dhrupad concepts clear, while it’s slowly unfolding structure and tuning system also point towards Morton Feldman and her studies with James Tenney. Performed by Lamb herself using only viola, formant oscillators and her own voice, the piece also falls into the lineage of composer performed solo works like Pauline Oliveros’ Horse Sings from Cloud for accordion and voice, or the ARP synthesizer works of Eliane Radigue (who has composed an as-yet unperformed piece for Lamb).
credits
released August 15, 2018
Catherine Lamb: viola, voice, formant/filtered oscillators
Recorder by Adam Asnan at Ausland, Berlin, January 2015
Mastered by Greg Davis
Thank you to Adam Asnan, Giuseppe Ielasi, Bryan Eubanks, Hanna Hartman, and Andrea Neumann.
supported by 34 fans who also own “shade/gradient”
“With Julius, he was based in repetition, but here was a spirit of openness and improvisation. His scores, if they were written out that way, were often like jazz scores. He loved multiplying instruments – four pianos, ten cellos – so there was a real feeling of the presence of the instrument, not just using an instrument in some kind of equation, as a means to an end.” ~ Mary Jane Leach
Enough said. pt
supported by 30 fans who also own “shade/gradient”
Is the sound of any instrument more profound than that of the cello in the hands of a master? (Well, maybe the viola da gamba.) Here is exquisite cello music from the 14th to the 21st centuries played by Charles Curtis, including four compositions of his own. "Unfinished Song" will make you a believer. John Simms