Music From Other Minds

This week’s program features music conveying a sense of place. Louise Campbell’s clarinet solos are personal reflections on aspects of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Senso di Voce and Henry Birdsey record in a small cabin in rural New Hampshire while recreating the acoustic environment of giant grain elevators. Henry Kaiser offers a requiem for colleagues in Antartica. Philip Petit uses electronic instruments to portray Dante dreaming that he is with Virgil bathing in the Acheron River. Rounding out the program are Nicole Mitchell and the Indigo Trio, Roscoe Mitchell playing flute and percussion, and a new performance of Pauline Oliveros’ 1970 composition, To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe on Recognition of Their Desperation.

Joseph Bohigian, in collaboration with Leyya Mona Tawil, plays music from Arab.AMP, a platform for experimental live art, music, and ideas by artists of the SWANA diaspora and region. Featuring music by Mike Khoury, Tony Elieh, Youmna Saba, BINT, Dirar Kalash, Marwan Kamel/The Daily Maqam, John King, and Jad Atoui & Anthony Sayhoun / NP.

Canadian composer Gayle Young works with electronics, graphic scores, microtonality, and invented instruments. According to the Moon is a new album of her vocal music featuring Montreal based singer Sarah Albu.

Violinist Meredith Bates is active as a performer and collaborator in Vancouver. Her new double album Tesseract uses field recordings, electronics, and violin.

Neil Rolnick’s new release on Other Minds Records is a continuation of his work combining piano and interactive computer. Lockdown Fantasies is a suite of pieces composed during the pandemic. Journey’s End symbolically traces his wife Wendy’s spiritual journey while dying of cancer.

Electroacoustic music is music that incorporates electronic sound production and manipulation into compositional practice. We’ll feature two composers from Latin America: Joaquín Orellana and Jacqueline Nova. We’ll also feature an electroacoustic work from Luc Ferrari, and something new from Chicago-based composer Matana Roberts. Also a classic electroacoustic work by Iannis Xenakis, and a couple of turntable mash-ups of pop music by Christian Marclay.

In this program, Joseph Bohigian plays a selection of submissions from composers, producers, and performers around the world. This is Music from Other Minds’s third listener submission program, featuring works in a variety of styles by Niloufar Nourbakhsh, Marjorie Van Halteren, Pierre Jodlowski, Staubitz and Waterhouse, dana jnnfrsn, Sheri Wills, Dan Senn, David A. Jaffe, Jakub Polaczyk, and Fernand Vandenbogaerde.

Sarah Kenchington’s mechanically assisted acoustic instruments are often uncontrollable, making surprising and delirious music. For more than 40 years, Tom Nunn was an essential force in San Francisco music, working at the intersection of invented instruments and free improvisation. He designed and built hundreds of original instruments and performed with dozens of musicians locally and internationally. A survey of Tom’s solo and collaborative music. Folded Landscapes, a new work by Scottish composer Erland Cooper, combines the words of poet Simon Armitage and activist Greta Thunberg with a chamber ensemble recorded in increasingly hot conditions for an immersive meditation on climate change.

Experimental music for people with short attention spans. If you hear something you like, look it up in our playlist and jump on the internet to learn more. If you don’t like what you’re hearing, it will change to something different in a few minutes. The program is weighted towards electronic music and experiments with voice – sound poetry and audio story telling. Artists include Lucrecia Dalt, Ben LaMar Gay, Valentina Magaletti, Valentina Goncharova, Henri Pousseur, Luc Ferrari, Charles Amirkhanian, Laurie Anderson with Scott Johnson, Delia Derbyshire, Toshi Ighiyanagi, Brian Eno, Joseph Byrd, Frank Zappa, and Tom Waits.

On this Music from Other Minds, Liam Herb plays Louder Warmer Denser by Pamela Z, From me flows what you call Time and Twill by Twilight (In memory of Morton Feldman) by Toru Takemitsu, Soundscape by Katrina Krimsky, and Morangak by Carl Stone.

Electronics pervade the performance of music in the 21st century. The use of electronic elements are common across many genres of music, and composers today are searching for new and interactive ways to incorporate them into live performance. The composers on this program take a variety of approaches to the use of interactive electronics, from the combination of acoustic instruments and voices and electronic processing to the creation of new electronic instruments using motion sensors and game controllers. Included is music by Mari Kimura, Paul Leary, Kate Soper and Sam Pluta, Thea Farhadian, Pamela Z and Paula Matthusen, Anne Hege, Lei Liang, Bora Yoon, and Caroline Polachek.