Mind & Machine, Volume Five

Organic & Electronic Works

William Jason Raynovich composer
Bill Whitley composer
Fared Shafinury composer
Jeff Morris composer
Juliana Hodkinson composer
David Congo composer
Colin Kemper composer
Daniel De Togni composer

Release Date: September 22, 2023
Catalog #: RR8091
Format: Digital
21st Century
Avant-Garde
Electroacoustic

The critically-acclaimed MIND & MACHINE series from Ravello Records returns with its fifth edition with an all-new roster of today’s electro-acoustic composers. This installment taps into and unpacks the foundations of our universe, from the hidden corners of our psyche to the fibers that hold our world together. Offering meditative reflections on the ephemeral moments in our lives and exploring resemblances between music and scientific concepts, MIND & MACHINE, VOLUME FIVE delivers a sprawling artistic soundscape that allows for deep introspection and self-discovery.

Listen

Hear the full album on YouTube

Track Listing & Credits

# Title Composer Performer
01 Now #256 (final 5 minutes) William Jason Raynovich Wiliam Jason Raynovich, electric cello 5:11
02 Kaleidoscope Bill Whitley Bill Whitley, electronic instruments; Elena Talarico, acoustic piano; Francesco Zago, gongs and bells 10:15
03 Quantum Shāhed: The Witness & the Waves Fared Shafinury, Jeff Morris Fared Shafinury, setār; Jeff Morris, live electronics 7:52
04 Furs Juliana Hodkinson Juliana Hodkinson, foley and sewing machine 4:52
05 Shells Juliana Hodkinson Carsten Richter, foley; Juliana Hodkinson, additional foley, violin and samples 5:09
06 Prisms I David Congo David Congo, electroacoustic 11:55
07 I am all that is here, I Colin Kemper Colin Kemper, Bb clarinet 5:08
08 Inquiry into the nature of the warm asphalt beneath my feet with lines lining things up Colin Kemper Colin Kemper, Bb clarinet 3:30
09 Rain on the Wind Daniel De Togni Transient Canvas | Amy Advocat, bass clarinet; Matt Sharrock, marimba 5:32
10 Now #257 William Jason Raynovich Wiliam Jason Raynovich, electric cello 15:40

Track 1*
Recorded January 27, 2023 at Chicago State University in Chicago IL
Recording Session Producer, Engineer, Editing & Mixing William Jason Raynovich

Track 2
Recorded February-March 2023 in Albany, Oregon & Lecco, Italy
Engineering & Mixing Francesco Zago

Track 3
Recorded January 29, 2023 at Belafonte Studio in Corpus Christi TX
Electronic instrument design Jeff Morris
Quantum physics conceptualization Nader Mirabolfathi, Kamran Reihani, Jeff Morris

Track 4
Samples originally recorded October 10, 2012 at picaroMedia in Berlin, Germany
Composition, Editing & Mixing Juliana Hodkinson
Recording Engineer, Final Mixing Peter Weinsheimer

Track 5
Samples originally recorded January 25, 2012 at Studio Warns in Berlin, Germany
Recording Engineer Johannes Warns
Composition, Editing & Mixing Juliana Hodkinson
Final Mixing Peter Weinsheimer

Track 6
An electroacoustic work created December 2018 – February 2019 at the Sound Synthesis Studio in West Springfield MA

Tracks 7-8
Recorded June 2020 in Tuscaloosa AL
Recording Session Producer & Engineer Colin Kemper

Track 9
Recorded August 4, 2021 in Alba, Italy

Track 10*
Recorded January 28, 2023 at 4718 N Kedzie Ave in Chicago IL
Recording Session Producer, Engineer, Editing & Mixing William Jason Raynovich

Mastering Melanie Montgomery

*This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

Executive Producer Bob Lord

A&R Director Brandon MacNeil
A&R Danielle Sullivan, Chris Robinson, Ivana Hauser

VP of Production Jan Košulič
Audio Director Lucas Paquette

VP, Design & Marketing Brett Picknell
Art Director Ryan Harrison
Design Edward A. Fleming
Publicity Aidan Curran, Chelsea Kornago

Artist Information

William Raynovich

William Jason Raynovich

Composer

William Jason Raynovich uses (or rather abuses) computers to create musical repetition out of the idiosyncrasies of physical performances. With the open-source visual programming language, Pure Data, he creates interactive compositions with new notational systems and explores self-similarity systems with live audio processing. He is constructing a series of unconventional instruments to accompany these algorithmic compositions. The works in this series include tre’ for voice, instruments, and computer,and his cello solo piece, now for cello and computer.

Bill Whitley

Composer

Bill Whitley works with shapes and patterns, correlating musical materials to kinetic sculpture. His music is defined by interlocking, often hypnotic patterns interspersed with passages of intense rhythmic energy, while placing linear content in the foreground.

Fared Shafinury

Fared Shafinury

Composer, Setār

Fared Shafinury is an internationally acclaimed artist, Persian setârist, composer, vocalist, activist, and educator. Beyond the singer songwriter, he is a disciple of the many prominent masters of Radif, setâr, and âvâz (Lotfi, Shâri, Zolghadr, and Mozafari). Shafinury has dedicated his life to both the preservation and evolution of classical Persian music.

Jeff Morris

Jeff Morris

Composer

Jeff Morris creates musical experiences that engage audiences’ minds with their surroundings. His performances, installations, lectures, and writings appear in international venues known for cutting-edge arts and deep questions in the arts. He has won awards for making art emerge from unusual situations: music tailored to architecture and cityscapes, performance art for the radio, and serious concert music for toy piano, robot, Sudoku puzzles, paranormal electronic voice phenomena, and live coding using algebra and breath-controlled piano.

Juliana Hodkinson

Juliana Hodkinson

Composer

Juliana Hodkinson’s practice moves within experimental music and sound art genres, and her works range from intimate chamber and object pieces through hybrid formats to larger electroacoustic and orchestral productions. Commissions include All around (BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra), Angel View (Spor Festival/Scenatet/Berliner Festspiele), Ground View (Ensemble Mosaik), Hauch and Ready for ecstasy (Neue Vocalsolisten), Can modify completely (WDR Sinfonieorchester), Turbulence (Chamber Made Opera), Lightness (Speak Percussion) and something in capitals (Phønix16).

David Congo

David Congo

Composer

David Congo (b. 1952) graduated with honors from Western Connecticut State University in Danbury CT, and earned his master degree in music composition at the Ohio State University in Columbus OH. After studying music at these universities, Congo entered a career in the IT field, and immediately began combining computer technology with music creation. He has created works for acoustic and electroacoustic instruments for over 45 years.

Colin Kemper

Colin Kemper

Composer

Colin Kemper is a composer, performer, and educator. His compositional interests are multifaceted; particularly, his art is concerned with matters pertaining to mental wellness, family dynamics, gender norms, addiction, trauma, and recovery. He is interested in collaborative endeavors involving notated music, electronic, electro-acoustic, popular song, theater, video games, film, dance, screendance, and multimedia installation.

Daniel De Togni

Daniel De Togni

Composer

As a composer and artist who primarily works with sound, Daniel De Togni is fascinated with the concept of space in sound/music. Specifically, the psychological space that music inhabits in our minds as listeners, performers and/or creators, how sonic objects interact with each other in real-time and space, as well how a sound can evoke an image or landscape in our minds.

Notes

Now,
every now has, is, or will occur,
though every now is only now
When it will be, is, or was now.

When performing now, it was now.
When listening to a now, it is now.

. . . now January 27 or 28 was a now,
but when the audio is replayed
they once again become. . . now.

— William Raynovich

Kaleidoscope (2022) – Here is a kaleidoscope that has come apart, and drifts weightlessly like an ocean of beads or diamonds. I worked with that four-note motif for over a year until I finally accepted that it wanted to fall apart. What’s left is a kaleidoscope out of its container, a kaleidoscope undone.

— Bill Whitley

This work is part of a larger project to explore the potential for music to elucidate first lessons in quantum physics. For more information, see: bit.ly/quantum-music. Quantum physics deals with things so small that we bump against the limits of the smallest meaningful units (e.g., of space, time, and energy), which makes things behave differently from what we see in the macroscopic world. This means that tactile demos and direct verbal explanations can’t convey deep understanding, so we’re exploring the creative, poetic route, exploring resemblances between quantum physics and music and art, toward building a more intuitive kind of understanding.

In Persian, the word shāhed means witness. The notion of witnessing something is also significant in quantum physics. In this branch of science, one must assume a balance of many possible truths (for example, regarding the state of a particle) until a measurement is taken, which collapses all possibilities into a single known reality. For students beginning to study quantum physics, a significant challenge is that they can only view the world through mathematical expressions balancing all possible outcomes; they cannot simply see the world of quantum physics directly, and it cannot be modeled faithfully with toys from our macroscopic world.

In Persian classical music, shāhed describes the pitch that has a special place within the music. One could say that it is the witness in the music in the sense that it receives the most attention from the improvising performer or that it is presented to the audience most thoughtfully. Different musical structures include their own shāhed pitches, so treating a pitch like it is the shāhed also evokes realizations about how all other pitches will fit together in their respective relationships to the whole: They lock into one configuration of the state of things.

The word witness carries senses of both seeing and declaring. In quantum physics, the act of measurement sacrifices many possibilities for the sake of knowing one reality, but at a deeper level, in order to study this world that is smaller — more fundamental — than what microscopes can show us, one must sacrifice prior beliefs about how the world works, letting go of knowing anything with complete certainty. Pursuing a deeper understanding of our universe requires patience and bravery to navigate many uncertainties as nature reveals itself to us in its own way.

We are using Persian classical music and electronics to explore our musical sense of the music “locking in” to one state (e.g., a single pitch in the bass drone and one mode in the setār — one pitch becomes the main pitch, around which other pitches orbit) and then going through other musical moments when multiple states could be possible until we hear it locking in again (like the wave function collapsing when measured and broadening in possibilities as further interactions commence). Each pitch we hear gives us a clue as to the relationships among pitches, and when we hear enough of them, our musical sense locks in, resolving uncertainty for the moment and allowing us to feel that now that particular pitch is the shāhed.

This mirrors the phenomenon of state in quantum physics: we can only know the probabilities of multiple possible states in which an object could be, until a measurement is taken, collapsing the wave function of all possibilities. Similarly, the long, pitched drone instrument occasionally locks in on its main pitch (a low E-flat). At other times, it locks in on higher pitches for a moment before returning to its ground state, and sometimes in between, we find it sounding uncertain, rumbling with multiple possibilities existing at once. All these moments of uncertainty resolving into clarity and fleeing back to uncertainty in a cycle keep the music moving forward.

We dedicate our efforts to the brave women of Iran.

— Jeff Morris

The sounds here were recorded in response to the animation film Allerleirauh by director Anja Struck, and first arranged as a live set which I performed with an amplified sewing machine at Berlin’s Volksbühne during the Interfilm festival in November 2012. I then created a fixed media piece, freely using the sample material, without adhering to the film’s timing.

The film takes its point of departure in the Brothers Grimm’s tale of a king who falls in love with her daughter, sending her on a journey of hidden identity. When discovered, as a delaying tactic she demands that the king bring her three dresses — one of gold, some of silver, and one made of the furs of every kind of animal in the kingdom. In the Grimms’ tale, the king fulfills this seemingly impossible task, has his way and they live “happily ever after.” Anja Struck’s animation film focuses on the effects of patriarchal child abuse and incest, played out on a damaged live-size doll.

I responded quite literally to the tale and the film’s themes of skin, fur, sewing, roughness, and identity, by collecting sounds that were concrete, heavy and brutal, and could be perceived against fragility and loss of will.

The live set was commissioned by Interfilm Festival Berlin with support from the Danish Arts Council.

— Juliana Hodkinson

Most of the sounds here were recorded and first shaped as creative foley samples for a soundtrack that I created in 2012 for the surrealist film La coquille et le clergyman by film director Germaine Dulac. My soundtrack for Dulac’s film and the samples for live performance were commissioned by Louisiana Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark, for the exhibition Women of The Avant-Garde 1920-1940. I also performed a live set with the samples at the exhibition opening, and later I made this short fixed media piece from the same material.

Dulac’s silent film is full of rhythm and sonic sensitivity: smashing glass; footsteps that chase, flee and dance; slow and fast motion; rifts and ruptures; and rhythmic repetitions of all kinds. It was the first surrealist film, premiering a year before Bunuel’s Le chien andalou, and it offers a radically feminist contribution to histories of symbolism, surrealism, and psychoanalysis — in Dulac’s time the film was even shown at gatherings of psychotherapy practitioners.

There was plenty of temporal composition already in the film, so my sounds worked partly in counterpoint to the images – often channeling the same objects and associations through use of foley, but freeing myself in the editing process from synchronicity and instead letting the sonic motifs find their own force-fields.

— Juliana Hodkinson

Prisms is an electroacoustic work comprised of kaleidoscopic audio events suggesting light processed through glass prisms. Imagining music by contemplating visual events is nothing new, but is still a valid approach that can help a composer, at least initially, begin creating a piece of music. Famous examples include Debussy’s La Mer inspired by The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai and Rachmaninov’s The Isle of the Dead inspired by Die Toteninsel by Arnold Böcklin.

I sometimes use this approach as a jumping off point to create music. Groups of sonic material are imagined and sketched before assembling them into a new work. These ideas are developed and transformed and, through this process, I discover each new piece of music. For me, this discovery phase is the most exciting part of the creative process. As I continue working, the new work is revealed to me, and the form for the piece is determined. During the final phases of creation, I continue by shaping, fine tuning and, in the case of an electroacoustic work, mixing and mastering to complete the work.

Sound material used in Prisms is principally electronic with a few sampled percussion instruments, bass clarinet, and vocal fragments. It was created in my home studio between December 2018 and February 2019.

— David Congo

Inquiry into the nature of the warm asphalt beneath my feet with lines lining things up is a meditation on emotional vulnerability and physicality during a time of crisis. At the onset of the pandemic, I compartmentalized and tried to keep all the sudden changes from affecting my writing. Eventually I learned to respond to the immediacy of events each day, to let my work become a space to be present and myself. This piece was inspired by one of those small, transient moments where I felt whole during that 2020 summer: walking around my neighborhood barefoot with the sun on my face. I am all that is here, I explore my anxieties from self-imposed isolation during the pandemic. Through repetition, dissonance, gradual pitch changes, and the capturing of small sounds such as breaths and clicks, the listener is slowly immersed into the soundworld. The parameters of this world are distorted and stretched so that immersion, not cathartic resolution, remains the primary architectural element.

— Colin Kemper

The fleeting impermanence of a moment is what contributes to its beauty and meaning. Rain on the Wind is a tone poem and reflection on the ephemeral moments in our lives, which contains meditative elements of gentleness and space. The many sounds heard in the electronics contain the sounds of cicadas, wind chimes, birdsong, as well as layers of bass clarinet sounds.

— Daniel De Togni