News
20 March 2008
Now that both Indices for chamber orchestra and Situation Temporaire (acousmatic music) are complete and have been successfully performed, I currently at work on a new septet which will be performed in Berlin in November 2008. In parallel, I will shortly begin work on a new piece for basset horn, for the outstanding French clarinettist Florent Charpentier. A spate of performances of older pieces is currently being organized, and I will be making new recordings of two pieces in April: Le Malheur Adoucit les Pierres and Two Pieces for Piano.
14 September 2007Work on my piece for 18 musicians has been temporarily set aside so that I can complete Evidence, which uses the same instrumental group as Wagner's Siegfried Idyl (13 players). This piece will be performed twice on consecutive evenings at the Opéra de Massy, France, in January 2008. Other projects include a 10-minute electroacoustic work tentatively set to be unveiled in March.
28 August 2007My new basset horn quintet, La Pendule de Profile, will be premiered at the Paris Conservatory on 17 October. Details here. I have added my program notes for this piece to the Works page. My current project is a large new work for 18 winds, brass and percussion, which lacks a title for the time being.
27 August 2007I spent all of July making high-quality digital transfers of my entire archive of tape recordings. This archive comprises hundreds of hours of short experimental pieces, spoken works, improvisations, songs and live recordings made over the period 1995-2002. The transfers were made using carefully maintained high-end playback machines to obtain the highest possible fidelity to the original sources. The tapes cover a range of formats, including stereo cassettes, 4- and 8-track cassettes, 16-track 1/2-inch reels, DAT and ADAT tapes. For the transfer of the 16-track tapes I have enlisted the services of noted tape restoration expert Richard L. Hess.
All this work was undertaken for two reasons. First and foremost, audio tape is simply not a stable medium and degrades over time, so I wanted to ensure that no recordings be lost or their quality compromised. Secondly, much of this material is being prepared for eventual commercial release, especially the 5 unreleased song collections Seuqimonoce, Switches 'n' Lights, You Only Need to Stay Above, A Walk in the Brambles and Sotas Ery; the two previously-released collections Twelve and Swollows, which will be entirely re-mixed and re-mastered, and an album of highlights from live performances with the Trosper Ensemble.
While these are not high-fidelity recordings, the original multitrack masters are of considerably superior quality to the original mixes. I am not hesitating to use every trick available in the digital domain to bring out the best in these recordings and minimize their flaws.
24 August 2007
My piece Ladle Days, from Songs of Elsewhere, is featured in the soundtrack of Luke Leonard's new film, Antiquated Play, which was premiered 9 July at Throckmorton Fine Art in New York City.
