Month: October 2023

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Ian Vine – Five Strings

Ian Vine, a composer out of the United Kingdom, provides us with a conceptual piece of classical music.  From his Bandcamp site:

“Recently I have written a series of pieces that are concerned in one way or another with the presentation of unique, and yet similar, events or objects. In this work I examine closely a chord played by four guitars and bass guitar. There is no repetition in the piece, except gesturally..

five strings is presented in its original 36-minute version and also as five shorter pieces, five strings I-V.

In January 2021 I asked our mother, my brother and some of his childhood bandmates to record some guitar pitches that I sent to them in a score. My intention was to make a birthday piece for my brother vaguely in the same year as his fiftieth. For various reasons that didn’t happen and this isn’t that piece, it does however use some of the same material. Thank you to Elizabeth, Eamonn, Sean and Richard.”

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Hani from Yunnan China – Hani Polyphonic Singing in Yunnan China

From our friends at Sublime Frequencies:

“Mystic choral beauty drifting far into the outer cosmos, this other worldly traditional music ensemble creates a contemporary-sounding avant-garde vocal fusion combined with strange instrumental accompaniment.

The HANI are linguistically derived from the YI branch of the Tibeto-Burmese and number a million and a half in the southern part of Yunnan province in China above Laos and Vietnam where smaller Hani communities also live.

As with many other ethnic groups of the area, an original traditional singing pattern is used with each singer adapting the words to the context. The choir that gathers all singers at the same time is considered to be a very unique style of vocal polyphony or heterophony. The cascading, mournful feel of this music is powerfully transcendent and you’ve never heard anything like it.

Many of these songs express intimate strong emotions that bring tears to the performers while they are singing.”

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María Cristina Kasem – Obras – (2006 / 2017)

Friends and readers, thank you for indulging your scribe a well-needed rest after 1,000 days of activity.  We relaunch with one of the most gorgeous electroacoustic recordings I’ve come across in a while.  María Cristina Kasem is a composer and violinist from Argentina who has an extensive body of work in academic experimental music.  These three works are eerie, but so incredibly engaging that the sounds managed to soothe my ears.  A very pleasant find.