SYNTHI 100
The first major artistic outcome of this project, was the result of a one week residency, jan 2023, at the Contemporary Music Research Center in Athens, Greece, a studio founded by Iannis Xenakis, Giannis G. Papaioannou and Stephanos Vassileiadis in the 70’s. Needless to say, it felt good to be in a place which such historical connections!
Their studio houses a EMS Synthi 100, a rare modular system made in the UK in the 70’s. I had been there a few years prior when I made my record «Kingdom of Bells...» so I was already familiar with this instrument. Unfortunately its state had deteriorated slightly since my last visit in 2019, so the sequencer was not quite working. Its an old an unstable instrument, which demands that you play it on its premises. If you treat it right it does however have a huge sonic potential! This made it clear for me that for this residency I had to stay quite close to the stretching part of my project.
Going into this I was thinking of how if one has a strong underlying aesthetic, very seemingly different musical idioms can serve towards the same overall expression. A great example for me is Roland Kejiser, Kjell Westling and Bengt Berger who beautifully juxtaposed and incorporated Swedish traditional melodies in a free jazz setting as can be heard on the record ‘vedbod tapes’. It is especially evident on the tracks where Kjell changes his raunchy free jazz clarinet for solo fiddle with traditional melodies and the music changes genre completely, it does not in fact change the esthetics of it. It is quite the opposite, these juxtapositions serves to enhance the sense that ALL their musics eminates from a deeper place and are part of the same thing. Looking at at the artistic outcomes of my phd as a collected body of work I hope that these recordings can fit in a similar way.
I plan to release this as a record (hopefully as a physical release) and on youtube as a videos. Although I do think the music stand on its own, I find that video is a good way to showcase the live nature of my approach. These takes do not contain any overdubs or mixing, they where recorded as stereo tracks straight from the Synthi 100, with some reverb and eq added in post.
Fanten
This is a slowed down drone version of the tune Fanten as I’ve learnt to play it on mouth harp. All the pitches of the melody get one oscillator each and I then play the melody by bringing these oscillators in and out of the mix. Later in the piece I freely improvise with these oscillators polyphonically to make a drone piece.
Melismatic
The Synthi 100 does not allow for the kind of micro transposing of a keyboard that I normally use with my system. However as the keyboards allow for scaling it enables xTET equal tempered scales (not only 12tet), although I found that the keyboards voltage was not equally spaced after all… in other words it took a lot of trial and error to find some scales that had a few arbitrary notes in tune. So this piece is composed of an improvisation with the arbitrary notes that the limitations of the Synthi allowed for.