Nigel Deane presents Wilted Leaves for string ensemble, a reflection on grief that takes inspiration from such natural phenomena as wind through trees or the formation of flying birds.
Laura Cetilia presents nestled in the static for cello and small bluetooth speaker array.
John Eagle presents (stream:streams), performed by Laura Cetilia, for solo cello and quadraphonic speaks as well as untitled (tuning series) for violin and cello and two speakers performed by and Emily Call and Laura Cetilia.
Automata Arts
504 Chung King Ct.
Los Angeles, CA 90012
About the pieces:
stream:streams (John Eagle), composed in 2021, presents a game-like performance situation blending multiple fields. The electronic sounds are field recordings taken from a watershed where a small stream feeds into a larger river. These field recordings are layered together in raw and processed forms. Two different recordings are always present, sounding from different speakers. The cellist acts as the mediator, looking to blend the two recordings in the performance space. The cellist’s notations are generated in real-time. Each notation is a set of available pitches, presented on a fingerboard diagram. These pitches, in sum, are harmonies derived from spectral data in specific field recording pairs. The cellist’s foot pedal allows them to cycle through different sounding combinations of field recordings, not knowing which combination matches their pitches from each notation. The situation is one of guessing, testing, and tuning, in search of greater degrees of harmonic cohesion between each field.
untitled (tuning series) (John Eagle): All the material in this piece comes from one precise physical location recorded eight times—rotating the microphone 45 degrees each time. The location is a loading dock with tall cement walls creating something like a narrow gorge leading out from the attached building. I recorded in the late evening so only ambient sounds are present. The reverb created by the walls changes at each angle—sometimes the change is barely audible and at other times it varies more noticeably. I filtered each field recording at 3 amplitude depths to expose the loudest frequencies. As the filter threshold changes from 8 frequencies allowed to 64 and 512, the sound begins to resemble the original, but with perceivable harmonies. I used the filtered frequencies at each depth to generate chords for violin and cello. A bank of chords was generated for each orientation at each depth and then presented to the performer in real time so that they have new material in each performance.
The material is shaped in a circle mirroring the circle created in the original recordings by rotating the microphone 360 degrees. The performers navigate all 360 degrees of the microphone rotation independently and freely with individual controls, thereby “facing different directions” most of the time while crossing paths at other times like two hands on a clock. At each orientation, a corresponding electronic part is played (one of the eight field recordings). At first all the recordings are filtered to the shallowest depth (8 frequencies) and, over time, move to greater depths and eventually return to the raw, unfiltered field recordings. Having only the sound of the electronic part to direct the precise tuning of each chord, the performers search for the microtonal intonation suggested by the field recordings.