Using music by saxophonist and composer Curtis Macdonald; pianist and musical director Njo Kong Kie; and Russian-born violist Lev “Ljova” Zhurbi, the illustrious choreographer Aszure Barton has collaborated with each dancer independently and built a shared vocabulary for the ensemble based on these personal interactions. Inspired by collaboration, Barton is interested in creating dense environments on stage in which each performer is an individual and all are united by a shared language. Barton’s new work, Untouched, will receive its world premiere at the Harris Theater June 3-6, 2010. Tickets and more information here.

From Time Out Chicago:

“In between the two is Barton’s Untouched, a world premiere. Like Bardo, it’s for twelve dancers and moodily-lit. Otherwise, it’s from the other side of the universe. Its decor (uncredited) is lit (by Nicole Pearce) such that it appears we are looking onto a stage through its back wall. A heavy red curtain hangs, just partly opened, upstage. The floor is lit by shafts of light from beyond this curtain. There’s the sense another house, another audience, is back there sitting quietly, with only a small window onto the action we see clearly, thus, the work is our secret. On top of that atmosphere, Barton builds a world of bodily language suggesting rapidly-shifting power structures lightly dusted with the folkloric. The ambiguity of the work’s title echoes in your head as you watch: They’re immaculate. They’re virgin. They’re alone, above, below. They’ve yet to be experienced. It’s somehow about dancers. It features beautiful ideas about how and when dancers can enter and exit the stage. Its closing duet is spellbinding.”

“I can’t describe it.”

Other reviews:
Chicago Sun Times
Gapers Block Chicago

Every year, the Banff Centre releases a compilation album of all the best recordings from the International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music, fittingly they  title it “Centre Pieces”.  And yes, that’s centre - the Canadian spelling of “center”  :-)

Artistic Director, composer and trumpeter extraordinaire Dave Douglas asked me to create a remix track as an addition to this year’s jazz compilation album.  In doing so, I recorded as many sounds as I could from the participants during my time at the workshop.  All in all, I sifted through approximately 8 gigs of source material all of which were recorded with nothing more than my pocket-sized field recorder (the Sony PCM-D50 to be exact).

Then the fun began!!
I loaded everything up in a session and played around with all the various individual sound bites.  Please note: everything on this track is ‘programmed’ – that is to say these clips were all live, acoustic, and improvised recordings.  They were then later re-sliced, effected and synced in an entirely new context quite unique from their original:

Featured on this track is original sound from these musicians:
(in order of appearance)

Adam Miller – Tablas
Michal Vanoucek – ‘Extended’ Piano
Brian Seligman – Acoustic Guitar
Ryan Butler – Electric Guitar
Anu Junnonen – Voice

click on the post’s link to listen to the music!

Last year I showed you all an excerpt of a piece I created for recorderist Terri Hron (to see the previous post, click here).  Well, I am happy to say that her album “bird on a wire” has  just been released throughout Europe, Canada and the U.S.,  It’s really a great example of several artistic collaborations on many levels.  The album’s music is comprised of several composers Terri commissioned for this project, and the audio production is of the highest, warmest quality possible – something that is difficult to achieve when electronics and real-time processing are so widely (or should I say wisely?) utilized.  This is a really unique and special album that I  am happy to be apart of and encourage you all to seek out.

Terri Hron – Recorder
Dan Porter – Engineering
Yours Truly – Producer/Composer

Here’s a musical snippet from the last performance at the Bowery Poetry Club in NYC.  (see this post).

This venue has been home to many colleagues of mine over the years and it was a pleasure to perform its stage!

As many may already know I’ve been busy writing  music for several albums and there’s no better way to develop new ideas than to hash it out on live – It was a lot of fun playing with these guys, and I’m eager to keep delving deeper into the sound of this repertoire.

Toronto’s Silver Line Trio commissioned me to write a piece for them, it has premiered in Toronto and now Banff, where it became subject to a 5.1 surround sound recording thanks to esteemed producer Steve Bellamy and musical director Barry Schiffman, who made these performances and recordings possible.  The piece is called “Table Turned” and is a blend of several musical ideas that were jumping around in my subconscious this past winter.  Both the live performance and recording was done in the luscious Rolston Recital Hall.

These musicians really played fantastic, it was really overwhelming to see a project like this come into such ripe fruition.  I learned so much.  Thank you guys!!!

Edwin Huizinga – Violin
Elspeth Poole – Cello
Rosabel Choi – Piano

Here’s a little concoction intended for some sort of television broadcast.  Who knows what may or may not come of these little mini demos, but they’re kinda fun to try. It’s neat thinking like a film composer especially when there is no film immediately in front of you.  In fact, that’s how they used to do it back in the day.

This one sounds like it has the flavor of something dark and tribal – kinda like a urban-exotic background theme or something else along those lines.  Check out this previous post, where I put on the same kind of ‘music for TV’ hat.
*thanks to Dan Porter for mastering this track!

Friend and composer Darren Miller recently wrote a series of several short pieces for the digital player piano – in fact, for the very same instrument I wrote something for last fall – (see previous post here).  This time, I asked Darren to give me the audio he recorded from the player piano – I felt driven to add drums and other misc percussion to his piece.  After many wakeful nights tucked away behind samplers, I constructed this little hybrid.

There are hundreds of samples used in this piece, some of which originated from the drums of Nasheet Waits , Eric MacPherson and Jim Black.  (see previous post “Nancarrow Arrangement” and This Mention on Post Classic).  I took it further this time, employing drummer Max Goldman in the studio one afternoon – I recorded him performing all sorts of techniques across 2 drum kits, plus additional percussion improvisations.   He is the drummer featured the most in this little experiment.

Look at this sort of thing like this: take a bundle of magazines, cut out letters from various attractive headlines and then piecing it all together to create a collage-like message.  Today, composers are able to utilize attractive “found-sound” audio bits in very much the same way as drawing notes to a page.  It’s the same process, different interface!  One helps the other.

]]> http://curtismacdonald.com/2009/04/carefully-programmed-drums-to-a-digital-piano/feed/ 4 http://curtismacdonald.com/2009/03/i-love-collaborations/ http://curtismacdonald.com/2009/03/i-love-collaborations/#comments Fri, 06 Mar 2009 00:40:25 +0000 Curtis http://curtismacdonald.com/?p=404 click on the post’s link to listen to the music!

click on the post’s link to listen to the music!

Remember the previous post involving the recorder?  Well, I promised you more, and here I am hyping it once again.  Terri Hron (recorder), Dan Porter (mixing/mastering engineer) and myself (remix composition / production) have been passing files back and forth all over north america to keep the flame alive when it comes to our little trio deluxe.  I have for you now, two new recorder remix pieces that are quite contrasting from each another.  One, is a startling recorder-distorto-drum-maniac-fantasia (drums samples performed by long-time friend and collaborator Alex Wyatt), and the other is a harmonic-retrospective-ballad.

I am honored to have been asked by Audiobrain, a studio I have been working with for the past few years to give a lecture on ‘the compositional aspects of sonic branding,’ but never did I imagine such a discussion would take place in my hometown!  ACAD, (the Alberta College of Art and Design) is Calgary’s premier arts institution and it is my absolute pleasure to shed light on the basics of sound design with their students and faculty.  I will be speaking alongside Audiobrain’s Executive Producer Audrey Arbeeny, where she will emphasize the importance of having outstanding music and sound for well-rounded, well-branded organizations.  Click Here for the write-up on the event from ACAD’s website.

So I was going through some old stuff from past websites and hard drives and came accross this snippet I did in 2007.  It was supposed to be an interactive video game with a story line similar to the hollywood movie “Hero” but sadly it was never released (I think they ran out of cash…)  I worked on the trailer for it, the music and sound that is, and decided to share it once again with you all.  The picture was still a working animatic draft at the time, but you get idea…

Click here to view the embedded video.