"...a kind of acoustic acupressure."
—Mark Swed, describing Reidemeister Move's live performance of Wonderment (“Critic’s Notebook” Los Angeles Times, October 12, 2018)
"My first thought on listening to the three pieces on this album in sequence was that I was hearing music being reinvented from first principles...as if every sound, every familiar interval...every structural turning point, is being heard for the first time..."
Richard Barrett, Composer
"This music is startlingly, starkly beautiful - a unique voice forging a path that invites the listener to follow its powerful internal logic. Original and remarkable."
Patricia Alessandrini, Composer
"...characterized by a rare clarity and restraint...in all the pieces there's a fresh and challenging reassessment of tonal foundations, which can unfold remote and surprising implications. This work...invites patience, attention, sensitivity to nuance; to all of which the performances and recordings are admirably attuned."
Erik Ulman, Composer
The vinyl release of By A Moment And A Word (Reidemeister Move and Dog Trio, new works by Ben Leeds Carson, 2022) is a 36-minute LP vinyl record, produced by Chris Mercer and Hans Thomalla, in a deluxe folding cardboard record jacket and sleeve designed by Ana María Bermúdez.
Includes unlimited streaming of By A Moment And A Word
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
...more
ships out within 7 days
Purchasable with gift card
$14USDor more
Streaming + Download
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Wonderment and Misgiving (2018) is a pair of duos for low wind and low string instrument, meant as a kind of story-music. As I wrote I imagined music for a pantomime or monodrama, and strived to think of those genres as having specific qualities of time and temporality, even before the situations, and characters, are known. I also tried in these works to re-think some broad tendencies and assumptions about the roles of constancy and change in musical discourse. The two duos were separate but related thought experiments: in each, I imagined a solid object, with contours curving and jutting in all directions—each moving differently in a five-dimensional space, represented in the music by modal pitch, dynamics, timbre, harmonic quality (produced via a higher note’s emphasis of a simultaneous lower note’s partials), and time—with time treated, unusually, as a dimension in which meaningful qualities can be differentiated. Here, time is a dimension like any other—like hardness, like brightness, or even dimensions with less categorical clarity, like suspense, or repose. If that seems abstract, notice small rhythmic gestures in the first half of Wonderment, and allow them their individuated and momentary characters. Normally one has to find a beat before feeling a syncopation, but here, the intensities must be figured differently, figured from a quality of time that emerges freely, from unmetered pairs of timespans.
Finally, in a space conceived from those five dimensions, each of the two bodies undergoes change and movement. Its contours are malleable, and rotate around a fixed axis that mutes the space in that region, where, because it is an axis, movement is minimal, and stability is unavoidable. In each case, the axis concentrates information around a narrow range in one dimension, and renders it mostly inarticulate (^1).
In Wonderment the axis of rotation crosses the musical space at middle D of the bass-clef range. (The axis is almost “perpendicular” to pitch, but not quite: the work’s notes descend in pitch, within about a fourth below D, as a direct function of reduced intensity and pitch fixity.) Its contours around that axis arise from differences in intensity, balance between timbres, shifts in degrees of syncopation, and shifts in the degree that pitch is fixed. Misgiving’s axis shifts within the piece: In most phrases it steadies itself around a particular, and only slightly “unpulsed” quality of time, exploring contours in pitch and harmonicity; in others, the axis fixes around harmonic fundamentals to let the object ebb, flow, and waft into dry, weightless syncopations. The axes in both movements should draw our attention to types of motion that might otherwise seem subservient: the first object inures us to forces of dynamic contour as though they were melody, and the second undergoes a kind of bloom, accustoming us at first to a rhythmic world, but then wobbling as it spins toward more conventional melodic gestures, bridging—in the manner of an intermezzo—some unspecified and almost “unpulsed” story, or dance, to another.
[1. Inarticulate in the way that timbre might be inarticulate in a beginner’s piano etude, or dynamics might be inarticulate in a melody whose pitches you struggle to remember.]
credits
from By A Moment And A Word,
released September 29, 2022
Recorded 9 June 2021
Jenö-Takacs-Saal, Kunstuniversität Graz, Austria
Reidemeister Move is:
Robin Hayward, microtonal tuba
Christopher Williams, contrabass
Engineering, mixing: Ludwig Frühschütz Eleton Audio
Space management: Astrid Grill Kultur-Betriebe Burgenland
(Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung)
Mastering: Chris Mercer
Carson's music—"a kind of acoustic acupressure":LA Times' Mark Swed—is featured internationally at venues for experimental
music, classical music, and jazz. Carson’s music is available from Sideband Records, Albany Records, Centaur Records, and other labels....more
The title of this one is a good indication of what’s in store: wonderfully bleak ambient music conjuring funereal atmospheres. Bandcamp New & Notable Jan 29, 2022
Moody and weird experimental pop from Melbourne follows the intuitive logic of the surrealist game from which the group takes their name. Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 8, 2020
A raucous adventure through noise, no wave, off-kilter DIY prog, and the absurdist side of post-punk from Pagan Athletes. Bandcamp New & Notable Jun 13, 2023
Cincinnati noise rockers Stella Research Committee blast the walls down on this, their final LP, every track hitting like a sledgehammer. Bandcamp New & Notable May 15, 2023
Rhythmic post-punk from Horseface with a pop-forward sense of melody and the open-ended expressionistic impulses of DIY. Bandcamp New & Notable May 31, 2022
The racket avant-rock/noise group White Suns make is queasy and challenging, but with a taut sense of dynamics and composition. Bandcamp New & Notable Jan 19, 2021
