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la vida que vendrá
music by orlando jacinto garcía on new focus records
AMAZON ::: NEW FOCUS ::: bandcamp
Album info:
Artist: loadbang
Title: la vida que vendrá: music by Orlando Jacinto Garciá
Label: New Focus Records
Release: May 24, 2024
Track Listing:
1) Resonating Color Fields
2) en un universo paralelo
3) Conversations with Harry
4) nubes nocturnas
5) la vida que vendrá
Title: la vida que vendrá: music by Orlando Jacinto Garciá
Label: New Focus Records
Release: May 24, 2024
Track Listing:
1) Resonating Color Fields
2) en un universo paralelo
3) Conversations with Harry
4) nubes nocturnas
5) la vida que vendrá
Liner Notes:
Universes By George Grella
For a moment, instead of thinking about new music in the conventional manner of analyzing the composer’s initiative and process, the formal and technical means of notation and performance, the intellectual/dramatic/narrative/expressive goal of the music, think about feeling. Think about the sheer sound, the vibrations reaching the ears, the feeling of that. Sound is touch at a distance and the sounds here are connecting the moments in time the recording captures and bringing them to life in real-time, and they are touching the listener. What does that touch feel like? It feels like it’s opening up space and building something inside. It feels like entering, even for a short time, a new universe.
That’s likely an obvious point, but what lies just underneath is more subtle and also the most powerful element of this whole collection of pieces from Orlando Garcia. For the moments of the album, the hour-plus duration, are filled with the substantial sensual experience of sound, how it can be stretched and folded and turned and curved, as gravity does to time and space. What Garcia and the musicians here are doing is not just outlining time with music, but pushing sound outward and seeing how the universe reacts to it, and then fitting themselves inside.
“In a parallel universe” is what baritone Tyler Bouque whispers in en un universo paralelo. Bouque’s voice literally folds in on itself in this piece as he vocalizes against tracks that Garcia crafted out of samples of the singer’s voice. Bouque speaks and sings and whistles with and against pre-recorded Bouque, the text is the Spanish and English versions of the titles of three of the works on this recording, and the words and whispers and whistles—and growls—build walls of sound that are also mirrors, in this case bouncing the vibrations off each other and, in some kind of combination of Borges and Escher, electrifying the mind. Listen to this and feel sparks light in the skull, thoughts as a physical sensation, a shape forming and expanding.
First and last, that is the point of making music. What Garcia does in this collection of pieces is follow a consistent process and see where it goes. These are electro-acoustic works in the old-fashioned sense of a musician playing live against pre-recorded audio, what Garcia calls “fixed media electronics.” In each piece the media and the live instrument reflect each other, voice/voice, clarinet/clarinet, trombone/trombone, etc. While Bouque performs with himself, the fixed media means that the live musician may be performing with one or more musicians from some point in the past (and the media brings the previous players to life again in real-time, just as listening does). On Conversations With Harry here, Adrian Sandi plays bass clarinet with (from the past) Harry Sparnaay—and the samples of Sparnaay are from that musician’s instrumental guide The Bass Clarinet. That’s universes first crossing paths, then working in parallel, fold by fold, to shape a sonic prism.
Also in this way, trombonist William Lang plays with trombonist Mark Hetzler on nubes nocturnas. Trumpeter Andy Kozar, meanwhile, converses with himself, often through the resonating strings of a piano interior, on Resonating Color Fields. Details like resonance, sound waves rubbing against each other, multiphonics, radiate outward from the combined central point of the player and the media. Along a linear timeline from start to finish, yes, but outward in all directions, like a sphere of time and space expanding from the singular original point of these discrete universes.
The complete Loadbang ensemble comes together for la vida que vendrá, but this piece stands apart from the quasi-solo works. At first it may seem conventional within the context of the complete album; musicians playing, acoustically, in the moment with each other. But listen, again, to just the sounds, the voice or an instrument playing a phrase, holding a note, another joining in to match it. Garcia describes this as the “extended control of sound and timbres,” the building blocks of any world of music. There is subliminal use of text from the liberation chant, “el pueblo unido jamas será vencido (the people united will never be defeated),” but more important than the words is how, working through the basics of sound, the musicians unite their own instrumental worlds into an expansive and expanding universe. Garcia observes that these basic elements “are aesthetic concerns,” but we observe the result, which is Universes.
Credits:
Recording Engineer: Ryan Streber
Mastering: Ryan Streber
Producer: Ryan Streber
Art and Layout: Alex Eckman-Lawn
Recording Dates and Locations:
Resonating Color Fields (1) and nubes nocturnas (4) recorded on August 2, 2023 at Oktaven Audio in Mt. Vernon, NY
en un universo paralelo (2), Conversations with Harry (3), and la vida que vendrá (5) recorded on October 26, 2023 at Oktaven Audio in Mt.Vernon, NY
Universes By George Grella
For a moment, instead of thinking about new music in the conventional manner of analyzing the composer’s initiative and process, the formal and technical means of notation and performance, the intellectual/dramatic/narrative/expressive goal of the music, think about feeling. Think about the sheer sound, the vibrations reaching the ears, the feeling of that. Sound is touch at a distance and the sounds here are connecting the moments in time the recording captures and bringing them to life in real-time, and they are touching the listener. What does that touch feel like? It feels like it’s opening up space and building something inside. It feels like entering, even for a short time, a new universe.
That’s likely an obvious point, but what lies just underneath is more subtle and also the most powerful element of this whole collection of pieces from Orlando Garcia. For the moments of the album, the hour-plus duration, are filled with the substantial sensual experience of sound, how it can be stretched and folded and turned and curved, as gravity does to time and space. What Garcia and the musicians here are doing is not just outlining time with music, but pushing sound outward and seeing how the universe reacts to it, and then fitting themselves inside.
“In a parallel universe” is what baritone Tyler Bouque whispers in en un universo paralelo. Bouque’s voice literally folds in on itself in this piece as he vocalizes against tracks that Garcia crafted out of samples of the singer’s voice. Bouque speaks and sings and whistles with and against pre-recorded Bouque, the text is the Spanish and English versions of the titles of three of the works on this recording, and the words and whispers and whistles—and growls—build walls of sound that are also mirrors, in this case bouncing the vibrations off each other and, in some kind of combination of Borges and Escher, electrifying the mind. Listen to this and feel sparks light in the skull, thoughts as a physical sensation, a shape forming and expanding.
First and last, that is the point of making music. What Garcia does in this collection of pieces is follow a consistent process and see where it goes. These are electro-acoustic works in the old-fashioned sense of a musician playing live against pre-recorded audio, what Garcia calls “fixed media electronics.” In each piece the media and the live instrument reflect each other, voice/voice, clarinet/clarinet, trombone/trombone, etc. While Bouque performs with himself, the fixed media means that the live musician may be performing with one or more musicians from some point in the past (and the media brings the previous players to life again in real-time, just as listening does). On Conversations With Harry here, Adrian Sandi plays bass clarinet with (from the past) Harry Sparnaay—and the samples of Sparnaay are from that musician’s instrumental guide The Bass Clarinet. That’s universes first crossing paths, then working in parallel, fold by fold, to shape a sonic prism.
Also in this way, trombonist William Lang plays with trombonist Mark Hetzler on nubes nocturnas. Trumpeter Andy Kozar, meanwhile, converses with himself, often through the resonating strings of a piano interior, on Resonating Color Fields. Details like resonance, sound waves rubbing against each other, multiphonics, radiate outward from the combined central point of the player and the media. Along a linear timeline from start to finish, yes, but outward in all directions, like a sphere of time and space expanding from the singular original point of these discrete universes.
The complete Loadbang ensemble comes together for la vida que vendrá, but this piece stands apart from the quasi-solo works. At first it may seem conventional within the context of the complete album; musicians playing, acoustically, in the moment with each other. But listen, again, to just the sounds, the voice or an instrument playing a phrase, holding a note, another joining in to match it. Garcia describes this as the “extended control of sound and timbres,” the building blocks of any world of music. There is subliminal use of text from the liberation chant, “el pueblo unido jamas será vencido (the people united will never be defeated),” but more important than the words is how, working through the basics of sound, the musicians unite their own instrumental worlds into an expansive and expanding universe. Garcia observes that these basic elements “are aesthetic concerns,” but we observe the result, which is Universes.
Credits:
Recording Engineer: Ryan Streber
Mastering: Ryan Streber
Producer: Ryan Streber
Art and Layout: Alex Eckman-Lawn
Recording Dates and Locations:
Resonating Color Fields (1) and nubes nocturnas (4) recorded on August 2, 2023 at Oktaven Audio in Mt. Vernon, NY
en un universo paralelo (2), Conversations with Harry (3), and la vida que vendrá (5) recorded on October 26, 2023 at Oktaven Audio in Mt.Vernon, NY