An album of extraordinary electronic works by American composer John McGuire. Originally written for multi-speaker systems, these compositions are concerned with the motion of sounds within the listening space, creating hypnotic swirls of overlapping patterns in and out of phase with each other. Pulse Music III is a half-hour piece structured with absolute precision. A series of sound waves or pulses are set in motion across the listening space at different speeds, creating overlapping patterns of dancing pointillist sounds. McGuire describes Vanishing Points as “an experiment in motion perspective. To begin with, I pictured driving along a road with an unobstructed horizon in front of me: the horizon was always the same distance away. It was, so to speak, continuously regenerated”. A Cappella took 5 years to complete and was written for McGuire’s wife, soprano Beth Griffith. Her pure, rich vocal qualities attracted McGuire to sample her rendering of three vowel sounds – A, E, and U at various pitches, and process them into a complex polyphony of choral sounds. Griffiths then sang in dialogue with the choir of samples of her own voice.
Credits:
Commissioned by the West German Radio, Cologne, and produced in the Studio for Electronic Music – Beth Griffith: soprano on A Cappella
Produced by: Wolfgang Becker-Carsten – Technical collaboration: Volker Muller, James Whitman, Bardo Kox, Markus Hassler, Paulo Chagas and Michael Peschko
TRACK LIST:
1. PULSE MUSIC III (24:20)
2. VANISHING POINTS (25:45)
3. A CAPPELLA (24:54)
Also available as downloads:
