Sound-sculpture investigations from micro to macro
PLEASE NOTE: All purchasers of this CD will receive a unique link to download a special binaural version of the ‘Leap Seconds’. Link will be sent after purchase.
Norway-based UK composer Natasha Barrett composes acousmatic and live electroacoustic concert works, sound-art, installations and interactive music. Her inspiration comes from the natural and social world around us, the way it sounds and behaves. These interests have led her to use cutting-edge audio technologies and exciting collaborations involving soloists, ensembles, visual artists, architects and scientists.
These four compositions span a period of five years and although distinct, share much in common: The pieces are acousmatic. They can be listened to as musical journeys, but the journeys are neither narrative nor totally abstract. Rather they aim to entice the listener into their flow for a more personal discovery. The sounds and musical structures are fashioned to personify the dynamic behaviour of real-world events and to evoke sensations of living entities.
Each work was commissioned to be performed in concert over high numbers of loudspeakers using 3D Ambisonics, an immersive system able to create images in space that are sufficiently tangible to entice touch. The first versions of all pieces were in this format. Later on, multichannel versions were made for diverse concert situations and stereo for sound diffusion performance. ‘Leap Seconds’ marks the end of the journey where these new stereo versions are mastered especially for private listening and radio-type broadcast.
From motion-capturing human micro-movements and translating them into sound (‘Involuntary Expression’) to evoking the four seasons and the passage of time from a decaying old piano (‘The Weathered Piano’) to the sonic recreation of the view from her Oslo home (‘He Slowly Fell and Transformed Into the Terrain’), Barrett is a masterful sound-sculptor inviting us to visit her poetic inner landscapes.
TRACK LIST:
1. Involuntary Expression (2017) 17:00
2. Dusk’s Gait (2018) 12:00
3. The Weathered Piano (quattuor tempora anni) (2019) 20:42
4. He Slowly Fell and Transformed Into the Terrain (2016) 17:16