From today, my new album "Victimae," is available on this site and on Bandcamp: it features five compositions for overdubbed voices and percussion. You can listen to the work on this page and purchase it directly here and from Bandcamp.
You'll also find below part of the cover notes, which provide an introduction to the work: enjoy!
Thought Waves- Heat Waves - All Vibrations
One thought can produce millions of Vibrations
John Coltrane - A Love Supreme - This album consists of five compositions, all constructed from the Gregorian chant sequence Victimae Paschali Laudes. This is a piece of uncertain attribution - still in the liturgical repertoire of the Catholic Church - which has been used over the centuries by various authors as a starting point for new creations.
I was interested in preserving two aspects of this piece: the first - and most important - is the modal character, which Gregorian chant shares with both extra-European music and various compositions of the 20th century. The second is the evocation of a ritual dimension, freed from the burden of the text, which I do not use except in the title; a reference in this sense is the last track "Psalm" from the album "A Love Supreme" by John Coltrane.
More important than the starting material is the treatment. First of all, I limited myself to using only the notes corresponding to the first two stanzas of the sequence, and in some cases (tracks 1 and 3) exclusively the first 5 notes of the piece. The second limitation was to write in two voices, in some cases in real counterpoint, in others merely as a timbral expansion of each other. The percussion essentially dilates or contracts the space, only in one case offering a dialectical structure to the voices: in the last track Victimae.
In each composition, I tried to start from specific,but interrelated, compositional techniques - developed by authors such as Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt, Béla Bartók (through Meredith Monk), La Monte Young - as well as from some aspects of Renaissance counterpoint. The difficulty of translating these techniques - predominantly instrumental - into the realm of vocal music forced me into a research that has led to a coherent writing, capable, I hope, of making the thought from which I started resonate in a new way.
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