Michael Pisaro-Liu: Radiolarians, by Muzzix

Michael Pisaro-Liu: Radiolarians

by Muzzix

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Giles Such a huge, gorgeous array and variety of sounds and structures in each track, but somehow it all makes sense as part of a larger scheme. (also there has to be a hidden connection with Meshuggah's Chaosphere somewhere)

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1.	Radiolarians 7 04:46	info	buy track
2.	Radiolarians 9 & 11 12:33	info	buy track
3.	Radiolarians 12 07:54	info	buy track
4.	Radiolarians 5, 4, 8 & 3 09:41	info	buy track
5.	Radiolarians 13 05:46	info	buy track
6.	Radiolarians 1, 2 & 10 12:39	info	buy track

about

Though richly varied, Michael Pisaro-Liu’s (b.1961) works are linked through their philosophical and ethical concern for the interaction between music and its sounding environment, their openness to the creative contributions of performers, and their capacity for making felt our belonging to and participation in a world of continuous and often surprising variation.

Radiolorians (2018) finds Pisaro-Liu drawing inspiration from another gifted observer of this world-in-variation, the German zoologist, naturalist, and philosopher Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), who promoted and popularized evolutionary thought via extensive monographs and artful renderings of insects, animals, sea creatures, and embryos. For Radiolarians, Pisaro-Liu creates what he terms “transcriptions” of individual radiolaria species depicted in Haeckel’s drawings.

Radiolarians comprises fourteen compact pieces, each derived from a specific species of radiolaria and ranging in duration from one to nine minutes. Each piece features a mixture of harmonic, melodic, and noise elements corresponding roughly to the structures of each radiolaria, where pitched elements serve as tonal spines unfolding in time as well as spatially within the ensemble, and noise elements capture the twitches and undulations of the protozoic bodies contained therein.

Pisaro-Liu’s inventive transcriptions are brought to life in this sensitively performed and masterfully recorded actualization by the Muzzix ensemble, whose balance of technological and acoustic elements reincarnate the fragile balance of the crystalline and amoebic in audible form. Across a spacious fifty-three-minute performance, the radiolarians appear more or less serially as in Haeckel’s illustrations, providing the listener opportunity to experience in musical time the heterochronic reverberations and anticipations of recurring organizing forces, such as the stringing together of notes in languid melodies or the surge and retreat of waves. The ensemble’s heterogeneity and seamless blending of technological and traditional elements recapitulate anew the sense of enmeshed temporalities and a cross-cutting of the natural, cultural, and mechanical in Haeckel’s monographs.

credits

released April 15, 2022

Composer: Michael Pisaro-Liu

Muzzix: Christian Pruvost, trumpet, project leader; Sakina Abdou, sax; Sébastien Beaumont, guitar; Samuel Carpentier, trombone; Claude Colpaert, gangsa, percussion; Ivann Cruz, guitar; Barbara Dang, keyboard; Xuân Mai Dang, flute; Raphaël Godeau, guitar; Martin Granger, keyboard; Patrick Guionnet, voice, objects; Christophe Hache, bass; Matthieu Lebrun, bass clarinet, saxophone; Philo Lenglet, guitar; Fred Loisel, guitar; Claire Marshall, flutes; Yanik Miossec, electronics, objects; Maxime Morel, tuba; Christophe (Pher) Motury, trumpet; Peter Orins, percussion; Stefan Orins, piano; Maryline Pruvost, flute; Jean-Baptiste Rubin, saxophone, clarinet; Anne Sortino, violin

In addition to the instruments listed, all the musicians played a variety of objects for the recording.

Producer: Christian Pruvost & Muzzix
Engineer: Peter Orins
Recorded at La rose des vents in Villeneuve d’Ascq, France, July 1–3, 2019.
Digital mastering: Paul Zinman, SoundByte Productions Inc., NYC
Cover art: Ernst Haeckel
Design: Jim Fox

Radiolarians is published by Editions Wandelweiser.

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New World Records Brooklyn, New York

Anthology of Recorded Music, Inc., which records under the label New World Records, was founded in 1975.

We are dedicated to the documentation of American music that is largely ignored by the commercial recording companies.

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