Matthew Barley/Cellist

Music is the hidden arithmetical exercise of a mind unconscious that it is calculating.

Leibniz

Noticing Things

I was introduced to Dai Fujikura through working on David Sylvian’s album Died In The Wool — a set of interpretations of his 2009 album Manafon. So when the invitation came from Matthew Barley to do a rework of Dai’s commissioned piece I was pleased to say yes to his generous offer. Noticing Things evolved into a reinvention of Dai’s originals using the Aria, Awakening and Floating movements from The Spirit of Beings as a starting point for these three small pieces.

REPLICA
Replica is a model of the Aria piece, using the beautiful melody in Dai’s composition, but with different blocks of sound to give it another view from a different angle. In this piece Matthew can choose to either improvise freely over the audio, or using small lines, or even play the melody as written in Dai’s original composition.

FLOODED CORRIDORS
There is a little pizzicato part in Awakening that brought my attention as glaringly special. Taking that as a starting point for this non-metrical piece that I somehow think of as a calligraphic drawing of irregular beats and parallel colours. Small occurring incidents created in my studio in Kristiansand using my hardware Akai sampler.

IMPLANTED MEMORIES
I wanted to make something that had a reference to Dai’s Floating piece and still had reminiscences of both two pieces I’d put together and of Dai’s work as a whole. The drone is being treated only by the use of pitch/EQ giving it a sense of clarity both technically with more space for Matthew’s cello improvisations, but also offering the listener a possible room for one’s own imagination.

Jan Bang

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