Deining (with Anne Bakker)
Nowadays I regularly put albums on Bandcamp as a free (if you wish*) download. Obviously I’ve released so much music that my discography might feel quite impenetrable, and I’m hoping to create an easy entry this way.
* it's actually 'name-your-price' - this way it stays in peoples Bandcamp collections etc... but paying zero cash is 100% okay!
This time: Deining, with Anne Bakker, self-released in October 2015.
In pretty much all cases, my music omces to life by simply starting, and see where the sound and inspiration take me. There might be a vague starting plan, but that’s about it. With Deining it was quite differrent, with the whole composition already thought-out before any sound was created.
I was (and still am) intruiged by glissandi, especially with strings. Alvin Lucier, Penderecki, and the music of Gloria Coates were all key inspirations for Deining. Lucier especially, with most of his pieces being quite simple ideas, but with very complex sounding outcomes. I wanted to do something like that, and my regular collaborator Anne Bakker was the one to help me with it.
Here’s what I wrote earlier about the piece:
The Dutch word 'deining' (pronounced "dining") translates to 'heave' and also 'commotion'. For Deining, I asked violinist Anne Bakker to bow each string of her instrument while sliding slowly from the lowest note to the highest, for exactly five minutes, as fluently as possible. Obviously, it turned out nearly impossible to do this really smoothly, but the unavoidable irregularities are a welcomed bonus. Anne also recorded the same procedure in reverse, following the strings from the edge of the fingerboard to the top nut of the instrument.
The piece is divided in four sections, each focusing on one string, and layering its recordings. The upward and downward glissandi form constantly fluctuating, complex combinations of tones, emphasized by manually-controlled sine waves that follow the pitches of the instrument. In the middle of each five minute section, the violins and sines hit the same note, which is then ‘frozen’ and continues as a separate, constant drone for the duration of the piece. The final low notes of each part are also held, adding an extra layer and playing a calm, minute-long drone before the next section begins.
Some subtle radio static, sine waves, and pitched-down viola recordings were added to the mix for extra flavor. The taste is still a tad bitter though.
An overview of the contruction of the piece:
A few months after the release, I was asked to do a live performance of the piece, at the International Film Festival in Rotterdam. With all the multi-tracking in the original, extra string players were needed to translate this into a live piece. Besides Anne, Lidwine Dam, Pablo Kleinsmann, and Saskia Venegas played violin, with Nina Hitz (also in Hydra Ensemble with me) providing some extra weight with her cello. And me sending out sine tones with a laptop. Oh, and of course (since it was a film festival) a gorgeous video by Marco Douma, which can be seen in full, here.
The recording of the IFFR gig is added to the digital release as a bonus.
Enjoy!
P.S. The art for Deining is probably stil my favorite cover in my discography…
