The posthuman series
Becoming-with
A Four-Album series celebrating the art of collaboration. Featuring a global lineup of contemporary sound artists, composers, field recordists, and improvisers, Becoming-with celebrates the universes that are unlocked when artists make work together.
Volume 1
Featuring collaborations with: MIRE, Basketgaze, and James Perley
Volume 2
Featuring collaborations with Dana Reason, Federica Flux, and Mira
Becoming apart
A Four-Album series celebrating composer Renée T. Coulombe’s anniversary in the city of Berlin. Featuring work from a decade in the most musically diverse city in the world, the album series captures the dynamic trajectory of music the composer has created in this decade of immense productivity and growth.
The first volume features Dream Song Duet for Ione
Sympathetic Resonance is a concert-length transmedia suite celebrating the piano as musical instrument, unique sound source, and historico-cultural phenomenon. Each of the four movements, named for the building blocks of an individual sound, draws either directly or indirectly from historical moments in the history of the piano in classical music.
The first movement, “Attack,” incorporates audio installation from Mario Davidovsky’s celebrated Synchronisms No. 6 for piano and electronics, which both won the Pulitzer Prize in music and changed the sound of the piano forever (as the first note of the piece achieves a crescendo thanks to the synchronized electronics – a piano key cannot crescendo after being struck).
The second movement, “Sustain” celebrates the addition of the pianos sustain pedal, as well as the influence of resonance and reverberation in the sound of the instrument. This work uses the convolution reverberation from the original Deep Listening recording – a 45 second reverberation recreating the sound of an underground cistern.
The third movement, “Decay” explores the effect of electronic instruments, digital signals, audio effects and human memory on the “sound” of the piano in the human imagination. The digital audio installation includes live recordings of more than a dozen live piano performances captured from stage microphones and digitally “degraded” in proportion to their age relative to the performance this evening.
Finally, the fourth movement “Release,” serves as cadenza for the other three movements, encouraging complex musical responses in real time to the materials of the first three movements.
Drawing on musical influences from the classical era through contemporary Jazz and free improvisation, the suite combines old and new, traditional and extended techniques, pre-recorded sound and live electronic processing with composed and improvised materials, to create hauntingly beautiful and unique original soundscapes. credits
released January 7, 2019
Audio recording, mixing and mastering by Renée T. Coulombe and Peter Terner. Cover art by Ilknur Demirkoparan, with a photograph by Assaf Pocker (front) and Peter Fancsikai (back).