The Sunday supplement: #64
The pleasure of listening to challenging music, some non-challenging recent favorites, a bizarre courtroom dramedy, a better plant-identifying app, and more
I mostly listen to things that don’t ask too much except for the challenge of absorbing new sounds. But this week I’ve been listening to the recent Last Camelias, Tres Esquinas, an album from Norwegian-Chilean flautist and composer Johanna Orellana, and it’s been pushing me in interesting directions, mainly for provoking new responses, new ideas.
From the album’s description:
On “El Jardin I” – “El Jardin IV”, Orellana runs through dozens of slight melodic variations, gradually decreasing the airflow until the tones transform into overtones; a soft wheezing generated by final breaths and eventually reborn as new melodic figures. The intimacy of both the field recordings and Orellana’s playing puts the listener not only in nature but almost inside of her mouth. Music and lung capacity become vital signs – and, in their absence, signs of passing in physical and sonic transformation. On album closer “San Fabian”, these themes merge into a final, trill-heavy, hallucinatory whirlwind of electronics and manipulated gasps. Las Camelias is an album made out of grief, but also a celebration of the physics of resonating bodies and the music hidden in the mechanics of technique.
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