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LP
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BT 117LP
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Black Truffle announces The Mountains Pass, a major new work from Olivia Block. A key player in Chicago's vibrant experimental music scene since the late 1990s, Block has developed an extensive body of work grounded in a personalized, at times emotive approach to the studio-based practices of the musique concrète tradition, while also encompassing improvisation, orchestral pieces, sound installations, and a sustained engagement with the piano. On The Mountains Pass, recorded by Greg Norman at Steve Albini's Electrical Audio and meticulously edited and constructed over the course of three years, Block pushes into new terrain, introducing her singing voice and drums played by Jon Mueller into flowing assemblages that move seamlessly from ruminative organ tones and fragmented piano airs to explosions of sizzling synths and thundering percussion. Like many of Block's past works, which include, for example, a sculptural installation using the sound of oyster beds, The Mountains Pass draws inspiration from nature and the animal world. Time spent in a particular mountain range in Northern New Mexico informs this suite of pieces, whose lyrics and titles refer particularly to animal life in the area. The music sometimes suggests the great outer-limits works of '70s Italian prog figures like Franco Battiato or Arturo Stalteri in the languorous drift of synthesizer, organ, and piano tones and the meticulous yet organic flow of its construction. Block's crystalline voice and rich piano chords at times call up the restrained chamber songs of Janet Sherbourne, but fragmented and threaded through passages of woozy pitch-bent keyboards, hypnotic distant thuds, tinkling bells, and searing distorted synth tones. On "f2754," the freedom of the roaming wolf surges through dense layers of rapid keyboard attacks and long organ tones over a propulsive drum performance straight out of Animal Magnetism-era Arnold Dreyblatt. This distinctive sound world is then reencountered in a darkened mirror image in the uneasy, metallic shimmer of the closing "Ungulates," named in reference to a heard of elk roaming through the mountains. Like Battiato's Clic or Gastr del Sol's Upgrade & Afterlife, The Mountains Pass inhabits the underexplored terrain where the beauty of song coexists with a radical formal openness, illuminating the deep musicality and warmth that have been present in Block's work all along.
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CD
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RM 4170CD
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With Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea, Olivia Block charts out a deepening current of work that condenses her longer form approaches into a series of richly fluid vignettes. Each piece is led by a bass pattern, the same seven notes, which reappear throughout the album in different configurations. The tonal repetition creates an overall sense of reduction and amplification; an extreme realization of focus. Tracing waves of warped Mellotron melodies and harmonies, the album celebrates an unfolding of the acoustic horizon, and dwells in a perpetual release of revealed frequencies and pulsing of waves which merge together to unite, and then divide, in time. Easily her most articulate and considered work to date, Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea reads as the first chapter in a new book of sound to come.
From Olivia: "During the lockdown, unable to do anything in the world, I turned inward and adopted a regular practice of listening with intention, while on psychedelic mushrooms. The mushrooms helped me to listen somatically, pulling my ears towards low tonal patterns and the warped sounds of a broken Mellotron. I started playing in my studio, creating bass-driven pieces on my vintage Korg synth organ, using a very limited tonal palette. The pandemic seemed like a strange dream or a surrealistic science fiction story. I re-read the brilliant surrealistic science fiction novel, Ice, by Anna Kavan, which describes a frozen post-apocalypse. Mentally, I connected Kavan's ice-world with the isolation of the lockdown. I approached this album as the soundtrack to this speculative science fiction film. It's an attempt to translate my emotions about this surreal and strange historical moment into sound."
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CD
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RM 493CD
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132 Ranks for Pipe Organ was composed by Olivia Block in 2016-2017, as a commission for LAMPO and The Renaissance Society. Block composed the piece specifically for the enormous Skinner Organ at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel in Chicago. The world premiere was performed by Block on April 21, 2017. The concert, free and open to all ages attracted a large crowd. 132 Ranks was conceived as a hybrid of concert and sound installation. Six speakers were placed throughout the chapel. These speakers played white noise, sine tones, and prerecorded organ sounds, designed to interact acoustically with the live performance, and bring out the acoustics of the chapel in unconventional ways. White noise and low bass tones pulsed and sliced through the air, while sine tones and organ clusters created complex beating patterns and inner ear sound phenomena. Audience members were participants, quietly walking through the majestic, dimly lit chapel. Listeners noticed how the acoustics, materials and shape of the space altered the live and recorded organ sounds as Block performed. Some audience members relaxed on the floor of the chapel, listening, while others explored the upper balconies and hallways. 132 Ranks was designed to emphasize the architectural qualities and unique sonic and spatial capacities of the Skinner Organ. The piece included both the lowest pedal notes, felt in the body, as well as the highest bell tones, played at extreme dynamic levels. At times, sounds were isolated in discrete locations to emphasize the chapel's shape.
Olivia Block is an American composer and media artist. Her body of work includes electroacoustic recordings, audio-visual installations, performance, sound design for cinema, and scores for orchestra and chamber music concerts. She has performed throughout Europe, America, and Japan in tours in festivals and performance series including The Walker Museum concert series, Incubate (Tilburg), Festival del Bosque Germinal (Mexico City), Sonic Light (Amsterdam), Kontraste (Krems), Dissonanze (Rome), Archipel (Geneva) Angelica (Bologna), Sunoni per il Popolo (Montreal), and many others. Additionally, she has presented work at the ICA (London), MCA (Chicago), La Biennale di Venezia 52nd International Festival of Contemporary Music, The Kitchen (NYC), ISSUE Project Room, Experimental Intermedia (Brooklyn) and TIFF (Toronto).
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LP
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GLEX 1603LP
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Glistening Examples present Olivia Block's Dissolution. Olivia Block on the record: "Dissolution is a reflection upon human 'webs of significance', and an investigation into the ways that electronic communications and recording technologies, both past and present, facilitate, complicate and transmute the formation of these webs. Sounds of shortwave radio, municipal broadcast recordings, fragments of found microcassette tapes, tones and instruments dramatize the fragility and failures of communication and language in shaping memory and experience. This album is dedicated to Adam Sonderberg, without whom I could not have completed this project." Personnel: Lesley Swanson - flute; Shaun Flynn - clarinet. Musicians were recorded at Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago IL in January 2015. The session was engineered by Alex Inglesian. Mastered by Jason Lescalleet at Glistening Labs, USA. Dissolution comes housed in a single-pocket jacket with glossy UV coating and black poly-lined inner sleeves with a 12x12" vellum insert. Includes download card.
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CD
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SED 044CD
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"Olivia Block's Heave To is her fourth full release under her own name (her first two are on Sedimental, the most recent on Jason Kahn's Cut label) and marks both a new maturity in her compositional prowess and also a new confidence. Heave To, a composition in three movements, is an investigation into the deep structures of maelstroms. A roiling mixture of crashing waves and wind, jagged strings, clanging metal, complex electronic textures, and clusters of chamber instruments. In our opinion, this is her strongest work since her debut, Pure Gaze. Olivia Block is a contemporary composer and sound artist who combines field recordings, scored segments for acoustic instruments, and electronically generated sound. Her recorded work seeks to introduce, set at play, and ultimately reconcile nature with artifice in the realms of music and sound. In the process, 'organic' sound becomes subtly processed, digitized and abstracted; 'inorganic' sound becomes self-replicating and animate; and 'musical' elements such as chamber instruments are defamiliarized from their traditional associations, freeing them to participate in the larger aesthetic possibilities of sound."
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CD
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SED 031CD
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" Olivia Block is a contemporary composer who combines field recordings, scored segments for acoustic instruments, and electronically generated sound. Her recorded work seeks to introduce, set at play, and ultimately reconcile nature with artifice in the realms of music and sound. In the process, 'organic' sound becomes subtly processed, digitized and abstracted; 'inorganic' sound becomes self-replicating and animate; and 'musical' elements such as chamber instruments are de familiarized from their traditional associations, freeing them to participate in the larger aesthetic possibilities of sound. Her pieces are composed over long periods of time in numerous stages. She often prepares elaborate tape installations in natural sites for field recording sessions which she later integrates into her recorded compositions. In live performance, Block introduces additional elements of paradox and tension: chamber musicians perform scores which accompany pre-prepared tape material, and improvisers (often including herself) interact with 'lo-fi' speaker installations and digital recordings."
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CD
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SED 026CD
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"Block is an electro-acoustic and modern instrumental composer whose recorded compositions combine layered, processed wind and string instruments with processed sound from sections of field recordings she has collected from various natural landscapes. Her performances include minimalistic scored musical sections played live by a quintet accompanied by taped material, often sounds of field recordings, or the same quintet previously recorded and electronically manipulated. Block herself 'plays' found objects and instruments (trumpet). The resulting surrealistic sonic landscapes and the contrast between elements create a paradoxical element to her work. In all of her recent works she emphasizes comparisons between organic or 'real' sounds and electronic ones, and she demonstrates how electronic technology imitates natural evolution using similar sounds from both worlds. She also explores the difference between 'sound' and 'music' and the creation of experience through emotional, subjective or intellectual, objective means."
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