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LP
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BLUME 024LP
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Since its founding back in 2014, Blume has carved a unique place in cultural landscape, issuing free-standing works, spanning the historical and contemporary, that represent singular gestures of creativity within the field of experimental sound. Joining their broad efforts in building networks of context and understanding, the label is now offering a brand new, ambitious work by the American composer Ben Vida, entitled Vocal Trio, conceived, performed, and recorded in Bremen, Germany, during the Spring of 2022. A truly stunning work of compositional conceptualism, combining the ideas of systems based synthesis with real-time vocal collaboration -- issued in a highly limited vinyl edition of 200 copies mastered by Stephan Mathieu, featuring specially commissioned liner notes by Bradford Bailey and a leporello insert offering the piece visual score -- it's a landmark in contemporary experimental practice and arguably the most forward-thinking and exciting piece by one of the most exciting American artists working today. Vocal Trio is a work that encounters Vida composing for the human voice with the ideas that allow for synthesis -- transferring the underlying concepts and structures of both subtractive and additive synthesis to the acoustic realm -- without using a synthesizer. During the Spring of 2022 Vida was in Bremen, Germany, collaborating on a dance piece with the choreographer Fay Driscoll, when the production fell into delays. Finding himself with time on his hands, a space at his disposal, and the company of two dancers -- Amy Gernux and Lotte Rudhart -- he set out to utilize the larynx as audio paths (multi-harmonic or harmonically pure) while conceptualizing each person's mouth as a filter to sculpt the timbre and resonance of a given tone. Considering how typographical scores might be developed into a non-linguistic social framework, Vida drafted a single page of text -- what became the score for Vocal Trio -- accompanied by a set of harmonic suggestion and loose parameters, seeking a core meaning from each word's phonic make-up by each of the three singers (Vida, Gernux and Rudhart) singing as slowly as possible. At the core of the pulsing vocal drones -- intoxicating, harmonically rich long-tones -- that make up the duration abstraction of Vocal Trio, is Vida's regard for music as a social space. It is an experiment that seeks liberation through the act of collective music making, by challenging the terms through which the act of composing is perceived and then relinquishing control.
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LP
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SHELTER 075LP
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Ben Vida's Damaged Particulates LP represents the conclusion of one body of work, Damaged Particulates, and the beginnings of a new long form project titled Reducing The Tempo To Zero. The version of Damaged Particulates (2012-2016) included in this LP is the final iteration of a piece that Vida has been developing for close to four years. It first materialized as a number of individual synthesizer studies under the title "Damaged Parts". These studies became the source material for an early version of DPs, taking shape as a commissioned work for the Unsound Festival. For the commission the piece coalesced as a single, through-composed live sound installation that utilized tactile sub bass speakers which interfaced directly with the audiences bodies. In this form, Damaged Particulates was presented at festivals, galleries and museums including versions at Experimental Intermedia, New York, Cricoteka Museum, Kraków, Poland and Leap Gallery, Berlin. It has since been presented in live performance at Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, Bologna and Electrónica en Abril, Madrid and as a multichannel defusion at the Akousma Festival, Montreal. Reducing The Tempo To Zero (2016 - ???) is the first recorded dispatch of Vida's new long form composition. This excerpt demonstrates a short instrumental passage taken from a work that, in its full duration, clocks in at close to five hours. Live performances featuring a four member vocal ensemble have been presented at Lampo, Chicago and at The Kitchen, NYC. This mutable composition will be reconfigured once again in late 2016, this time scored for choir and electronics, to be staged in Italy and Belgium. Reducing The Tempo To Zero represents Vida's return to the durational drone based forms that he first experimented with in the mid-90s with his group Town And Country. In performance, RTTTZ continues his exploration of phonetic based text scores. This method of scoring was used in his project Slipping Control which debuted at Audio Visual Arts Gallery, NYC with an LP version was also released by Shelter Press in 2014 (SHELTER 038LP), and creates a continuous thread between his work as a composer and his developing career as an artist. Vida has expanded his compositional process into a number of mediums, acting to blur any delineation between disciplines and practices. 140 gram vinyl, uncoated sleeve & inner sleeve. Artwork by Katy Fischer. Design by Bartolomé Sanson. Mastered and cut by Helmut Erler at D+M.
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SHELTER 038LP
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Slipping Control is Ben Vida's new LP. Slipping Control derives from the text piece "Tztztztzt Î Í Í...," written in 2013 by Ben Vida (and published as a book by Shelter Press). Composed to act as a score, a sound piece and as raw data for an electronic control source, "Tztztztzt Î Í Í..." became the intrinsic element that tied together some different pieces of art made by Ben Vida and presented at the eponymous show at AVA Gallery (NY, USA) in April 2013. "I was interested in the rhythm of speaking, interested in using the voice to create rhythmic patterns that would inevitably break out of time and become asymmetrical and awkward. I wanted to create one set of control sources (the text) and run them through a bunch of different systems (the video, the book, the record, etc.) and see how the original source material morphed and changed as it manifested in these different modalities. The process of developing each unique work involved setting the control paths for the text to be processed though. In terms of this path, the first step after writing the text was to find the primary filter of interpretation and translation that would start this process of slipping control -- and this is where Tyondai and Sara come in..." A Control Path may look something like this: Text > Performer/Vocalist > Voiced Recording > Electronic Analysis > Reconfigured Text > Audio Synthesis > LP Record. Or maybe like this: Text > Performer/Vocalist > Video/Audio Recording > Electronic Analysis > Audio Synthesis > Video Editing > Color Synthesis > Video Installation. Or this: Text > Performer/Vocalist > Video/Audio Recording > Electronic Analysis > Audio Synthesis > Video Editing > Color Synthesis > Video Installation > Color Field Panel Display. Or more simply: Text > Poster. All music by Ben Vida, with Tyondai Braxton and Sara Magenheimer. Mastered and cut by Helmut Erler at Dubplates + Mastering. Pressed at Pallas in an edition of 500 copies worldwide.
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LP
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FAG 001LP
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"Future Audio Graphics is pleased to announce Extraction, the latest from composer and sound artist Ben Vida (PAN, Amish, Shelter Press, et al). Extraction (FAG 001) is a collaboration between Vida, visual artist Meredyth Sparks, and curator/writer Anthony Elms and is the first in a series of collaborative releases for Future Audio Graphics. Continuing Vida's explorations of digital and analog processing systems, Extraction gives particular focus to aural phenomena -- engaging electronic, non-representational sounds that appear to cut, move and oscillate on both vertical and horizontal planes. Building on his past work, Vida's two, side-long contributions to Extraction include, among other things, a series of what appears to be infinitely long, sweeping tones staggered between short, halting breaks. The audio parallels an artistic practice and method that visual artist Meredyth Sparks has developed over the last five years in her own studio and practice. Full-color gatefold LP, limited to 350 copies. Mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin."
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