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ARTIST
TITLE
Hints Of Things To Come
FORMAT
CD
LABEL
CATALOG #
FW 1038CD
FW 1038CD
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
2/10/2023
In 1970, Harry Bertoia had been developing his sonic sculptures for over ten years. He had only been composing/recording for two years and the four long pieces chosen for this CD find him starting to arrive at the sonic forms he had been searching for. Hints Of Things To Come is one of the most unique and melodic pieces discovered so far in the Bertoia tape archive. In this piece, you hear him slowly create and articulate a musical riff. Bertoia builds this phrase patiently until the composition reaches an intense climax where the riff is played heavily and distinctly. "7 ½ + 7 ½ Combined", another historic standout, is one of the earliest examples of Bertoia overdubbing by playing a tape and then performing along to the playback. This CD is defined by ambient passages, long drones, gongs that sound like whales, shimmering harmonics and the feeling of an artist searching for sounds deep within his own sonic sculpture.
Harry Bertoia first gained some artistic visibility in the early 1940s, then came into prominence with his sculptural, ergonomic chairs, produced by Knoll Furniture beginning in 1952, which quickly became classics of modernist furniture. Inspired by the resonant sounds emanating from metals as he worked them and encouraged by his brother Oreste, whose passion was music, Harry restored a fieldstone "Pennsylvania Dutch" barn as the home for this experiment in sounding sculptures which he had begun in the late 1950s. Bertoia was an obsessive composer and relentless experimenter, often working late into the night and accumulating hundreds of tapes of his best performances; Oreste, too, would explore and record the sculptures' sounds during his annual visits to his brother's home in rural Pennsylvania. Harry Bertoia's recently dismantled Sonambient barn collection was an attentive listener's paradise full of warm, expressive instruments that were gorgeous visually and audibly. Nothing could prepare you, even on return visits, for the overwhelming experience of entering the spacious wood and plaster interior where gongs, some of them giant, hung among the ranks of standing sculptures of various metals. Over nearly twenty years of adding, culling and rearranging, Bertoia carefully selected nearly 100 harmonious pieces ranging in height from under a foot to more than fifteen feet. He considered this barn a full experience, sights and sounds comprising not a collection of works, but one piece unto itself. It was here, deep in the woods, that his Sonambient recording work took place.
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