About once a year I will have Joanna Brouk on repeat. Her music calms me down instantly. Since late January and all of February were an onslaught to our civil rights, scientific, medical, and educational funding, among other horrors, I wanted to give you at least an hour of pure calm, starting with the work of one of my favorites, Joanna Brouk.
I give this playlist a Difficult Listening Hour rating of 2/10.
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1. The Space Between by Joanna Brouk. Album: Hearing Music. This was originally released under her own label, Hummingbird Productions, but since, all of her works have been posthumously produced and maintained by the Numero Group. Joanna studied electronic music at Mills College with Robert Ashley and Terry Riley.
2. Doubtless by Holland Andrews. Album: Doubtless. “Holland Andrews is a vocalist, composer, producer, and performer whose work focuses on the abstraction of operatic and extended-technique voice to build cathartic and dissonant soundscapes.” From the album description, “If the untameable style of Andrews’ earlier music was – thanks to its broad, mysterious instrumental palate – hard to pin down, ‘Doubtless’ confirms that it’s slowly revealing itself as inimitable, much as Beverly Copeland, Cocteau Twins’, Scott Walker’s or Talk Talk’s did (though inevitably none are comparable).”
3. Particle by Maria Chavez and Valentina Magaletti. Album: Remotely Together. This album was created during the COVID-19 lockdown during a remote residency. About this track, “New York–based turntablist Maria Chavez and celebrated Italian percussionist Valentina Magaletti collaborate on Particle, featuring hypnotic textures and dreamlike percussion that seems to sonically propel itself forward, slowly expanding into a rich and layered work of stretched-out free jazz.”
4. Woven Processional by Ellen Fullman. Album: The Long String Instrument. “Ellen Fullman began developing her installation The Long String Instrument in 1980, in search of tonalities that could not be achieved with traditional instruments. This large-scale work consisted of 70-foot-long metallic wires, anchored by a wooden resonator, across which the performer moves backwards and forwards with rosin-covered fingers. The overall effect has been rightfully compared to the experience of standing inside an enormous grand piano.”
5. Now in Gold and Red by Todd Fletcher. Album (single): Now in Gold and Red. Note: this is on the Spotify playlist. “This album happened by accident. While playing around with various combinations of Midi and audio looping, always first thing in the early hours, I ended up with enough doodles for an album. The result is a kind of blurred composite of many small moments from the gold and red of the beginning day.”
5. Animated Album: Futures by Todd Fletcher. Note: this is on the YouTube playlist.
6. 1/1 by Brian Eno. Album: Ambient 1: Music for Airports. I know about this piece through the acoustic version performed by the Bang on a Can All Stars. Eno is a producer turned composer who worked with early synthesizers and whose influence spans decades. I highly recommend reading this full article to learn more about his history and this particular work. The origins, at least to me, are VERY relatable, “That’s when it happened: Sitting among the gleaming steel fixtures and softly glowing concrete lines of the modernist Cologne Bonn Airport on a sunny Sunday morning in late 1977, en route to his homebase, the perennially nervous flier recoiled once again at the canned pop pleasantries mindlessly piped into such an inspired space. The music was not only an afterthought but also insulting to the idea that you would soon climb into a sleek metal tube and be propelled by engines through the sky at 40,000 feet. “I started thinking, ‘What should we be hearing here?’ I thought most of all you wanted music that didn’t try to pretend you weren’t going to die on the plane.” “.