“[An] extraordinary solo recording […] Mac Erlaine is consistently one of the most interesting and adventurous musicians of his generation, and his sometimes very abstract music has always preserved a human quality that engages audiences and wins him admirers in other genres.” - The Irish Times, October 2012

Ergodos is delighted to announce the release of Long After The Music Is Gone, the new album from Dublin-based woodwind instrumentalist and composer Seán Mac Erlaine. It’s an album of extraordinary ambience, rich with Mac Erlaine’s distinctive supple reed work and subtle electronics. With each track Mac Erlaine seems to channel the atmosphere of a space or vista, immersing us.

Conceived and recorded in rural Leitrim, Long After The Music Is Gone stands as a meditation on Irish landscape, dipping into the chants of Medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen and the work of Irish philosopher John O’Donoghue. It’s all in the blood of this record, assimilated into a language of rare elegance and originality.

Seán Mac Erlaine is recognised as one of Ireland’s most forward-thinking jazz musicians. Mac Erlaine works in a variety of settings maintaining a busy performance schedule in Ireland and internationally, working in free improvisation, contemporary jazz, folk music and experimental theatre.

Outline:

This performance was conceived as an open ended opportunity to perform with my most comprehensive Max patch to date. Comprehensive in the sense that the patch included 8 discrete processing effects with a large amount of variable parameters and also included optional random processes. Performing with a large set of possible sonic options increases the potential palette of the music. It also demands more responsibility in terms of artistic choice. In fact many of the effect modules remained unused throughout the performance and much of the music used digital processing only sparingly.

The performance used delay lines to create texture (either rhythmic or drone) and I then improvised over this on bass clarinet.

Analysis:

Using closed delay lines (effectively a loop) I create a gritty textural rhythmic figure which serves as a bedrock at the start of the piece upon which to improvise. I also set up a drone in Bb, which is used to establish a firm tonal centre. The improvisation stays largely within a Bb major tonality, with a rubato time feel. The textural loop continues until 3:25 when low pass filters cut the energy level of the background processes and the bass clarinet assumes a more central role. The improvisation at this point becomes urgent and more extended techniques are used. At 6:20 a new textural loop is introduced and the ‘triple-delay’ process is used which creates fragments of clarinet recordings at various speeds. I also use a harmonizer in this section and set up a new loop at 7:45 (asynchronous to preceding loops), creating a strongly deliniated rhythmic pattern using tongue slap. This new loop continues and provides a rhythmic lift encouraging the bass clarinet to create denser lines. By 9:00 the piece slows down and the dynamics become quieter, effectively serving as a long fade out. All electronic processes fade out and the bass clarinet plays a rhythmic multiphonic line imitating some earlier electronic sounds ending at 10:04.

This was my first solo performance using spatial music technologies. The system I am using is the sixth generation realisation of a hemispherical speaker system, first designed by Perry Cook and Dan Trueman at Princeton University in 1997.

Analysis

This piece is three and a half minutes in duration and uses a very pared-back aesthetic, the simplicity of approach in this piece is influenced by the Gagaku tradition, which is directly referred to timbrally.[1] Dutch composer Ton De Leeuw, who carried out ethnomusicological work in Japan during the 1960s was one of many western musicians who were inspired by the shō in Gagaku music:[2]

In order to represent some of the soundworld and atmosphere of Gagaku (continuous drones, chord clusters, slow tempo, repetition) I used three processes: looping, harmonizer and reverb. Unusually, in this current research practice, once these loop, harmonizer and reverb settings are selected, I did not change, nor use any additional, DSP settings.

Underpinning the piece is a continuous loop. This was created in the performance by sampling a short section of a clarinet drone which also contained a note simultaneously sung a perfect fifth above the clarinet. This sample was then pitched an octave lower. This loop is also sent through a band-pass filter which serves to accentuate mid-frequency details. The loop has a drone quality (in the sense that it establishes a tonal centre) as well as much timbral detail. It also contains complex rhythmic qualities: on a macro level it can be heard as a one bar loop in 7/4 at approximately 110 bpm, however other poly-rhythms disguise this structure, yielding a satisfyingly ambiguous rhythmic feel suitable for a figure, which is maintained for over three minutes.

[1] Gagaku is “The traditional court music of medieval Japan, originally derived from China… The style is smooth and precise; the tempo is initially slow but later fast.” See Oxford Grove Music Encyclopedia.

[2] The shō is a mouth organ from the same family as the khaen (Thailand) and the sheng (China). The sheng was the precursor to the development of reed organs, the harmonium and the accordion. See Jeremy Montagu, Origins and Development of Musical Instruments (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2007), 95-97. The shō has been featured in the work of contemporary composers such as Toshi Ichiyanagi, Toru Takemitsu and John Cage.

[3] de Leeuw, Ton, Ton de Leeuw (Netherlands Music Archive) (London: Routledge, 1997), 24-34.