CARL STONE
AL-NOOR
ITO CD 10
COMPUTER MUSIC by CARL STONE
1. Al-Noor
2. Flint's
3. Jitlada
4. L 'Os `a Moelle
Total: 54 min.
*BONUS TRACK "Dino's" AVAILABLE ONLY ON iTUNES
Carl Stone is one of the pioneers of live computer music, and has been hailed by the Village Voice as "the king of sampling." and "one of the best composers living in (the USA) today." He has used computers in live performance since 1986. Stone was born in Los Angeles and now divides his time between California and Japan. He studied composition at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney and has composed electro-acoustic music almost exclusively since 1972. His works have been performed in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America and the Near East. In addition to his schedule of performance, composition and touring, he is on the faculty of the Information Media Department at Chukyo University in Japan.
Al-Noor contains Carl Stone's newest explorations into the dismantling and re-composition of global song and melody, and their realtionships to other resonant rhythmic and harmonic phonemes. Stone's computer technology brings forth his transformation of beats, measures and sonic landscape into phase-shifted liquid journeys and sonic monuments. From solitude to shred, sounds gradually shift forth creating new scenes of distant mystery. Movement births stillness. Order becoming anarchy becomes paradise. Other-dimensional voices beat within a new world of texture and space. This is that. Here is there. Those become these. This cd of 4 new compositions represents Stone at one of his most creative periods of his career.
Included are links to a spellbinding internet-only bonus track.
All the music was made using Max/MSP software from Cycling74. Flint's is taken from a live recording made at the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, 2000. L'Os a Moelle was recorded live at the Apple Store Ginza, Tokyo. All other tracks recorded and mixed at Nakano Studios, Tokyo and Tower 39, Los Angeles.
A winner of numerous awards for his compositions, including the Freeman Award for the work Hop Ken, Carl Stone is also the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Foundation for Performance Arts. In 1984 he was commissioned to compose a new work premiered as part of the Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles. His music was selected by the dancer/choreographer Bill T. Jones for the production 1-2-3. In that same year. In 1989 he resided for 6 months in Japan under a grant from the Asian Cultural Council and in that same year, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles commissioned a new work, Thonburi as part of the radio series "Territory of Art". In 1990 he was commissioned to create music for a 60-minute program for ZDF Television in West Germany entitled Made in Hollywood. In 1991 he received separate commissions from Michiko Akao (She Gol Jib, for traditional Japanese flute and electronics), Sumire Yoshihara (for percussionist and electronics) and Sony PCL (Recurring Cosmos, for High Definition video and electronics), which was awarded special honors at the International Electric Cinema Festival in Switzerland in 1991. In 1993, he was commissioned by the Paul Dresher Ensemble to create a new work, Ruen Pair, with funds from the Meet the Composer/Reader's Digest Commissioning Program. In 1994 he was commissioned by the Strings Plus Festival, Kobe to create Mae Ploy, for string quartet and electronics. In that same year he also created Banh Mi So, for ondes martenot and piano, at the request of Takashi Harada and Aki Takahashi. In 1995, he was commissioned by NTT/Japan to create a new work for the internet, Yam Vun Sen, as part of IC95. In 1996, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, he created music for The Noh Project, a collaboration with choreographer June Watanabe and Noh master Anshin Uchida. In 1997 he was commissioned by Bay Area Pianists and Cal Performances to create a new work, Sa Rit Gol, for disklavier and pianist, as part of the Henry Cowell Centennial Celebration at UC Berkeley. Other festival performances in 1997 included Other Minds (San Francisco) and TonArt (Bern). In 1999 he was invited as Scholar-in-Residence at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study and Conference Center. In 2001 he served as Artist-in-Residence at the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS) in Japan, and in that same year he joined the faculty of Chukyo University's School of Cognitive and Computer Sciences.
Carl Stone's music has been used by numerous theater directors and choreographers including Hiroshi Koike (Pappa Tarahumara), Akira Kasai, Bill T. Jones, Setsuko Yamada, Ping Chong, June Watanabe, Kuniko Kisanuki, Rudy Perez, Hae Kyung Lee, and Blondell Cummings. Musical collaborations include those with Yuji Takahashi, Kazue Sawai, Aki Takahashi, Sarah Cahill, Haco, Dorit Cypis, Samm Bennett, Kazuhisa Uchihashi, Michiko Akao, Stelarc, z'ev, Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, Tosha Meisho, Otomo Yoshihide, Kathleen Rogers, Min Xiao-Fen and Mineko Grimmer. Carl Stone served as President of the American Music Center from 1992-95. He was the Director of Meet the Composer/California from 1981-1997, and Music Director of KPFK-fm in Los Angeles from 1978-1981. He hosted a weekly program on KPFA-fm in the Bay Area from 1994 to 2001.. Other activities have included serving as a regular columnist for Sound & Recording Magazine in Japan, serving as web editor for Other Minds, a world wide web site devoted to New Music, and for the official web site of the John Cage Trust. In 2007 he began contributing a regular column to the American Musix CenterŐs New Music Box website.
Recordings of Carl Stone's music has been released on In Tone Music, New Albion, CBS Sony, Toshiba-EMI, EAM Discs, Wizard Records, Trigram, t:me recordings, New Tone labels and various other labels.
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MISC. REVIEW(S)
".....Listening to the new release of Carl Stone's music, Al-Noor (on the Los Angeles-based In Tone label), the music still sounds enticing and head-twisting, but is now suitable as a holiday season party favor, thanks to the changes in musical perception in the past 20 years. House music, techno, acid jazz, jamband-ery and other groove-is-the-thing fashions have trained us to appreciate Stone's sonic mash-up artistry afresh. Stone has moved on to other computer music intrigues, including the cerebral nitty-gritty of granular synthesis, but he remains a master mixologist. These four tracks draw on materials from the global marketplace, tweaked into virtually unrecognizable forms and tethered to hypnotic beats (or anti-beats). Slap it on the player of choice at your holiday party and watch the dance action kick in, with some double takes along the way. They oughta' put it on Mel's jukebox, for old times' sake."
-JOSEF WOODARD-Santa Barabra Independent
".... Carl Stone’s offerings on Al-Noor are all equally stunning, hypnotic, fascinating, and gorgeous. The opening track, also the title track on the disc, begins with a simple and mournful sounding melody. This melody is then harmonized and twisted using Max/MSP in haunting and mesmerizing ways. At first, it sounds like the vocalist suddenly started smoking 6 packs of unfiltered cigarettes. Then, gloriously, the rough sounds harmonize the melody, forging a rich and stunning homophonic texture.
Flint’s changes gears instantly. Beats start up, pop-sounding harmonic loops groove over top, and once we feel comfortable and groovy, Stone starts cutting, editing, and transforming. Vocal lines are shuffled but still preserve their trajectory. The beat (fat beats, as my 3 year old daughter likes to call them) is infectious and omnipresent. This piece is a recording of a live performance at the 2000 San Francisco Electronic Music Festival which, to me, makes it even more impressive. Not only is the music expertly crafted, it was created in real time. The performance nature of the piece comes through in the work’s intuitive structure.
Jitlada is similar in nature to Flint’s. A repetitive groove starts up, although a much mellower groove than the previous track. Vocal fragments drift in and out forming an almost Dada-ist understanding of the global melody. I feel as though I’ve heard the recorded melody complete and uncut, but it was served only in fragments.
The final track on the CD is also a live recording taken from the Apple Store Ginza, Tokyo. L’Os à Moelle shares the same structure as the previous two tracks: start a groove, edit the groove, make better grooves. This time, though, instead of vocal melodic fragments, the source is a classic-rock sounding instrumental loop. Voice-like sounds start flying around the audio space and the constant transformation of the repetitive structure make this 20+ minute journey positively captivating. THIS is the music that will draw in younger audiences. Stone’s output demonstrates the best synthesis of avant garde electronic music, minimalism, and popular aesthetics. Think spectromorphology with a rhythm section.
Not available on the CD is the bonus track Dino’s. You can get the track on iTunes (even as a iTunes Plus download). Go buy this track. Right now. I’ll wait. Got it? The spectral transformations used on the Asian melody from the first track are now done to “Oops, I Did it Again” by our own global sensation Britney Spears. The same great talent is brought to mixing and editing the spectral world of this song. Amazing stuff. Additionally, though, I love the possible implications on the future. Ms. Spears singing “I’m not that innocent” sounds a lot different given her current context than it did when she first sang the song. And, with the “6 packs of smokes” filtering done on her voice, we might be hearing what Ms. Spears will sound like at her Comeback Tour in 2035. The ending of the track is, of course, perfect.
Great music. Expertly crafted. Extremely entertaining. I can think of nothing else like it."
-Jay Batzner SEQUENZA 21.com.
"....There is a special link between Carl Stone's work and your reviewer. Compositions such as "Banteay Srey" or "Shing Kee" are, to this day, fundamental objects in my mental collection of positive sonic stimuli. The man hasn't rested on his laurels, though; on the contrary, his material - which he distils through not frequent releases, and that's a plus from here - is perennially a couple of steps ahead when compared to the large part of electroacoustic music published nowadays. The funny aspect of this, though, is that Stone does things that are apparently "easy", and most of the times we find ourselves nodding rhythmically to the incessant incoming of elaborate patterns. It's a minimalist approach in terms of constant addition to a same design, but certainly not when we figure out how many layers and occurrences are in there. The four tracks of Al-Noor are all significant in that sense. One of them - the initial title track, featuring a female singer intoning a heartrending Vietnamese chant "a cappella" - is a veritable masterstroke; the intensity reached by that lone voice is augmented by the author's knowledgeable treatment, pitch-shifting and morphing reverberation attributing an alien-ish harmonic content to what started as a simple monodic plaint, ending the whole in something that resembles a sacred ceremonial. Quite spectacular indeed. The subsequent pair of selections feature what's rightly called a "dismantling and re-composition of global song and melody", a main characteristic of Stone's recent methods - perpetual beats, almost disco in certain occasions, alimenting a whirlwind of vocal segments and looped fragments that create an intricate language of phonemes which dazzles and intoxicates with each listen. The final 24-minute "L'Os 'a Moelle" is another pleasurable coup de tete by the Californian, who takes a 60's psychedelic guitar progression - deliciously basic and naïve - subjecting it to a progressive series of imperceptible modifications. Imperceptible? At the end, the simplicity has morphed into a "rock-from-Mars" meets sci-fi meets Clockwork Orange patchwork where no element sounds like it was at the beginning. A sort of instrumental version of Alvin Lucier's "I am sitting in a room", if you will. Tentative descriptions of particles and snippets that define a classic destabilizing jewel. Not to be missed."
-http://spazioinwind.libero.it/extremes/touchinghome.htm
the WIRE magazine MARCH 2008
SIGNAL to NOISE magazine SPRING 2008
