Browse Items (868 total)

• Vanished into the Clouds (雲隠)

  (SCORE AVAILABLE BY REQUEST – jacob.sudol@gmail.com)

  stereo version also available for rehearsal and performance

  Vanished into the Clouds (雲隠) takes its title from a chapter in the ancient Japanese novel The Tale of Genji. This chapter is significant because it has no content. There are two theories about this chapter. The first theory is that the chapter is lost. The second theory, and the one that I prefer, is that the chapter was left intentionally blank so as to express the narrator’s sorrow about the death of Genji which occurs between the end of the preceding chapter and the following chapter.

  Unlike the aforementioned chapter, this work for cello and live electronics is not left blank. This said, many conventions of music such as melodic or motivic development, clear phrase structure, and rhythmic motion are regularly obscured and ignored. The resulting work instead focuses on exploring the inner sonic regions of the cello’s open and muted C string, sudden ruptures in motion, and the gradual degradation of material. The goal of this approach is to create a sort of new musica povera that reflects on both a narrators’ or authors’ difficulty of writing as well as the sort of inequalities of wealth that pervade our world.

  The work was written for and premiered by cellist Jason Calloway and is dedicated to him.

  – Jacob David Sudol Kaohsiung, Taiwan July 28, 2013

• Peculiar Galaxies: UGC 4881

  a digital emulation (on a Kyma system) of woodwind multiphonics

• descent #7

  brought to you by Carl's Jr.
  

  One piece in six parts. There are no gaps between parts.

  Sampled piano in loops. Reverb. Random panning and amplitude according to a predetermined behavioral framework. Everything made in Pd.

  There exist a quadraphonic and stereo version.

• White Turbulence

  When I first started thinking about this piece, I thought it might be interesting to have water as a unifying theme. I recorded many sounds involving water with microphones and hydrophones and processed them using phase vocoding, convolving, and extreme equalization. As I started putting the piece together, I thought it might be playful to incorporate some obvious quadraphonic effects (the convolved airplane at the beginning) in addition to the more subtle spatialization techniques I used such as continuously varying phase relationships. Other sounds include waves lapping against the shore, an old toilet tank slowly filling with water, a brass ball spinning very fast in a stainless steel bowl with a small amount of water, etc. There is a mix of recognizable (although processed) sounds and sounds processed beyond recognition. While working on this piece I recalled the difficulty of layering complex sounds which were spatially oriented with other complex sounds of another spatial orientation. The space tends to become confused or to simply collapse when layering the sounds. This piece is therefore reminiscent of many of my early quadraphonic pieces (1973-1985) which are more episodic rather than thickly layered.

• Moiré

  Moiré is the soundtrack for Jordan Belson’s 2001 video Bardo. It also appears on Asphodel label’s Swarm of Drones CD set. Most of the source materials are derived from natural sounds that are highly processed using extensive layering, resonant filters, equalization and SoundHack algorithms, resulting in a complete disassociation from their origins. Spatial location and modulation are of primary concern.

• ReCycle

  ReCycle uses my recordings of a refrigerator, a freezer, a floor furnace, ice melting, water boiling, a Jacob’s ladder I built, a faulty faucet, and noise between pieces in old 78 recordings. Some of these sounds have large cycles such as the refrigerator, freezer and floor furnace cycling on and off, but there are also cyclic patterns within their “on-times.” The Jacob’s ladder has an irregular cycle. The faulty water faucet, the penultimate sound in the piece, and the looped noise between pieces from an old recording at the very end have the most consistent rhythmic cycles. The “Re” in the title comes from both the use of the sounds of my re-frigerator, and the recycling of unused source materials from some of my previous works, including Distant Thunder, Fluid Dynamics, and System Test.

• Beyond

  Beyond the boundaries of earth to the vastness of the universe.

• Fizz

  Two sounds primarily sparked FIZZ. The first was a disequilibrium in a toilet tank that caused almost inaudible cyclic, but constantly changing, sounds: a faint rising squeak that occurred at the valve where the rod attaches, coupled with water trickling down the refill pipe, resulting in a squeak, trickle, squeak, trickle sequence. I stretched this sound using granular synthesis and layered the results. There is an ebb and flow that floats naturally across the space. It provides the long section that occurs after the rhythmic filtered faulty faucet valve that begins the piece. Disk drives turning on and off then spiral us into a section in which a malfunction in my system caused cyclic low frequency feedback. This is accompanied by fizz, a sound that I never captured satisfactorily until a student, Alison Johnson, played her wonderful recording of fizzing for me. She divulged her method of producing fizzing, providing the second spark for this piece.

• Glassy Metals

  A continuation of my fascination with the sounds of metal objects, Glassy Metals explores the sounds of tungsten filaments in burned out incandescent light bulbs, magnetic (iron oxide) tape rushing across a head stack, small ball bearings, ball chains of various sizes, sheet metal, tiny gear motors, bikes, BART (which permeates the sonic landscape of the San Francisco Bay Area), freight trains, and other metal objects.

  Some sounds are used in their raw state; others, such as the BART train, which now sounds like the wind, are transformed beyond recognition. Selecting only small portions of the spectrums of several sources and layering them results in new constructs with constantly fluctuating details. The ending exaggerates these perturbations, as sources emerge from the texture and fold back in as if they are fluttering insects hovering close by briefly, then flitting away, only to return later. Although several sources are cyclic, none are precisely so, nor are they synchronous with other sources combined in the layers, so apparent synchronous relationships occur only briefly, then drift apart. Glassy Metals takes its title from non-crystalline (amorphous) metallic materials.

• System Test (fire and ice)

  System Test (fire and ice), which primarily uses my recordings of Jacob’s ladders, ice melting, and papers sliding against each other as the sources, is a rather dramatic piece, which I attribute to the dynamic/dramatic character of the Jacob’s ladder. There is such intensity in the discharges, accompanied by wonderful sizzling, hissing, crackling sounds, and powerful low frequencies—danger is always present. The sources are convolved, stretched, granulated, equalized, and further processed many times over, then whirled into this intense piece.

  The visual component for this work uses four electroluminescent wired “imagers” in a very dark presentation space.