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Surface

The sensing of timbre is none other than the perception of the succession of movement within sound. As well as being spatial in nature, this perception is of course temporal in nature… timbre arises during the time one is listening to the shifting of sound.

(Toru Takemitsu “My Perception of Time in Traditional Japanese Music”, Contemporary Music Review. Vol 1, (1987): p.10).

Surface comes out of a continued questioning of the fundamental nature of musical material.

Experiencing and understanding the world through sound, focusing on sound as an end in itself, investigating the idea of music-making as an opportunity to engage fundamentally with the phenomenon of sound, surface attempts to create from a large scale traditional ensemble of diverse instruments and individuals a single resonating sonic object, a musical monolith, a physical brute fact, to treat the orchestra as a kind of uber-instrument creating a rich immersive sonic experience for the listener. Slowness and the quiet nature of the work allow space to focus attention on the detailed timbres and shifting colouristic qualities of these almost static sounds inviting the listener into the work and enabling the ear to become absorbed in the sonic moment, shifting its attention across the surface of this almost frozen sonic object much as the eye may shift and flit across the surface of a work of visual art, Gerhard Richter’s Abstract Painting (Skin), Bridget Riley’s Current or Agnes Martin’s Untitled 1978. Density shifts as time and memory superimpose accumulated and amassed pitch material and long patterned repeating threads, sometimes sudden shifts in register foreground the spatial quality of material and orchestra, reminiscent perhaps of the Cage late-numbers pieces, late pieces of Feldman or Tenney, Jo Kondo’s Mulberry, Japanese Gagaku or the ambient work of APhex Twin or Eno.