Octoid, by Chris Mercer

Описание: Since its founding in 2012, the Chicago-based ensemble Fonema Consort has championed music that explores the expressive capacities of the human voice. For the ensemble’s fifth birthday, Fonema Consort presents five new works that operate at the boundary between singing and speech, speech and noise, voices and instruments.

Chris Mercer’s Octoid, finally, leaves voices behind for a thick wall of instrumental sound. Performed by a pianist with three assistants playing inside the piano, Octoid builds an ensemble around the most ubiquitous of percussion instruments. The music is frenetic and jagged, with different sounds and textures closely abutting, at times almost as if different bodies of material were interrupting or overlapping one another. The subordination of roles among the players is unstable: it is difficult to say whether Octoid is a heavily assisted piano solo or a quartet for piano and percussion. As Mercer puts it, the ensemble is like a shape-shifting, octopod creature, “splitting into parts and then reforming into an eight-armed beast.” The beast changes form as the work moves toward its finale and two of the assistants join the pianist at the keyboard in a cacophonous passage for six hands. As the assistants return to their stations beside the piano, the music settles down into a deceptive lull before a final, chaotic push to the cadence.

Notes by Samuel Rowe

PERFORMERS:
Daniel Walden, piano
Weston Olencki, piano assistant I
Shawn Lucas, piano assistant II
Joan Arnau Pàmies, piano assistant III

CREDITS:
Recorded at Northwestern University by Chris Mercer
Edited by Chris Mercer
Mixed by Alex Inglizian and Mastered by Chris Mercer
Video by Arlen Parsa
Produced by Pablo Santiago Chin

Special thanks to Seth Bousted for facilitating rehearsal space at Access Contemporary Music, the Aaron Coplan Fund for Music, Inc. and to all our donors through Indiegogo for partially funding this album.

www.fonemaconsort.com
www.parlourtapes.com