MAZE & MOVING FURNITURE RECORDS

When Splendor musician Anne La Berge organises something, there will always be intriguing adventurers of the contemporary/avant-garde scene involved. This time we hear MAZE, her own Amsterdam-based ensemble dedicated to alternative forms, hybrid and open scores and collaborations with pioneering composers. Tonight, MAZE presents a new album with music by field recording pioneer Annea Lockwood. Sound artist Coen Oscar Polack will also perform music from his upcoming album; bassist Dario Calderone will perform parts of his recent album with composer Claudio Baroni, and MAZE will finish the evening with RAW: Anne La Berge's lively interactive composition.

Music based or structured on reality – whether on the reality of a sound, on a sounding environment, on the structure of a river delta, on the texture of a stone, on the constellations of stars, or simply on the dynamics here and now of a group of musicians guided by chance. Making music as extension and deeper experience of reality, instead of tailoring sounds into building blocks for large architectonic forms, which would pretend to underly the apparent chaos of the perceptible world, but which are illusions, inevitably dated, determined as they are by taste and culturally determined ideas about what order is.

PROGRAMME:
Annea Lockwood: Bayou Borne (2016), for 6 players
Coen Oscar Polack: new music (2022), electronics solo
Claudio Baroni: Ursae Minoris (2016-2021), for double bass and loopstation
Anne La Berge: RAW (2014 - 2022), for 6 musicians

Annea Lockwood: Bayou Borne (2016)
Annea Lockwood (1939, New Zealand) is known for her explorations of natural acoustic sounds and environments, making works on the intersection of body, environment, sound and text - a life's work that equally highlights acts of generous listening, invitational composition and a hunger for considered experimentation. Having started studying electronic music in the 1960's at some point she had a major epiphany when she witnessed a performance with La Monte Young slowly pushing a chair across the floor, emanating an unstable ever-changing but continuous sound. This was a sound not 'composed' by anyone, but it seemed to have an agency of its own, an inherent vitality that could totally engage our ears. From that moment on, she decided to concentrate on working with untreated unaltered sounds, whether coming from the environment, from non-intentional situations or from open instructions to performers, all sounds becoming alive by the act of listening. Bayou-borne, for Pauline (2016) is dedicated to Pauline Oliveros. She was born in Houston, Texas, so I created a graphic score from a map of the six bayous which flow through the city to Galveston Bay, thinking that she would have known one or all of those rivers intimately as a child – swimming, wading, river mud between her toes. She was a superb improviser, so it is scored for six improvising musicians with each player reading one of the rivers as a guide. Their lines move independently at first, coming closer together at the confluences to form duets and trios, before converging at the red star, the whole sound darkening as they approach Houston in memory of the devastation and deaths caused by Hurricane Harvey in 2017.

Coen Oscar Polack: new work for new album for MFR
Coen Oscar Polack is a sound artist based in The Netherlands. His works balance natural textures with synthetic and instrumental sounds. He tears fieldrecordings apart and builds them up with layers of synths and electronics in a thin line between reality and synthesis. Polack works in album format and in collaborative projects, and performs in concert settings and site-specific installations.

Claudio Baroni: Ursae Minoris
Claudio F.Baroni is a composer with a systematic approach oriented towards investigating the nature of sound and the passage of time. His scores are often based on things that have a structure, in depth or on the surface, things like maps or spoken language. In Ursae Minoris Baroni channels a whole 17th century celestial map centered around the constellation Ursae Minoris through one single minded playing technique to make the coordinates, constellations and possible paths audible in the clearest way.

Anne La Berge: RAW
Six musicians generate random basic scores using their smart phones. RAW is an open-ended work for ensemble and electronics made up of fragmented gestures and shards of skeletal speech. ”RAW embraces the unbridled opportunities that unforeseen combinations offer. It is a work that asks the musicians to play unfinished musical material and to collectively create a work in real time, as they are asked to make ongoing randomly generated choices. The piece cuts through worn musical habits and jettisons both audience and player back and forth squarely and simultaneously to point zero & pointomega. To go even beyond that which music is, is where the fiery spirited and elemental heart of RAW lies.

MAZE
Anne La Berge - flute
Gareth Davis - bass clarinet
Dario Calderone - double bass
Reinier van Houdt - piano
Wiek Hijmans - electric guitar
Yannis Kyriakides - synthesizer
Coen Oscar Polack - electronics

Click here for MAZE's youtube channel