Philadelphia Mint

Cameron and I spent some time this weekend working on our Eigenvalues project, and we made this recording of a new piece... Cameron wrote the poem during a performance I was in back in the beginning of April. I was playing with a group of improvising musicians from Philadelphia in a project called Sound Exchange, led by Pauline Oliveros. Our first concert was actually a concert by Dr. Oliveros' "Deep Listening Band," but we all played with them during the second half of the evening. She titled this large group piece, "Philadelphia Mint" - so since this piece of music inspired the poem, Cameron borrowed the title.

The music is done live with laptop, clarinet, and a bamboo thing I call my "Tibet Store Flute." I start with the bamboo flute, which is processed and looped, transposed down one octave. This material makes a smooth transition to the clarinet, and helps tie in the text references to various wind instruments. As for the notes, that's all improvised.

I think this is a nice addition to our repertoire, since it has original text (as opposed to found text), and it's also quite personal - where our other pieces are more detached.

It's also up now on our myspace page. We'd love to know what you think.