NEHIL, SETH & OLIVIA BLOCK - Sunder, unite

Format: CD

Label & Cat.Number: Sedimental SEDCD 034

Release Year: 2003

Note: digipack

Price (incl. 19% VAT): €14.00

More Info

Collageous / cut-up – surroundings made from many different sound-sources and real instruments. Very obscure and unique !

“Sunder, Unite began with the destruction of musical sources through the insertion of silence and/or faulty connection. It continued with the playing of small objects, fire and grass on our tour of Japan in 2000, being multiplied on many small speakers in each space and recorded in these situations. Sources continued to be recorded in our locations, train stations, a market in Kyoto... Sounds were traded and holes punched in, surfaces distorted. Transparencies of sound were overlaid and cut, residues remain. We followed an ever-shifting ground and rate-of-change. A skip and fade, an intuitive mix and then traded again. The crumbling recording of metal. A walking recording of creaking wood. Speakers in a room.”
Composed 1999-2001. Instruments and treatments by Seth Nehil and Olivia Block except: Kyle Bruckmann, oboe, Chinese oboe; Michael Northam, objects; Michael Shannon, reeds. Photograph by Carmen Resendez. Drawing by Bethany Wright and S.N. With thanks to Koji Tano for assistance in Japan.
Contact: s_nehil@yahoo.com, oliviablo@aol.com
Olivia Block is a contemporary composer and sound artist who combines field recordings, scored segments for acoustic instruments, and electronically generated sound. Her recorded work seeks to introduce, set at play, and ultimately reconcile nature with artifice in the realms of music and sound. In the process, "organic" sound becomes subtly processed, digitized and abstracted; "inorganic" sound becomes self-replicating and animate; and "musical" elements such as chamber instruments are defamiliarized from their traditional associations, freeing them to participate in the larger aesthetic possibilities of sound.
Seth Nehil (b. 1973) began working with sound around 1990 using found objects and instruments, old records, reel-to-reel machines, discarded magnetic tape and other detreitus. Alial Straa was formed in 1994 in collaboration with John Grzinich as a studio projectinvolving Grzinich's handmade piano-wire instruments and Nehil's analog tape-treatments and objects. Joined by Olivia Block, the group went on to perform as an electro-acoustic improvisational trio. Seth Nehil worked with experimental arts magazine N D as writer and artistic contributor from 1996-2000, and received a BA in studio art from the University of Texas at Austin in 1998. Beginning with 1998's Tracing the Skins of Clouds, Seth Nehil has pursued an interest in the sensual surface of found objects and materials, and the inner dynamics of their acoustical properties. Without altering those properties, the possibilities of the studio are explored as a means of transforming sounds into dense interactions - meditations on physicality, germination and disorientation. Recent work has included continued collaborations with John Grzinich and Olivia Block in studio works as well as soundtracks for experimental theatre group Hand2Mouth." [press release]