Deep Ambience: Maya Dunietz and Andie Brown

Monday 21 June 2021

If you’ve read enough of my stuff here you’ll already have figured out that I like funny pianos. Yes, they can get over-fetishised and sentimentalised over but it’s always wonderful to hear someone come up with yet another new way of making music with them. Maya Dunietz’s work with performing music, composition and art installations converges on “a family of five retired pianos,” the titular Five Chilling Mammoths, taking a quaint enough premise into alien territory. Dunietz treats the instruments as large resonating objects and subjects them to forces that expose their unique, complex sonic qualities in a form that is abstract in its purity. The instruments are activated by transducers attached to them – basically, large speaker drivers. The principle is similar to that used in David Tudor’s Rainforest IV, but Dunietz uses digital signals instead of amplified sounds. Dunietz and sound artist Daniel Meir collaborated on creating an algorithmic system based on Pythagorean ratios to generate the signals, allowing a wide variety of signals governed by a common logic.

The sounds themselves? An evocation of untamed nature, in that the natural acoustic phenomena are heard without any reassuring framing device to relate to on a human scale. As with nature at its most powerful, the listener’s experience of it is marked by the awareness of nature’s indifference as the sounds switch without warning from the soothing to the harsh or intimitdating, creating music that is both fascinating and disturbing at once. The deep, booming tones that predominate, and the continual resonances of the pianos floating throughout the recording, create a kind of immersive, undersea sound, amorphous and, again, simultaneously natural and alien.

Andie Brown’s Alucita is a similar type of deep ambience, where the sound is pervasive not through colouring the background of everything heard but by soaking through all available space merging foreground and background into one. Brown has been exploring the acoustic and harmonic properties of wine glasses for years and, rather like Dunietz, has embraced the ability of larger objects to bring out more complex sonic phenomena. Seriously, some of these glasses are huge; they take a lot of care and nerve to work with them. In Alucita, Brown takes a particularly bold approach, coupling a single glass, four glasses, eight glasses with electronics to create three seamless panels of sourceless harmonics that stain the air with a dark drone that projects higher frequencies in the way that a rainbow’s spectrum is reflected on an oil slick. The three works heard here were created as installations, but each works well as a minimal, single-minded composition. Brown has tailored each piece so the length is inversely proportional to the amount of readily perceptible activity: the severity of form maximising the amount of subtle detail to be discovered in closer listening.