New album by Gabriel Paiuk
ACPA alumnus Gabriel Paiuk is releasing a new album, titled Degrees of Transparency, on the Unsounds label.
This album is the second volume in a collection resulting from the collaboration between Unsounds and Echonance Festival in Amsterdam, coming just one year after the first volume dedicated to the music of Phil Niblock. It will be officially launched on February 7th in the context of the third Echonance festival at the Orgelpark in Amsterdam.
The album comprises two pieces composed by Gabriel Paiuk and premiered at last year's Echonance 2024 edition: Rhythm, Presence, Voice, a piece for piano and string quartet perfomed by pianist Reinier van Houdt and the Maurice String Quartet: Georgia Privitera & Laura Bertolino, violin, Francesco Vernero, viola and Aline Privitera, cello, and Degrees of Transparency, an electronic piece based on field recordings and recordings of Paiuk's piano improvisations. Both pieces share, although from very different perspectives, a focus on the piano, its acoustic imprint and mechanics, as well as an exploration on how sound takes part in different processes of mediation.
Rhythm, Presence, Voice is a piece dedicated to composer Peter Ablinger and Jazz composer and pianist Andrew Hill. The piece taps into the extensive history of the relation between language, meaning and music. Often this relationship is bound to the habitual setting of words into music. In those cases, meaning is presumed to emerge from the capacity of language to refer to entities or events in the world. Nonetheless, language also produces meaning through rhythm (prosody), melodic articulations (intonation), stresses, pauses and the fundamental possibility of coupling different sensing agents. Rhythm, Presence, Voice delves into the space in-between music and language, exploring the material and rhythmical qualities of prosody as a realm where the possibility of meaning appears.
Degrees of Transparency is part of a series of works Paiuk elaborated in the past decade that explore the material and spatial aspects of sound as they are rendered by sound reproduction technologies. Given that sound is always the product of coupled material oscillations, the border between that which is distinguished as a material or as a spatial property of sound is ambiguous. As sound takes part in circuits of sound propagation and mediation – and bear traces of the artefacts and protocols of the recording and reproduction process – it simultaneously expresses material and spatial conditions that come to inform how we affectively engage with it. In Degrees of Transparency, Paiuk taps into a personal archive of field recordings and excerpts of his improvisational practice at the piano, many of them bearing traces of the contexts in which they were produced, to pose questions on the role processes of mediation play in our engagement with the realities we participate in.
The album will be available from February 1st onwards on:
https://unsounds.com/shop/degrees-of-transparency
https://unsounds.bandcamp.com/album/degrees-of-transparency