Jam of the Week #5: Noé Cuéllar
At first blush, composer/sound artist Noé Cuéllar seems a stoic fellow. After that impression fades, one realizes that he is, in fact, merely economical: no gesture or encounter is made lightly; no talk—however quiet it may be—is small. Today's JOTW, in turn, presents a paucity of material treated with ample consideration.
JOTW#5: Noé Cuéllar
personnel:
Noé Cuéllar: Korg CX-3
Dan Mohr: Sony IC Recorder, breath, effects
Track 1: "Untitled"
(download a zip file of the track & the artwork)
Noé and I have been collaborating for the past few months on a strange song cycle based on texts farmed from the internet and mashed up; we performed our first work, Detailed Measurements, at a salon presented by The Plagiarists and curated by Sara Jean McCarthy at the Black Rock (the bar in Roscoe Village, not the boat on Lost) in February. When Noé and I hang out, we're usually either listening to music, or noodling around on whatever instruments might be at hand. Today, I wanted to see what he'd do with my first-edition Korg CX-3 organ emulator. We recorded 18 minutes of Noé making full use of the instrument's drawbars and subtle timbral shifts to create a slow-moving drone. After he left, I pieced together my material using only breath and feedback, with a digital dictaphone by Sony. Using the dictaphone's very cool looping function and a few additional tracks in Pro Tools, I played back the breath/feedback recordings through a series of delays, reverbs and pitch-shifts.
The resulting music is a spare, piercing, and decidedly lowercase excercise in drone that will reward undivided attention through its 19-minute duration. N.B.: The track starts very quietly; I'd recommend setting your volume at a healthy, medium-high level before you press play to avoid having to make adjustments when it gets loud later.
I'll be performing a solo piano/voice version of our aforementioned collaboration Detailed Measurements at a Sunday Solo at Experimental Sound Studio on April 25th.
