#Catherine Lamb

[dustedmagazine]

Catherine Lamb — Curva Triangulus (Another Timbre)

Catherine Lamb composes complex, heady music. She explores how we perceive music, playing with harmonic structures and intonation, challenging our typical sense of sound. For Curva Triangulus, she joins with Ensemble Proton to investigate not only compositional drama, but the use of unusual instruments in creating (and limiting) the timbral possibilities of her work. The piece has an undeniable and immediate beauty to it, its leisurely place allowing room (or, better, time) for the experiments that Lamb conducts. It provides opportunity for deep listening challenges — interesting moments and unique developments arise everywhere — but it also makes for accessible pleasure, despite the novel and sometimes unsettling tonal work.

Bern's Ensemble Proton offers Lamb the ideal group for this project. The octet includes musicians hungry for the new and experimental with a penchant for playing unlikely instruments. Coco Schwarz's arciorgano — an extinct but resurrected keyboard instrument — might be the rarest and most unusual. The instrument breaks and octave in more than the usual number of divisions. Lamb uses the arciorgano's tonal options as a sort of sonic adhesive, holding the ensemble's varied sounds together. In a context with not only that instrument but also a lupophone, clarinet d'amore, and others, a violin or bassoon could sound downright pedestrian; instead, they sound otherworldly, part of the strange brew that makes up Curva Triangulus.

Lamb writes in her notes, “Elemental concepts around melody and harmony are reconsidered, blurred.” For listeners less attuned to prime qualitative harmonics and the modal challenges developed across “triadic counterpoint” (whoever those people might be), the blur of melody and harmony becomes the most fascinating aspect of the record. Melody remains subordinate to harmonic movement, but in the interplay of sounds and tones, melody peeks through in unexpected ways. The sonic shifts never become linear, but essentially melodic movements arise, occasionally passed between musicians. The lead “instrument,” might be a harmonic instead of a violin, but those structures give shape to musical phrases that cohere into, if not melody, at least melodic sensibility.

The deep concepts of Curva Triangulus make the album's nuances difficult to access, but the album never relies on its intellectual demands if listened to as a straightforward album. The tonal structures and uncommon instrumentation give it a particularly idiosyncratic feel, but everything sorts itself out into a spellbinding aural geometry. When the ensemble hints at a church organ six minutes in, no one will anticipate a turn toward hymnody, but when it drops into alien space informed by triple harp, no one will feel jarred either. Lamb's work provides a series of intellectual tests, but also a memorable stretch of focused wonder.

Justin Cober-Lake

[bobbitsims]

Just chilling around the neighbourhood

[jgthirlwell]

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Ghost Ensemble performing the world premiere of Catherine Lamb’s Exterius / Interius at the tribute to Richard Teitelbaum concert at Roulette Intermedium NYC. Event organized by James Ilgenfritz. With Margaret Lancaster (flute), Sky Macklay (oboe), Ben Richter (accordion), Chris Nappi (percussion), Lucia Stavros (harp), Martine Thomas (viola), Tyler J. Borden (cello), James Ilgenfritz (contrabass), and Kyle Motl (contrabass), with special guests Catherine Lamb (viola), Katie Porter (clarinet), Jen Baker (trombone), and Thomas Verchot (trumpet).

[unaturalhistory]

Catherine Lamb

[sinceileftyoublog]

BCMC & andplay Live Show Review: 2/20, Constellation, Chicago

BCMC

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Tuesday night marked the beginning of the Peter Margasak-curated Frequency Festival, an annual event hosted by Constellation that focuses on contemporary classical and experimental music. Though this year's lineup is heavy on microtonal music, specifically string players, the headliner of night one was a guitar-and-synth-wizard supergroup. BCMC is guitarist Bill MacKay and Cave/Bitchin Bajas multi-instrumentalist Cooper Crain. They had been playing live together for a few years before releasing their debut album Foreign Smokes last year via Drag City. Unlike what I imagine was the experience of many folks in the crowd on Tuesday, this was my first time seeing BCMC live. Witnessing their performance after their album was released, meaning I had a number of months to digest it, gave me a greater appreciation for how the duo was able to, live, build off of their compositions.

BCMC started off with abstract sounds, gradually becoming more concrete before reverting back to rounded noise. MacKay's bluesy guitar riffs embedded within Crain's synthesizer hum, replete with a sense of motion akin to a chugging train, simultaneously swirling and gentle. At times, the songs turned percussive, via pulsations, as MacKay either meandered or ripped slide guitar licks. Even Crain got an opportunity to solo on the keyboard on "The Swarm". Simultaneously tactile and droney, BCMC were able to lull you into hypnosis and suddenly capture you at the command of their instruments.

andPlay

The opening set from NYC-based string duo andPlay, meanwhile, set the tone (no pun intended) for the rest of the festival's ethos. Violinist Maya Bennardo and violist Hannah Levinson performed the two pieces that make up their latest album Translucent Harmonies (Another Timbre), both of which use just intonation. Kristofer Svensson's "Vid stenmuren blir tanken blomma" (“By the Stone Wall, Thoughts Become Flower”) emphasized extremely short strokes of different lengths and volume, using pauses and ultimate silence to create a sense of tension and disintegration. At times, one player would play a note--a mere pluck--and the other would continue their stroke, resembling a sort of synaptic process. Ultimately, the piece was paradoxically meditative, consistent in its lack of consistency. Their second piece, Catherine Lamb's "Prisma Interius VIII", was comparatively deliberate, the players playing in tandem at times and not just off of each other. As a duo, in contrast to larger ensembles who have played on other recorded versions of the piece, Bennardo and Levinson were able to strip "Prisma Interius VIII" down to its essential elements. Though there were many contrasts between andPlay and BCMC--in instrumentation, in groove (or lack thereof), in space--the two acts shared a common desire to hold your patience and deep attention, toy with your expectations, and make you reflect.

[supermassivebutthole]

things in the twilight script that made me laugh

[snuffysbox]

obsessed with this one show (Slow Horses). I need another season of their dumb shenanigans right now.

[brotherconstant]

Slow Horses | 4.02 "A Stranger Comes to Town" ↳ A Comedy

[snowfallnight]

them though...

[agentgreenbean]

Slow Horses as textposts* part 1/?

*and 1 tweet

[loreartisan]

Good day, i've gotten hyperfixated on slow horses now, expect art and memes

[lilchaoticthing]

we need more slow horses memes! slow horses fandom arise

[bobbitsims]

evening out

[florart98]

Catherine is actually very good at lying, she completely fools Flyte, she even seems to have fun with it

look at her proud smile

She just can't lie to Jackson. She can't even look at him because she can't hide anything from him.

Except when they look at each other, then she blurts everything out and she tells him the truth.

[shipthecarsons]

OMG I think he bought her the jaffa cakes 😂😂🤦🏻‍♀️

[phantom-of-the-laboratory]

“ ‘Hold on, girl,’ she said aloud. She said it to Catherine Martin and she said it to herself. “We’re better than this room. We’re better than this fucking place,” she said aloud. “We’re better than wherever he’s got you. Help me. Help me. Help me.’ “

(Thomas Harris- The Silence of the Lambs- ch 24- pg 145)