Sabina Meyer - Cruelly Coy- CD LM 1001

AA.VV.

Sabina Meyer
Cruelly Coy

musics by Luciano Berio, Hanns Eisler, Giacinto Scelsi, Erik Satie, John Cage, Sabina Meyer, Fabrizio Spera, Michael Thieke.

Lazy Melodies
CD LM 1001 - price 15.00 Euro -

Sabina Meyer - Cruelly Coy

Tracks

Luciano Berio
Sequenza III - 7'52"

(Demo .mp3 - 30 sec. - 597 Kb)

Hanns Eisler
Über den Selbstmord - 2'12"

(Demo .mp3 - 30 sec. - 451 Kb)

Giacinto Scelsi
Hô, cinq vocalises pour voix solo

Hô I - 1'58"
Hô II - 2'34"
Hô III - 4'04"
Hô V - 2'38"

(Demo .mp3 - 30 sec. - 691Kb)

Erik Satie
Trois poèmes d'amour

n° 1 - 0'36"
n° 2 - 0'36"
n° 3 - 0'38"

(Demo .mp3 - 30 sec. - 500 Kb)

John Cage
Aria - 9'58"

(Demo .mp3 - 30 sec. - 600 Kb)

Sabina Meyer, Fabrizio Spera, Michael Thieke
Sibilo sibilla
music for voice&noise

(Demo .mp3 - 30 sec. - 595 Kb)

Hist - 4'04"
Coy - 3'04"
Long distances - 4'05"
Raucedine e trasparenza - 4'59"
Eclipse - 2'02"
Cruelly - 2'56"
Gelbes - 3'04"
Kreis - 2'03"
Silent in - 1'09"
G/A - 1'11"

CD Info

I came in contact with Scelsi’s music in 2003 when I started to study with Michiko Hirayama: to sculpture, to chisel, to explore in and around the musical material of the score.
The naked voice comes to expression through minimal shifting of quarter tones alternating with very large intervals which conducts the sound in very different areas of resonance. This provokes a high richness in timbre and colour, as if the score would be a kind of indication of movement through space and inside of the singer’s body. There are no significant words, there is no story to tell through verbal comunication.
The syllables are like invocations . . . Magic formulas, so the singer is pushed to invent a subterranean tale which can be deducted through the alternation of density and rarefaction, vehemence and abandonment of the timbre. This behaviour has strictly to do with improvisation, improvisation which originated in fact this music.
The Hô series consists of 5 melodies, the author has withdrawn the fourth piece, therefore I decided not to record it.
Sequenza III spurs me to explore the combination of my emotional colours in relationship to the different contemporary grammars: all the resources around the timbre systemized in a gesture of continous transformation up to a very strict organization of time and space.
John Cage’s – visual score Aria - traces signs and colours whose rigorous organization was the first to be discovered. The interpreters body is going to be transformed in a soundbox which evokes ten different personalities. The black squares between the coloured lines indicate not to sing but to make noise.
Rather than the human noise, I’ve been attracted by the mechanical sound of everyday life objects which interact with the vocal parts.
Finally two “songs” treated in an unconventional way: Trois poèmes d’amour by Erik Satie, proposed for voice and toy piano; the voice has been recorded after the instrumental part, and Hanns Eisler’s Über den Selbstmord arranged for voice and electronics. The noise parts have been added independently from the vocal recordings.
Sibilo sibilla. Music for voice&noise is a sound landscape whose protagonists are the voice, electronically treated objects, and reeds. The combination of voice and noise is inspired by my ethnomusicological experience with khorakhané roma during several years of recordings in gipsy camps. For Sibilo sibilla i thought about my natural environment. I thought about the objects around me. I wanted to listen to them, to try to find out about their interior life. To explore their sound, real or imaginary, pushed me to speak to them, to interact with them through my vocal improvisation and experimentation, as if tales, languages and memories could spring out of them. For this I involved two musicians who have worked for a long time on possibile transformation from sound to rumour (crackling, rattling, rustling, air).
The score consists in a trajectory of neat evocations organized in ten segments with precise lengths. Every fragment results from extramusical elements: from psychoanalytical language to technical-mechanical expressions, from poetry to visual arts and cinema. “The nightbird between hoarseness and transparency” is an instant imagine of a dream, as well as the water-elements in andreij tarkovski’s stalker becomes a neat frame for long distances.
The run-up of the words as “to totter, to stagger, to shilly-shally, to dilly-dally” in eclipse evoke skin-deep stream of musical movement which will be immediately stopped by the words “to lash, to whip, to squeeze, to tremble, to hit, to ruin” in cruelly. Objects and reeds have been recorded first and the voice is inserted in a already fixed material and moves in this spectrum of substances to lap the sound texture, to drown in it and suddenly surface to direct the score.
Sometimes the texture gets very dense and tight around the throat and unexpectedly silence takes its place.
[sabina meyer, rome, october 05]