Label: Farpoint Recordings

アート系コレクターは是非!!カナダの大ベテラン前衛音楽家と、もとPere Ubuメンバーによる振り切れまくったデュオ実験!!オノ・ヨーコの[Secret Piece]の実践録音や、同国の物理学者、楽器ビルダー"ヒュー・ル・ケイン"の音源監修、その他ケージ、ジェームズ・テニー、オリヴェロスの演奏及び作品ライナーなども担当して来た作曲家ゲイル・ヤング。本作は米ポストパンク・バンド"Pere Ubu"に、1995年リリースの[Raygun Suitcase]からエレクトロニクス担当として参加した事で知られる、盟友ロバート・ウィーラーとの共同録音。ジョン・ケージとレジャレン・ヒラーによる[HPSCHD]のライブに参加した時に意気投合したという二者であり、ゲイル・ヤングは21本のスティール弦と3本のコントラバス弦を備えたツィター的自作楽器"Amaranth"を、ロバート・ウィーラーは1974年製のセミモジュラー"ElectroComp EML-101"を操り、得体の知れない音塊を奔放に大放射。4パネル・デジパック、8ページのブックレットが付属。



Gayle Young — Amaranth
Robert Wheeler — EML ElectroComp 101

CD album comes in a four panel gatefold sleeve with an eight page booklet with liner notes. CD comes with digital album and full artwork pdf. Also available as DL with streaming. Please note Bandcamp may add tax at the checkout process.

American synthesist Robert Wheeler is best known as either a descendant of Thomas Edison or a member of the foundational post-punk experimentalists Pere Ubu, taking up Allen Ravenstine's role behind the knobs starting with the group's 1995 release Raygun Suitcase. Canadian Gayle Young, meanwhile, tends to be associated with contemporary concert music, but her practice is far broader than that, encompassing sound art, improvisation, writing and building instruments of her own design. The underlying connection between Wheeler and Young, however, sheds more light on their collaboration.

In June of 2008, the two performed as part of a live performance and recording of John Cage and Lejaren Hiller's HPSCHD at the Ontario College of Art & Design—a production that also included Casey Sokol (a founding member of the CCMC), Eve Egoyan, George Boski, Gregory Oh, Marc Couroux, Tania Gill, and electronic music pioneer Joel Chadabe. Young's Clavinet was processed by Wheeler through a Moog modular, and a lasting friendship was forged between them.

Given Young's background, this isn't altogether surprising. Young’s present output focuses primarily on acoustic methods, yet she continues to remain informed by her extensive training and work with electronics while also occasionally employing certain electronic tactics in her work—sometimes in conjunction with acoustic processing. One such example is filtering pre-recorded electronic filtered tuned physical resonators that she deploys in site specific scenarios. As a student of Richard Teitelbaum and David Rosenboom during York University's heyday in the 1970s, she worked extensively with a number of early synthesizers, primarily Synthi and ARP. Engaging with these nascent technologies provided her with crucial insights into acoustics and sound perception. Young also worked with James Tenney during her studies whose interests in psychoacoustics and tuning bolstered the lessons she extracted from these electronic tools. Tenney's influence is ongoing,reflected in Young's commitment to exploring intonation. Some time after her days at York, she penned The Sackbut Blues, a biography of pivotal Canadian electronic music inventor Hugh Le Caine, outlining the invention and development of his arsenal of idiosyncratic electronic instruments beginning in the mid-1940s. She also served as editor and publisher for stalwart experimental music publication Musicworks.

In 2022, after 12 albums, Robert Wheeler quit Pere Ubu, giving way to further collaborations with fellow Ubu-ite Allen Ravenstine. The pair had known one another since the late 1970’s - Ravenstine was the one that convinced Wheeler to purchase an Electrocomp EML synthesizer over one by Buchla. The pair connected in Ontario around the same time as the aforementioned HPSCHD performance as both were being interviewed for the synthesizer documentary I Dream Of Wires where they addressed their shared use of their EMLs. As a footnote to this conversation, the two played together, and what started as a short exercise for the flm ended up as two days worth of sessions once it became clear to everyone present that something important was happening. These sessions yielded two Ravenstine-Wheeler duo albums Farm Report and City Desk. When Wheeler was invited up to Hamilton again in 2024 to record with Gayle Young in Hamilton, he jumped at this chance to expand the scope of their previous musical encounter. Captured by lauded engineer Bob Doidge, the pair worked together at the beloved Grant Avenue Studios (where everyone from Long John Baldry to Jon Hassell, Brian Eno to Ani DiFranco recorded).

On this recording, Gayle Young plays one of her numerous inventions, the Amaranth, a zither that features 21 steel strings and 3 double-bass strings and employs a mix of guitar tuning pegs and triangular wooden bridges for tuning. Young is a true vocabularian on this unique instrument, activating idiosyncratic microtonal scales through striking, bowing, plucking, strumming and scraping its strings. Her expansive lexicon makes her a perfect sparring partner for Wheeler's gritty analogue abstraction. The Electrocomp EML 101, Wheeler’s apparatus of choice, is widely known for its extensive palette. It may have a keyboard attached to it, but it seldom sounds that way in Wheeler's hands. Instead, its presence is much more chimeric, unleashing splashing metallic percussion, mufled motorized howls, furious electric chirps, and rubbery bursts of friction. Young's aforementioned spectrum of sonic possibility allows her to provide relevant organic contrasts to Wheeler’s gesture, present evocative commentary, and, perhaps most critically, lets her fuse efortlessly with Wheeler's vivid synthetic hues to generate peculiar and engrossing composite sonorities.

From Grimsby to Milan is a vital and eccentric release, showcasing both artists' inventive and individualistic approach to music-making, while presenting an utterly singular acoustic-electronic instrumental pairing— one that defes the received wisdom surrounding this format.

For fans of Morton Subotnick, Harry Partch, Zoviet*France, Hwang Byungki, Keith Fullerton Whitman and Pere Ubu.