This 65 minute DVD Audio/Video release features 13 new music composers dramatically exploring surround sound for the first time. The results are intense, exciting, haunting, beautiful. All 13 pieces were commissioned to premiere on this groundbreaking release – the first such recording in history. The composers are Pamela Z, Bruce Odland, Maggi Payne, Carl Stone, Phil Kline, Ellen Fullman, Lukas Ligeti, Paul Dresher, Pauline Oliveros, Paul Dolden, Merzbow, Ingram Marshall, and Meredith Monk.
Immersion plays on regular DVD players, as well as audiophile DVD-Audio units.
Tomlinson Holman, one of the world's leading surround sound authorities, states that "this fascinating disc" is among the first "to show composers stretching the boundaries of recorded sound by exploring the new possibilities inherent in DVD-Audio."
Immersion has won widespread critical acclaim. Stereophile wrote “All the music is fascinating” and Billboard notes the DVD establishes “a number of ‘firsts’ in an exceptionally enjoyable program.” Audiophile Audition adds “the variety of approaches is breathtaking and all are worth hearing... Best of the Year.”
All the music on this innovative DVD involves you in ways never before possible. In the opening piece “Live/Work,” Pamela Z gives you a virtual surround tour of her studio with a precision not previously heard. Z is an audio artist who works primarily with voice, live electronic processing, and sampling technology. In performance, she creates layered works that combine operatic bel canto and experimental vocal techniques with a battery of digital delays, found percussion objects, spoken word, and sampled concrete sounds.
Bruce Odland's “Tank” places you in a huge underground water tank, where you hear Ron Miles' trumpet reverberating for 7 seconds, with an authentic reality simply not possible in conventional stereo. Odland is known for his psychoacoustic sound designs for theatre and for his cutting-edge, large-scale multimedia installations in public spaces, and has collaborated with many of America's leading theatre directors, including Peter Sellars, JoAnne Akalaitis, and Andre Gregory.
Maggi Payne's “White Turbulence 2000” begins by putting you in the center of a dramatic circling pan of a convolved thunderous airplane, and then adds highly processed water-based sounds. Having created quadraphonic pieces during 1973-1985, she now comments about returning to surround sound: "To be able to once again have more spatial control of the sound environment is exciting. To enter this more complete world allows one to more fully sculpt the space/experience dynamically over time."
"One of the best composers working in the country today" (Village Voice), Carl Stone shifts hyper-speed hallucinatory barrages from speaker to speaker in “Luong Hai Ky Mi Gia.” Stone comments that "The opportunity to make a piece using the medium of surround sound for Starkland's DVD has allowed me to expand on some of the quadraphonic techniques that I often use in live performance."
Phil Kline's haunting piece, “The Housatonic at Henry Street,” is a "vision of enfolded time flowing through a place on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where successive waves of migrant humanity have overlapped for centuries. Background and foreground are blurred as street sounds are recorded, then mixed with 'musical' material from computer and tape." The result situates you in "an imaginary surrounding landscape in which past and present hang out together in asynchronous multitonal harmony." Early in his music career, Kline, with former classmates Jim Jarmusch and Luc Sante, founded the rock band the Del-Byzanteens, and in 1988 he joined the Glenn Branca Ensemble. In 1990 he began producing a body of work using large numbers of boombox cassette machines to create complex phase patterns and sound masses. "A real original" (New York Times), Kline notes that "By nature all of my works are surround sound pieces."
Ellen Fullman's work places you in real world/virtual spaces only possible with surround sound. “Margaret Tuned the Radio In Between Two Stations” is one of two pieces on Immersion that employs composer-created instruments using unusually long strings. Since 1981 she has composed for her Long String Instrument, which uses strings nearly 100 feet long, filling her warehouse studio. Fullman comments that "In creating the surround sound mix, it was thrilling to hear a recording, for the first time, that envelops the listener, mirroring the live experience of my instrument."
Paul Dresher also wrote his postminimalist work, “Steel,” for a unique instrument, the Quadrachord, which he co-invented and constructed. It has four 14-foot long steel strings, with electric bass pick-ups at both ends. He writes that "both ends of the strings are acoustically 'active,' making the Quadrachord's sound inherently spatial. Because of their length, the strings often vibrate sympathetically, imparting a remarkable reverberant quality. This aspect in particular inspired its use in this surround sound composition for Starkland." Dresher, "one of the best post-minimalist composers" (Stereo Review), writes for a wide variety of forms (from experimental music theater to orchestral pieces), tours with his Electro-Acoustic Band, and has had his works performed at the New York Philharmonic, BAM's Next Wave Festival, Minnesota Opera, and five New Music America Festivals.
Lukas Ligeti co-founded the group Beta Foly, perhaps Africa's only experimental music ensemble combining traditional and electronic instruments. “Propeller Island” takes advantage of widely spaced playback speakers to explore his interest in polymetrics. He surrounds you with steel drums, West African balafons, and other percussion in multiple tempos. Every time you listen, the beat elusively shifts and new rhythmic vantage points emerge and recede.
In her Immersion work, “Sayonara Sirenade: 20/21,” Pauline Oliveros draws on materials from a 1966 spatially-presented improvisation. "Extracting sounds from the old piece, I used today's software to create new tracks, adding placement and movement. The new piece reveals the depth of field that was missing since that first studio performance. The flatness of stereo became fullness in surround sound. Spatiality becomes the clarifying parameter in composition." Oliveros and her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth, and ritual have been an important influence on American Music for four decades; in 1991 she was awarded a letter of distinction from the American Music Center at New York's Lincoln Center. John Rockwell has written: "On some level, music, sound consciousness and religion are all one, and she would seem to be very close to that level."
The Canadian composer Paul Dolden also explores multiple tempos, typically by composing, recording, and mixing literally several hundred simultaneous musical parts. His high energy Starkland piece, “Twilight's Dance,” wraps his dense, driving rhythms around you, imparting a clarity to his music's intense, polyrhythmic activity never previously heard. Dolden's exhilarating works have received over 20 national and international awards.
Likely the world’s leading Noise composer, Japan’s Masami Akita has released over 200 recordings under the name Merzbow. He says about his Immersion piece: “2000 combines two stereo multiple noise loops (front and rear), transformed in real time by different pan effects, with a monaural subsonic bass loop and a high feedback loop. The work especially aims to create accidental Doppler crash effects from the sounds surrounding each other.”
Ingram Marshall's piece for Starkland, “Sighs and Murmurs: A SeaSong,” is based on his memories of an isolated, "austerely beautiful white farm house which sat like a shining beacon on this rough and tremulous coast" of Nova Scotia. "One's feeling of solitude was tempered by an underlying sense of souls, long departed, who had once dwelt there." You hear murmuring voices, a poignant piano melody, and sea sounds that evoke strangely familiar memories. Marshall's music has been performed by ensembles such as the Kronos Quartet, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, and St. Louis Symphony. His music often uses real-time digital processing, and he has widely performed his live electronic music works in Europe and the USA.
The Immersion DVD ends with an ethereal vocal work from Meredith Monk, a pioneer in what is now called "extended vocal technique" and "interdisciplinary performance." A composer, singer, creator of new opera and music-theatre works, films, and installations, she has created more than 150 works since 1964, and has made twelve recordings (mostly on ECM New Series). Regarding her Starkland piece, Monk writes: "In Eclipse Variations I was interested in the idea of a new sound being revealed when another one disappears - a sonic equivalent of the light or glow coming from behind the shadow of the moon in an eclipse," noting that "the entrances and exits of the singers leave an aural residue which modifies the texture. In surround sound, the piece becomes a suspended ring of sound, with the voices moving across the space, colliding, leaning, and creating beats in the air." With DVD-Audio, you hear Monk's shimmering, seamless vocal layers in a floating, enveloping space never before heard in home sound systems.
Each piece on the Immersion DVD is accompanied by 5-10 slides shown during playback.
In addition to bios and notes from all the composers, the comprehensive 32-page booklet presents three Introductions from leading new-music critic Kyle Gann, Tomlinson Holman (likely the world's foremost surround sound authority), and the CD's producer, Thomas Steenland, President of Starkland.
The Immersion DVD was mastered at Gateway Mastering by Bob Ludwig, a leader in surround sound. Records mastered by Ludwig, one of the world's finest mastering engineers, have been nominated for hundreds of Grammies.
While regular DVDs offer surround sound, they use a perceptual encoding process that actually discards most of the sound data. DVD-Audio keeps 100% of the original material. Immersion offers this option for those who want to listen in high-resolution surround.
With all music commissioned exclusively for high-resolution surround sound, Starkland's Immersion DVD became the first such recording in history. If you're interested in surround sound, you need to hear Immersion.
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