Simon Zagorski-Thomas continues the theme of his previous two albums, Gob Almighty and Dance Suite & other stories, exploring the ways in which the timbres and gestures of popular music can be used create ‘art music’ in the way that dances and folk tunes have informed earlier art music traditions. This album also explores a second theme that infuses both his academic research and his compositions: that recorded music and concert performance are as essentially different from each other as theatre and cinema are. Although there are many performers on these recordings, none of the recordings were performed in the conventional sense of the word and it is not a work that is intended for live performance. This album is a collage of pre-composed elements which have then been edited, processed and mixed to create a recorded output that is the final artwork. The five short Due(di)ts that intersperse the longer pieces reflect the notion that in contemporary recorded music a performance is almost always a form of duet between a performer and an editor. The Due(di)ts are constructed from fragments of performances that were originally performed for the longer pieces on the album and which have been stretched, manipulated and processed into new ‘performances’.
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