Tom
Hamilton - City of Vorticity
Tom
Hamilton’s electronic environments are
brilliantly colored, immersive structures but more
than that, they are contexts—contexts for
listening and for interaction with
instrumentalists in real time.
For nearly 40 years, Hamilton has been using
analogue synthesizers to build settings within
which improvisers playing acoustic instruments can
interact. These environments are textural
constructions made up of layered elements, each of
which is a vortex of sound rotating around an
independent axis. Individually and collectively,
these sound objects are structured by rapidly
pulsing, irregular and asynchronous rhythmic
cycles that give the environment a quality of
perpetual, recurrent motion. The resulting overall
textures tend to be dense, but even during sparser
passages there are always several sound elements
in play simultaneously—a complex weave of strands
of varying thickness.
Taken alone, as it is on the second of this
release’s two long tracks, the environment
envelops the listener in its asymmetrical,
divergent patterns whose beginnings and endings
often defy expectations. When set out in
conjunction with live accompaniment—as it is on
the first track—its significance subtly shifts as
the listener’s attention is continually directed
toward and away from it as it accommodates and
alienates the adjacent instrumental sounds,
sometimes absorbing them and sometimes throwing
them into plain relief. The challenge for the
accompanying musician is to integrate the
discretionary choices open to the improviser with
the interlocking structures of the electronic
background; fortunately the three soloists here—Al
Margolis on violin, Alan Zimmerman on percussion
and prepared dulcimer, and Peter Zummo on didgeridoo
and trombone—always seem to find the right points
of entry and exit as they play off of the
surrounding electronics with the appropriate
rhythmic and timbral abandon.. Dan Barbiero - Avant
Music News
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