Componium Ensemble - 8 Automated Works 八つの自動作曲作品集 (CD)

EM Records is proud to present “8 Automated Works”, the first full release by Componium Ensemble, an “indeterminate chamber music” ensemble helmed by Spencer Doran of Visible Cloaks. Situated in a lineage of automated music that traces back to the ancient Greeks, Doran uses the possibilities of digital technology and its ability to automate a huge range of virtual instruments to move beyond human impulses and limitations to allow “new shapes to emerge”. Dedicated also to Noah Creshevsky, pioneer of what can be considered cyber-human music, Componium Ensemble features a wide and intriguing range of instruments including prepared piano, bowed harpsichord, celesta, bass clarinet, flute, cello, bamboo tingklik and more, often in multiple groupings. Despite this variety of instrumentation and the seemingly formidable theoretical underpinnings, the music is very accessible and attractive, spaciousand fresh, with a light touch and a sophisticated melodic sense which will appeal to pop fans as well as classical/contemporary music listeners. The album is mixed by longtime collaborator Joe Williams (Motion Graphics, Lifted) and available in 10-inch vinyl, CD and Digital formats, with EN/JP liner notes by Doran and a hyper-realistic cover by Japanese visual artist/graphic designer Kai Yoshizawa, using 3DCG software. The CD and Digital formats also feature a Carl Stone remix bonus track.

“The history of automated instruments reaches back as far as Archimedes and his "organum hydraulicum”, but it was the Banū Mūsā brothers in 9th-century Baghdad who first perfected the concept of a programmable, automated musician: a mechanically controlled flute which performed using a cistern’s hydraulic water pressure and a system of arrangeable punchcards using a visionary proto-MIDI structure. As European clock-making and mechanical music caught up to the Islamic Golden Age a millennium later, automated instruments intersected with aleatoric composition in Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel’s “self composing” Componium, a mechanical organ with two irregularly-shifting barrels that is said to have been able to arrange upwards of 55 trillion variations of an 80 bar piece divided into alternating 2 bar sections of pins. It is this intersection of chance systems and musical automatons that forms the terrain for the pieces on this release.

These basic principles remain unchanged in the contemporary virtual studio, but the array of automatable instruments within our software systems has widened to a near-unfathomable degree (not to mention the speed and ease in which they can be summoned). Virtual players can be manipulated by far deeper aleatoric processes of note randomization, tempos modulated by the pseudo-naturalistic values of perlin noise, with even the physical properties of instruments erratically contorted and continuously in flux...” - S. Doran (from the album’s liner notes)