Olivia Block
Musician and electroacoustic composer from Chicago, Illinois using chamber instrumentation, field recordings and digital effects and synthesis. Alongside her audio releases, she produces site-specific installations as well as scores for performance and film.
Musician and electroacoustic composer from Chicago, Illinois using chamber instrumentation, field recordings and digital effects and synthesis. Alongside her audio releases, she produces site-specific installations as well as scores for performance and film.
The Mountains Pass
Black Truffle is pleased to announce The Mountains Pass, a major new work from Olivia Block. A key player in Chicago’s vibrant experimental music scene since the late 1990s, Block has developed an extensive body of work grounded in a personalised, at times emotive approach to the studio-based practices of the musique concrète tradition, while also encompassing improvisation, orchestral pieces, sound installations, and a sustained engagement with the piano. On The Mountains Pass, recorded by Greg…
Innocent Passage In The Territorial Sea
Magisterial, psilocybic stuff from Windy City electro-acoustic explorer Olivia Block, returning to Room40 with a filmic new album inspired by mushy trips during lockdown. "During the lockdown, unable to do anything in the world, I turned inward, adopting a regular practice of listening with intention while on psychedelic mushrooms. The mushrooms helped me to listen somatically, pulling my ears towards low tonal patterns and the warped sounds of a broken Mellotron I had recorded earlier. I starte…
132 Ranks
132 Ranks for Pipe Organ was composed by Olivia Block in 2016-2017, as a commission for LAMPO and The Renaissance Society. Block composed the piece specifically for the enormous Skinner Organ at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel in Chicago. The world premiere was performed by Block on April 21, 2017. The concert, free and open to all ages attracted a large crowd. 132 Ranks was conceived as a hybrid of concert and sound installation. Six speakers were placed throughout the chapel. These speakers played…
Untiled
a new untitled work for piano and organ by the highly-acclaimed Chicago-based composer-performer Olivia Block.“This suite was created over a span of several years. I developed techniques inside piano through rehearsals and performances, sketched the basic ideas out – the motives, physical materials etc, leaving a lot of room for improvisation between the composed bits.”
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Interview with Olivia Block
What is your musical background an…
Dissolution
Glistening Examples present Olivia Block's Dissolution. Olivia Block on the record: "Dissolution is a reflection upon human 'webs of significance', and an investigation into the ways that electronic communications and recording technologies, both past and present, facilitate, complicate and transmute the formation of these webs. Sounds of shortwave radio, municipal broadcast recordings, fragments of found microcassette tapes, tones and instruments dramatize the fragility and failures of co…
Karren
Olivia Block's Karren is a two-movement electroacoustic-orchestral composition. The first movement, Foramen Magnum, is an electroacoustic concrète piece created from heavily processed field recordings taken from orchestral rehearsals and various public locations, including museums and zoos. The second movement, Opening Night, is a layered orchestral score performed by the Chicago Composer's Orchestra, with whom I recorded and worked for several years in order to complete this project. Thematical…
Resolution
Olivia Block makes her label debut, paired with Greg Kelley in his first appearance on Erstwhile since "Forlorn Green", although the overall cast of the session seems more firmly located in her neck of the woods, which is to say very thick and richly layered, possessing a massiveness and spatial volume. She plays a bit of piano here and there (once unfurling a couple of strikingly Tilbury-esque arpeggios, elsewhere within the piano's string-bed) but it's her electronics that predominate, …
Teem
Olivia Block: field recordings, piano, reed organ, editing and mixing. Kyle Bruckmann: oboe, English Horn, suona, accordion, field recordings, editing and mixing. Bruckmann and Block's creative relationship dates back to the recording of Block's 1999 release Pure Gaze, shortly after both artists entered into Chicago's vibrant experimental music community. Their decision to create a collaborative duo ensued, but remained in the realm of good intentions until shortly before Bruckmann's relo…
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This untitled work presents the first digital collection of visual work by the collaborative artists Sandra GIBSON and Luis RECODER, and what may be described as a 'site specific' musical composition by Olivia BLOCK. The footage documents a version of a performance piece that was later presented and experienced as an installation. An earlier, different incarnation of this work was premiered at the Kill Your Timid Notion festival located in Dundee, Scotland, in 2006.' SoSeditions. 'Special note m…
Heave to
'Olivia block's 'Heave To' is her fourth full release under her own name (her first two are on sedimental, the most recent on jason kahn's cut label) and marks both a new maturity in her compositional prowess and also a new confidence. 'Heave To', a composition in three movements, is an investigation into the deep structures of maelstroms. A roiling mixture of crashing waves and wind, jagged strings, clanging metal, complex electronic textures, and clusters of chamber instruments. In our opinion…
Mobius fuse
“Sedimental’s release of the second cd from Chicago based electro-acoustic composer olivia block titled Mobius Fuse. This much anticipated follow up to her critically acclaimed debut Pure Gaze(sed cd028) continues her rich and unique exploration of both acoustic and electronic sounds reaching a depth and level of emotional intensity rarely heard in the field.olivia block is a contemporary composer who combines field recordings, scored segments for acoustic instruments, and electronically generat…
Pure Gaze
“Block is an electro-acoustic and modern instrumental composer whose recorded compositions combine layered, processed wind and string instruments with processed sounds from sections of field recordings she has collected from various natural landscapes. Her performances include minimalistic scored musical sections played live by a quintet accompanied by taped material , often sounds of field recordings, or the same quintet previously recorded and electronically manipulated. block herself “…