Ikon and other Early Works
Label: New World Records
Format: CD
Genre: Electronic
In stock
This CD comprises the text-sound works (1974-1980) on which Ingram Marshall concentrated throughout the seventies and falls into two parts: the works from the Fragility Cycles period (Cries Upon the Mountains, SUNG, Sibelius in His Radio Corner, and IKON) and the earlier works (Cortez, Weather Report, and The Emperor’s Birthday).
“Cortez, Weather Report, and The Emperor’s Birthday
form a kind of trilogy representing my work with “text-sound” in the
early seventies. The techniques used to generate musical fabrics and
structures out of spoken text are similar in all three works, but the
source materials are all quite different. I used tape loops to create
repetitive patterns from words or phrases; musical structures were
developed out of the resulting fabric. It is not the original utterance
or sound bit that is the building block, but the whole cloth created
from it.”
SUNG and IKON are both based on poems by Swedish poet
Gunnar Ekelöf. The first piece, referring to the Sung Dynasty, is
scored initially as a solo/duo recitative by painter Jan Håfström and
dancer Margareta Asberg, after which the tape processes multiply their
voices into a ghostly chorus as Marshall’s spectral bass appears with
the English translation, to be in turn transformed into its own small
chorus.
IKON, Marshall’s setting of Ekelöf’s Ayiasma, is a mystical
meditation on an ancient ikon seen in a Greek church. The air of
apocalyptic finality in the text is enhanced by the electronics, with
the pervasive soundscape being that of an entropic cosmic machine.
Marshall again intones the English translation; the incantatory
recitation of the Swedish original is by Ekelöf himself.
“Rop pÃ¥ fjellet (Cries Upon the Mountains) again uses
materials “collected” in Scandinavia, most significantly an ancient
recording of locklåtar and rop from Swedish mountain herdinner
(shepherdesses) traditionally used to call goats and cattle from great
distances, although clearly also cultivated for their own intrinsic,
shrill beauty. The live element is my own voice, a high keening
processed through a tape delay system.”
Sibelius in His Radio Corner was inspired by a photograph of
the Finnish composer during his “forty years of silence,” sitting in an
armchair and listening to his own work being performed on the radio. “In
his old age Sibelius enjoyed pulling in distant broadcasts of his music
off the short-wave. I imagined that with all the static and signal
drift, some of these listening experiences might have been proleptically
like a modern-day electronically processed kurzwellen piece.”
Marshall’s brooding, mysterious sonic landscapes are essential
listening for anyone interested in Minimalism and the musique concrete
tradition in electronic music.
Cat. number: NW 80577
Year: 2000