TTW#79 – Mark Fell featuring Rhodri Davies, Okkyung Lee – A Pattern For Becoming
Cassette only – limited edition of 150 copies.
SOLD OUT AT SOURCE
Tracklisting:
A: A Pattern For Becoming with Rhodri Davies, performed at the Blue Boom, Royal Festival Hall, 22nd January 2015
B: A Pattern For Becoming with Okkyung Lee, performed at the Blue Boom, Royal Festival Hall, 26th March 2015
Collage – D.M. Nagu
“A Pattern For Becoming” is a piece by Mark Fell for seven moving speakers and solo improvising instrumentalist. The piece was first conceived for and performed at Harmonic Series at Southbank Centre, as programmed by Oliver Coates. In this piece each speaker plays a different and entirely static synthetic tone. The speakers are positioned around the audience and, throughout the piece, the direction and position of each speaker is changed, creating a slowly evolving synthetic sound field. For the performances featured on this edition, the speakers were moved by the following performers: Amy Kate Riach, Oliver Coates, Tom Rose, Na’ama Zisser, Rian Treanor, Galya Bisengalieva, Daniel Pioro, Hugh Brunt and Robert Ames. The recording and live sound engineer was Trevor Davison.
Reviews
Vital Weekly (NL):
Music by Mark Fell is also not always reviewed – we simply have the wrong connections; or at least not the overworld. The last time wasn’t certainly twenty years ago. Fell was a member of the influential duo SND and then went on an interesting career programming software to play some highly rhythmic music and as such he’s quite at the forefront of todays laptop music (I saw a video of a recent concert of his, which sounded great, but looked poorly on the “performance” aspect). Here he has a piece for seven moving speakers; in each of these speakers there is a different, static, synthetic tone. The speakers are around the audience and moved around by performers (which are: Amy Kate Riach, Oliver Coates, Tom Rose, Na’ama Zisser, Rian Treanor, Galya Bisengalieva, Daniel Pioro, Hugh Brunt and Robert Ames). On both sides there is also a credit for Rhodri Davies (side A) and Okkyung Lee (side B), but the information doesn’t reveal what their involvement is. Davies plays harp, and Lee plays cello, and their playing is incorporated in these pieces. I am not sure why that would have been necessary, as the outline of Fell’s idea, speakers moved around through space, sounded interesting enough. I kind of imagined something along the lines of Gordon Monahen’s “Speaker Swinging”, but then perhaps at much slower pace. But now these static tones are pushed away and the soloist is in the middle playing improvised tones. Lee does that in a hectic and nervous way, and doesn’t do much for me, but in the version with Davies we hear a bit more of the static tones, and Davies adds more controlled harp sounds to it, making this quite an intense piece, which works best at a somewhat louder volume. This is something I would have liked to see in concert, to witness myself how it works.
