Label: Room40 - RM4146

全6楽章からなる流麗なロング・ストリング・インストゥルメント録音!!当店ではオープン当初から諸作を紹介し続けている、80フィート以上の自作ロングストリングスを歩きながら演奏するパフォーマーにして楽器ビルダー、米重鎮コンポーザーのEllen Fullman。工場規模の広大な空間に精密に調律・構成された136本の弦を配置した壮大なインスタレーション作品[Elemental View]。まるで巨大な楽器の中に入り込んだかの様に錯覚する凄まじいリスニング体験が出来る一枚であり、打楽器的な音を出すために特殊な形状の自作弓を使い複数の弦を同時演奏、またギター、サントゥールなどの異なる楽器の導入、アンサンブル形態での録音など、彼女の作風には珍しい音楽的な内容で纏めた傑作盤。エンボス・スリーヴ仕様、インサートカード付き。





Monochrome printed and embossed sleeve in matte laminate plus insert card.

“Elemental View” is a work in six movements by pioneering composer Ellen Fullman for her Long String Instrument and The Living Earth Show. The expansive installation inhabits an industrial sized space with 136 strings, precisely tuned and configured for this multi-movement piece. Listening to the music of Fullman’s singular creation is akin to standing inside a giant musical instrument. The result is a music at once ancient and utterly new, environmental, and folk-like yet orchestral; immersing the listener in a transportive glistening atmosphere.

“Elemental View” invites the listener to discover, as if with a magnifying glass, the details of the physics of string vibration itself. Fullman bows the instrument lengthwise with her fingertips while walking, playing multiple strings at once. As she walks, upper partial tones unfold at different rates, in proportion to differences in string length, imparting an undulating wave of continually shifting overtones. The notation for the Long String Instrument contains both temporal indications and spatial choreography, as specific harmonies emerge at distinct locations along the string length.

Invention and discovery are at the core of Fullman’s work. To produce percussive sounds on the otherwise drone-based instrument, Fullman designed and fabricated the box bow, shovelette, and shoveler, which play three, six, or nine strings at once. Varying techniques with these tools produce either open ringing tones or closed dampened ones. With their laser focused precision and virtuosic ensemble playing, The Living Earth Show brilliantly executes the rhythmic and harmonic complexity of Fullman’s composition.

In the movements “Environmental Memory” and “Concentrated Merry-Go-Round”, Fullman incorporates Travis Andrew’s primary instrument, the guitar. Andy Meyerson and Fullman accompany the guitar in duo playing box bow and shoveler. For “Surface Narrative in Four Parts”, Meyerson also applies his percussion mastery to the santur, a Persian hammered dulcimer. The santur’s unique tuning is derived from the extended microtonal partials of the sequence played by Fullman on The Long String Instrument.

Ellen Fullman: Long String Instrument, box bow, shovelette
Travis Andrews: box bow, shoveler, Hawaiian steel guitar
Andy Meyerson: box bow, shoveler, santur
recording engineer tracks 1, 2, 4: Theresa Wong
recording engineer tracks 3, 5, 6: Ellen Fullman
tracks 1, 2, 5: recorded at Headlands Center for the Arts
tracks 3 and overdubs on 5: recorded at EMPAC, Troy NY
track 6: recorded at Casa Ninja, Berkeley
microphone choice and placement for the LSI: Theresa Wong
mixed by Ellen Fullman and Theresa Wong
pre mastered by Thomas Dimuzio, Gench, San Francisco