Author Archives: 13thpartial

First in a Series


“Meadows” is the first of a series of electroacoustic music and video compositions intentionally produced for meditative, mindful, and prayerful moments to be experienced through concert or exhibition audiences, small group therapy, educational or corporate climate improvement, or individual personal practice. The series will feature a variety of captured moments from visually compelling scenes composed with minimal sound sets for the purpose of facilitating focus on breath and inward presence within a simple slice of time.


For me, dissonance demonstrates innate resilience. Most people cannot listen to anything discordant. If one looks up definitions for dissonance and discordant, they will find two meanings for each. Both are defined musically as tension, being harsh, or lacking harmony. Unfortunately, these words carry on the same meanings in the context of humanity’s inability to be together in peace and harmony.

Sometimes, whether it be industrial thrash metal or European serialism, listening to harsh music allows me to release my tension by embracing it like a child scribbling finger paint on a wall-sized canvas or thinking like a poet writing in a stream-of-consciousness modality. But music can also be passively dissonant as experienced when listening to very ancient motets composed in the middle ages. There is nothing like a Gesualdo madrigal resolution from a tense harmony melting the soul in your stomach from your auditory command center!

Allow yourself to embrace what you at first may perceive as clashing discordance. Breath with the flow of the voices. Stare into the movement. Become one with the pulse of the wind. Air knows no dissonance.

Tempus fugit

Latin for “time flies,” Tempus fugit is certainly an apropos hook by which to post to one’s website for the first time in nearly two years. It also bears the name for an electronic music composition created about one year ago, originally conceived for a multi-speaker array environment, but is newly released here in the first of a series of remixed and re-imagined electronic and electroacoustic works. Utilizing the fabulous binaural panning capabilities of Logic Pro X, I bring fixed media nuances usually experienced in multi-speaker, 3D, and HDLA performance spaces only to visitors to this site wearing headphones in the comfort of homes, offices, coffee houses, and class labs.

As Spring 2019 marches forward from late winter, works composed during the past five years represent a retrospective celebration of my 2013 graduation with the inaugural class of MFA in Music Composition students at Vermont College of Fine Arts; and this post serves as a dedication to this excellent program and its graduates, students, faculty, and administration. Here first, Tempus fugit, is available in this binaural realm for personal headphone listening.

So get comfortable, dim the lights, close your eyes, and imagine time compressed in space through sound.

“Tempus fugit” is a sonic depiction of its meaning translated from Latin, “time flees” or “time flies.” This text can be found in multiple sources, both secular and sacred, as evidence of humankind’s journey to reconcile the inevitability of death with the meaning of life. Musically, “Tempus” unveils sound masses as points, lines, and planes that disperse throughout space, much like the moments, pathways, and destinies of human beings.

https://soundcloud.com/jason-matthew-malli/tempus-fugit-1b

Prophets, Farfisas, and Dvořák, Oh My!

Sometimes one just needs a fun go-to project, something beneficial personally, but not necessarily Earth-shattering. Something I have been wanting to do for awhile is to re-orchestrate some of my favorite symphonic passages into the fabulous virtual instrument sounds of classic synthesizers like Prophets, Farfisas, Mini Moogs, and even some B3 on the side. So with a little music tech fun, I have started with the gorgeous slow movement from the New World Symphony. So when I need a little sonic therapy, I enter into the swirling realm of Arturia Classic Virtual instruments and just bathe in the sound sculpturing process. There are several other selections that come to mind by Sibelius, Mahler, Adorno, Gesualdo, Bach…. the possibilities are endless and may lead to some moving image scoring examples for my showreel. 27 days until summer!

Concert Announcement

Per aspera ad astra III

for

Tambin, Balafon, Medium Gong, Atoke, Gankogui, and Live Processing

Composed and Performed by Jason Matthew Malli

NYCEMF Concert 20

2017 New York Electroacoustic Music Festival

Abrams Art Center, 466 Grand Street, New York, NY 10002 NYCEMF 

Sunday, June 25, 2017 – 4:00 pm

AudioMulch and NYCEMF 2017

Per aspera ad astra Interation III was accepted into this June’w NYCEMF at Abrams Arts Center in NYC, so I will be performing on tambin, balafon, and medium gong in an AudioMulch live processing environment. The first live performance realization for Per aspera…was during a Winter Residency “Electronic Music Showcase” five year ago.

A year or so and some processing changes later, I recorded a studio performance. In this third iteration, transducers have been added to the setup. I’ll explain this further in the next post – soon!

A December Dawn’s Stream of Musical Consciousness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w743skBk09g

That moment when you simply choose a CD to pop in your van on the way to dropping off your daughters for a bus trip to voice auditions for a New England Music Festival and the sounds you hear pierce your soul with a breathtaking ultra-deja vu-like experience, yet beyond that – an entity’s remembrance of a possible past, if not identically, then at least within a parallel time/space connection to something, someone you once could have been from a long life ago displaced eternally from now and concurrently still to be.
 
That sound connects you to a periphery of beauty, the early December sunrise reflections against the grayness of the year’s passing days, each note a moment, each breath a chance, each gasp a loss of moment, each silence – newness, each cadence, beginnings overcoming death.
 
Although this now moment will fade as the day will be overcome by schedules, chores, and duty (without regrets), a longing for an exorbitant time/space composing only for voices to be performed in a gothic cathedral, natural reverberations bleeding stunning dissonances, some to be resolved – many not – beauty in darkness and hope in light.

Massive Energetic Shift 040916

Pianist Stephen Gosling, Violinist Jennifer Choi, and Cellist Yves Dharamraj performed at the VCFA Composers Concert at St. Peter’s Church, Chelsea, NYC.

A three hour “Massive Energetic Shift” occurred on April 9th, 2016 at 2:00 am EST remotely communicating a message of peace, love, surrender, forgiveness, healing, and powerful vibrations being directly sent to individuals through their energetic field. Large amounts of energy moved through individuals during this time as an amplification system. Anyone in a field of awareness, if surrendered enough and awake while it happened, felt blissful love, peace, and an urge to celebrate. “Massive Energetic Shift 040916 emerged from this experience.

Spatializing the Studio

Summer is here accompanying a plethora of recording projects featuring the scoring of Jochen Kunstler‘s film, Get Your Shit Together, Zeus. As inspiration hits full force, it is critical to have the studio ready for plugging in the laptop and having at it. Balancing creative endeavors such as these along with the Little League All -Star Baseball season, cantoring lessons, yard work, fife and drum corps parades, laundry, mindfulness, cooking – even thinking about thinking about planning teaching for next September . . . – one gets the idea. When there’s a moment of motivation, whether succinct or substantial, that coincides with isolation, it must be conquered as productive. Thus, the can must be ready to collect explosions of ideas, whimsically or deliberately.

A process that has worked very well for me over the years begins with the placement of several microphones around the space at various angles and distances from the performance stool. The mics are of course all different and are tracked individually and in as many as 20 to 30 combinations of stereo or mono with EQ, verb, and other FX ready to automate via nobs and sliders within an arms reach. This flexible set up was developed during preparations for surround sound fixed media compositions like “consubstantial.” Eight mics recording the same sound from eight different angles and eight different settings on the DAW maximizes potential decision making during editing for moving the audio around the performance space. Even works that are eventually rendered for stereo benefit from the timbre modulations resulting from this marriage between instrument and technology.

For these GYSTZ Sessions, I will be overdubbing myself as a virtual reed quartet of A Clarinet, Alto Saxophone, Tenor Saxophone, and Bass Clarinet. I hear this one’semble as a fluctuation of sonorities from church organ to jazziness to cerebral departures from both and everything else. I will also have the percussion ready to pop in at any moment – djembes, balafon, hand drums, rattles, bells, dumbek, to name a few. No doubt, this score will utilize electronic sounds and virtual instruments created in Reason, Reaktor, Ableton, Cubase, Pro Tools, and Logic; but that bank of real instruments will form the foundation and the necessary earthliness I am hearing for this film. The psychology of Crystal, the lead character, demands a complex and developing theme interspersed with pre-recorded Gospel tracks sung by two gentlemen. There are definite dreamscape notions formulating in my mind that may call for two guest singers, young female voices as undulating echoes from these featured guttural Gospel men.

As I embark upon the work, I hear a vastness of music that just may well expand beyond the needs of this film and result in an entity of its own inspired by this cool collaboration born from the VCFA community.