Plus-Minus Ensemble - Joanna Bailie: Artificial Environments (2019)

The chamber works on this portrait album, the latest in our Debut Discs series, demonstrate Joanna Bailie’s distinct and powerful skill of mixing field recordings and other found audio material alongside partial transcriptions, which are played simultaneously on acoustic instruments. The effect is otherworldly and immersive.

In the three-part Symphony-Street-Souvenir Bailie pays homage to the Italian composer Aldo Clementi (1925-2011). She borrows and twists one of Clementi’s compositional techniques, and introduces some of his musical obsessions. ‘Symphony’ uses the opening of the C minor symphony of Brahms, one of Clementi’s favourite composers; ‘Street’, a Copenhagen carillon (with accompanying ambient street sounds); and ‘Souvenir’ a music box. Over these a mixed chamber ensemble interweaves subtle layers and slow glissandi. Trains features fragments of music on solo cello over a textural bed of radically slowed down audio material. In Artificial Environments Nos. 1 to 5 you hear the composer’s voice, like a futuristic tour guide in a science fiction world with recorded sounds captured in locations around Europe – the hills of Umbria, Copenhagen, Malmö, London and Brussels and in Artificial Environments No. 8 the solo piano is paired with an urban soundscape, recorded whilst walking up and down a queue of tourists waiting to enter Notre Dame in Paris.

"Much of the greatness of this music lies in the care, indeed the almost tender way in which Bailie treats the sounds, creates musical situations to immerse oneself in, and at the same time establishes a connection to an outer listening space" (Björn Gottstein, SWR)

TRACKLIST

1. Plus-Minus Ensemble;Joanna Bailie;Mira Benjamin;Bridget Carey;Alice Purton;Gwen Reed;Ilze Ikse;Mark Knoop - Symphony-Street-Souvenir: I. Symphony
2. Plus-Minus Ensemble;Joanna Bailie;Mira Benjamin;Bridget Carey;Alice Purton;Gwen Reed;Ilze Ikse;Vicky Wright;Mark Knoop - Symphony-Street-Souvenir: II. Street
3. Plus-Minus Ensemble;Joanna Bailie;Mira Benjamin;Bridget Carey;Alice Purton;Gwen Reed;Ilze Ikse;Vicky Wright - Symphony-Street-Souvenir: III. Souvenir
4. Alice Purton;Joanna Bailie - Trains
5. Plus-Minus Ensemble;Joanna Bailie;Mira Benjamin;Alice Purton;Ilze Ikse;Vicky Wright;Mark Knoop - Artificial Environments Nos. 1 to 5: No. 1, —
6. Plus-Minus Ensemble;Joanna Bailie;Mira Benjamin;Bridget Carey;Alice Purton;Ilze Ikse;Vicky Wright;Mark Knoop - Artificial Environments Nos. 1 to 5: No. 2, —
7. Plus-Minus Ensemble;Joanna Bailie;Mira Benjamin;Alice Purton;Ilze Ikse;Vicky Wright;Mark Knoop - Artificial Environments Nos. 1 to 5: No. 3, —
8. Plus-Minus Ensemble;Joanna Bailie;Bridget Carey;Alice Purton;Ilze Ikse;Vicky Wright;Mark Knoop - Artificial Environments Nos. 1 to 5: No. 4, —
9. Plus-Minus Ensemble;Joanna Bailie;Mira Benjamin;Alice Purton;Ilze Ikse;Vicky Wright;Mark Knoop - Artificial Environments Nos. 1 to 5: No. 5, —
10. Mark Knoop;Joanna Bailie - Artificial Environments No. 8: I. And the Dreams That You Dare to Dream
11. Mark Knoop;Joanna Bailie - Artificial Environments No. 8: II. Babel
12. Mark Knoop;Joanna Bailie - Artificial Environments No. 8: III. Street