Crónica is very proud to announce it’s 100th release, Arturas BumÅ¡teinas’s “Gamelan Descending a Staircaseâ€!
Arturas Bumšteinas (aka Refusenik) is a composer of acoustic and electronic music (graduated from the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theater), performer, sound artist, and a founding-member of Quartet Twentytwentyone, the Works & Days, Wolumen and Zarasai ensembles. His various projects and performances were presented in dozens of festivals and art events around Europe and USA. Arturas lives and works between Vilnius and Warsaw. In 2013, Arturas Bumšteinas was awarded the Euroradio Palma Ars Acustica for the best radio-art composition.
The instrumental sound material for Gamelan Descending a Staircase was recorded at the Ethnologisches Museum Dahlem in the summer of 2013, during a research visit there. A large collection of Indonesian Gamelan orchestra instruments was recorded, and later it was composed into a surround-sound composition, premiered in Jauna Muzika festival at the Vilnius Contemporary Art Center, in April 2015. The live version of this piece also involved three improvising trumpetists providing live solo/accompaniment textures for the pre-recorded music.
Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 painting Nude Descending the Staircase No.2 was an inspiration lurking not only behind the title of this composition but also regarding the deconstructed micro-forms and the study of sound structures, progressing as if in slowmotion, and without a clear point of destination… Descending into the unknown territories… The title came in a vision, as a possible sonic event of a instruments of a gamelan orchestra falling down the stairs. A beautiful, unrealistic image. A dream.
Sad Young Man on a Train is composed from sounds recorded entirely on one prepared harpsichord. Preparations as wood, glass, stones, metal objects, kitchenware, toys and electric devices such as e-bows and cappucino mixers were used. All these objects were dangerously applied to the strings of harpsichord and the recording attempted not to reveal their presence, only amplifying the sounds of the harpsichord’s strings and body.
The whole recording session took place after recording another Bumšteinas’s composition Epiloghi. Six Ways of Saying Zangtumbtumb, which was produced by Deutschland Radio Kultur’s Klangkunst and released by Unsounds label in The Neatherlands in 2014.
The composition’s title is borrowed from the 1911-1912 painting of the same name by Marcel Duchamp. The auto-erotic associations provoked by the painting should not be dismissed as an influence for this musical composition.
Gamelan Descending a Staircase is now available from Crónica, Bandcamp and all the best digital and physical goods retailers!
