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Harry Bertoia - Hints Of Things To Come - CD

Harry Bertoia - Hints Of Things To Come - CD

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Your purchase directly supports the preservation of Harry Bertoia's musical archive. 

Release date: December 2, 202

Scroll past the Soundcloud link for more info.....

 In 1970 Harry Bertoia had been developing his sonic sculptures for over ten years. He had only been composing/recording for two years and the four long pieces chosen for this CD find him starting to arrive at the sonic forms he had been searching for.

Hints Of Things To Come is one of the most unique and melodic pieces discovered so far in the Bertoia tape archive. In this piece we hear him slowly create and articulate a musical riff.  Bertoia builds this phrase patiently until the composition reaches an intense climax where the riff is played heavily and distinctly.

7 ½ & 7 ½ Combined, another historic standout, is one of the earliest examples of Bertoia overdubbing by playing a tape and then performing along to the playback.

This CD is defined by ambient passages, long drones, gongs that sound like whales, shimmering harmonics and the feeling of an artist searching for sounds deep within his own sonic sculpture.

These are among the best pieces found in the archive so far. 

Bio:

Harry Bertoia first gained some artistic visibility in the early 1940s, then came into prominence with his sculptural, ergonomic chairs, produced by Knoll Furniture beginning in 1952, which quickly became classics of modernist furniture. Inspired by the resonant sounds emanating from metals as he worked them and encouraged by his brother Oreste, whose passion was music, Harry restored a fieldstone "Pennsylvania Dutch" barn as the home for this experiment in sounding sculptures which he had begun in the late 1950s. Bertoia was an obsessive composer and relentless experimenter, often working late into the night and accumulating hundreds of tapes of his best performances; Oreste, too, would explore and record the sculptures' sounds during his annual visits to his brother's home in rural Pennsylvania.

Harry Bertoia's recently dismantled Sonambient barn collection was an attentive listener's paradise full of warm, expressive instruments that were gorgeous visually and audibly. Nothing could prepare you, even on return visits, for the overwhelming experience of entering the spacious wood and plaster interior where gongs, some of them giant, hung among the ranks of standing sculptures of various metals. Over nearly twenty years of adding, culling and rearranging, Bertoia carefully selected nearly 100 harmonious pieces ranging in height from under a foot to more than fifteen feet. He considered this barn a full experience, sights and sounds comprising not a collection of works, but one piece unto itself. It was here, deep in the woods, that his Sonambient recording work took place.

Learning by experimentation was common for Bertoia and he mastered the art of tape recording, turning the Sonambient barn into a sound studio with four overhead microphones hanging from the rafters in a square formation. He would experiment with overdubbing by performing along to previous recordings, sometimes backwards, constantly improving his methods while also honing his performance skills. Bertoia was a careful editor of his own work and only chosen recordings remained, each with a date and carefully considered observations written on a note included with each tape. Through these pieces of paper a the artist's logic can be uncovered, a careful approach to composition, ideas, feelings and forms. The story of Sonambient barn collection will slowly be told through the release of recordings from the archive as well as installations and performances built from Bertoia's own recordings, lectures and a book.

www.Sonambient.com

REVIEWS

Washington Post feature article by Marc Masters

Sonambient interview ~ Fact  

"This is the real deal, pure art in all manifestations, and it's possibly the quintessential collection of ambient music ever made." ~ Fact Magazine

"'When I know a man's sound, that's this man," stated John Coltrane in a 1966 interview. He was speaking of what he called music of the individual, and no better example can be found than sculptor and improviser Harry Bertoia. This massive and expertly documented set encapsulates the work of Bertoia's last 20 years, when he built what he came to call his sonambient sculptures, and there is absolutely no other music like it." ~ Fanfare 

The Complete Sonambient Collection offers deep listening of the highest order. These are sounds which are as worthy of heavy contemplation as any, but they're even better when you just let go and feel them like so much sand between your toes, as an eternal sound for which there can be no words. ~ The Quietus 

 "One hears not just the rumble and reverberation of stroked gongs, struck metal sheets, or colliding rides, but the dimensions of Bertoia's studio. The experience is not merely sensual, but follows hearing and feeling back to the conscious and unconscious sentiments stirred by them." ~ Dusted

"The supremely well-curated and tirelessly hard-working Important Records finally present one of the most important and anticipated editions in their enviably impressive catalogue to date, a staggering, lushly packaged box-set with the complete Sonambient Collection, featuring all 11 Bertoia Sonambient releases newly restored from the original master reels." ~ SoundOhm

Frastuoni  (Italian)

Wall Street Journal

Vogue

Dombus

The National

Curbed

Full Bertoia interview via Archives Of American Art

TL Mag

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