Arnold Dreyblatt - Turntable History: Spin Ensemble - Cassette

AVAILABLE VIA BANDCAMP

Arnold Dreyblatt's - Turntable History: Spin Ensemble was recorded March 12, 2011 by Ernst Karel at Boston's Goethe Institut. This performance version of the original piece (released on CD as IMPREC323) provides a different perspective on the original composition.

From the original studio version of the piece:

Arnold Dreyblatt (b.1953) is an American composer who has studied with La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros and Alvin Lucier. He is a member of the German Academy of Art. He has released work on labels such as Table of the Elements, Canteloupe, Tzadik, Hat Art and Dexter's Cigar.

Turntable History is a recording of a 40 minute multi-channel sound composition which was conceived as part of an audio-visual installation installed in the circular vaulted brick space of an historical water container in Berlin in 2009. The original sound content is derived from recordings made by Arnold Dreyblatt of a Magnetic Resonance Imagining Scanner ("Siemens Magnetom Symphony Maestro Class") in a radiology practice in Berlin. Dreyblatt was fortunate to gain rare permission to record this device in operation without patients being involved. A technician from Siemens manned the machine especially for these recordings, searching for software settings related to their resulting sonic output rather than for scanning particular body areas. Dreyblatt treated the device as a giant "Tesla coil," in which the alignment and resonances of a powerful magnetic field is gradually altered by rotating radio frequencies. Dreyblatt analysed and deconstructed the original recordings and grouped the audio segments by pitch, rhythm and density. The resulting five-channel composition of harmonically resonating, pulsating signals, sounded within this voluminous reflective space (with long delay times) is wonderfully captured in this recording.