Photo: © Caroline Forbes

Recorded at Bates Mill, Huddersfield, November 18^th 2011

Recording Notes

This wax cylinder was originally made for Evan Parker’s improvisatory piece Tesserae, devised for the ensemble and directed by him and commissioned by the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2011. It was reproduced from an Edison phonograph to close the ensemble’s 75 minute length performance of Tesserae at the festival that same evening.

Recorded during rehearsal, the musicians formed a moving circle and took it in turns to play their stones into the phonograph’s recording horn. From right to left in the picture are Agustí Fernández (back to the camera); Evan Parker; Paul Lytton; Ikue Mori; Ned Rothenberg; Peter van Bergen; Paul Obermayer; Richard Barrett; Okkjung Lee and Aleks Kolkowski (phonograph). Out of the picture but present in the recording are Philipp Wachsmann; John Russell; Lawrence Casserley; Joel Ryan; Peter Evans; Walter Pratti and Barry Guy.

Evan Parker formed The ElectroAcoustic Ensemble in 1990 as a sextet to explore the possibilities of real-time signal processing in an improvising context. It has since grown to an eighteen piece chamber orchestra consisting of strings, reeds, brass, piano, percussion and live electronics.

Each stage of the evolution of the group has been documented by ECM records working with producer Steve Lake. Their most recent release The Moment’s Energy (ECM 2066) was recorded live at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2007.

evanparker.com