Sow Your Gold In The White Foliated Earth

Description

Sow Your Gold in the White Foliated Earth first exists as a programmer's fantasy - that of the 2014 edition of the Ultima contemporary music festival in Oslo. The idea was to give the venerable Norwegian experimental electronic musician Helge Sten, aka Deathprod, access to the instruments invented, designed, custom-built, and personalized by avant-garde composer Harry Partch - an orchestra tuned in just intonation, using up to 43 intervals instead of the 12 standard ones of the most common Western tempered scale. An artist with over 30 years of experience and an impeccable reputation that reflects the emotional specificity of his sound, Sten was an intriguing choice for such a project. Although he attended art school, he has little experience with acoustic instruments and cannot read or write musical notation. However, he has been interested in Partch's music, and more generally in raw art, since his adolescence. The piece he created for the project was originally intended to be played only by the Ensemble Musikfabrik from Cologne, for a series of concerts between 2015 and 2018. It was Musikfabrik that undertook to build a complete set of the composer's instruments - the second after the originals built by Partch himself. These virtuoso musicians had to retrain themselves on these unknown and experimental sound sculptures with non-standard tunings. They are the only ones allowed to play these instruments. But on Sow Your Gold, it is not them who play. Sten played the instruments himself during the recording, layered the tracks, and edited them without effects to compose an audio score from which the ensemble could work to interpret the piece. This makes Sow Your Gold an even more unique rarity. If you ask Sten to explain the album's title, he will point you to the text from which he borrowed it - Michael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens from H.M.E. De Jong, a 1969 study of a 1617 book of alchemical emblems - and the remarkable passages dealing with alchemy, chemistry, and agriculture, all processes of transformation. His viewpoint is simple: one must break something down to create something new, a lesson he believes is closely related to his own musical process, especially in this project. Thus, although Sow Your Gold in the White Foliated Earth is a piece written for specific, strangely tuned, extremely rare and unusual instruments, and for a certain orchestral ensemble, Sten has grown fond of the audio score, which he considers to emanate directly from the creative process in its purest and most natural form.