Assigning different times systems--standard time, decimal and hex time--to different musicians, harpist Rhodri Davies develops an electroacoustic improvisational environment of unusual perception and sensation, performed live in Cardiff in 2018 with Ryoko Akama, Sara Hughes, Sofia Jernberg, Pia Palme, Andre Parkinson, Lucy Railton, Pat Thomas, & Dafne Vicente.
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2020 Country: UK Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold 3 Panels Recorded live at Chapter, in Cardiff, UK, on April 13th, 2018, by Simon Reynell.
"Transversal Time was composed by Rhodri Davies in 2017. For its starting point it assigns different time systems - Standard Time, Decimal Time and Hex Time - to individual musicians. As a composition it encompasses many of those sensations and perceptions of time that are embodied by music. Improvising musicians develop acute sensitivities to body clock, breath, pulses and the silent transformations of time-between-time. So a musician's heightened, fluid time becomes enfolded in this narrative situated within the house of clocks, all of them 'telling' different times.
Also buried under the surface of the piece is Francois Jullien's book, In Praise of Blandness, an exploration of the ancient Chinese value system based on simplicity, extreme subtlety and the paradox of sounds that deepen in the mind of the listener if they are not fully sounded, better still left silent so that they retain something secret and virtual within. "In short," writes Jullien, "they remain heavy with promise."-David Toop
"When human diversities - both physiological and intuitional - merge inside a musical composition, the possibility for a listener to be dealing with temporal parallelism becomes certainty. In that case, it is necessary to manage individual indicators mostly based on breathing, either strictly physical or creatively gestural, sometimes in communion.
People scared by sudden changes of perspective and, in general, deviation from the norm tend to disregard the notion of time. This is typically due to a congenital inability to instantly recognize the composite rhythms and quick twists typical of our existential score, particularly in conditions of solitude. Thanks to the inquisitiveness of Rhodri Davies - a sonic investigator who is equally at ease in quiet and noisy environments - we're now presented with sounds useful to absorb fundamental data for the transmutation of theoretical "shocks" into steady, if ever-changing undercurrents.
The core of the matter lies in the metamorphic qualities of the sources in a simultaneous synthesis, as one absorbs substances as acoustically varied as they are natural in terms of dynamic ebb and flow. The modest virtuosity of the players - listed at the link above - goes far beyond their instrumental and corporeal command. In fact Transversal Time, rather peculiarly, generates feelings of detachment from earthly materiality more often than not. An aggregate of faint disseminations leads to a veritable annihilation of the performers' selves, as the improvised frames succeed according to a logical consequentiality. This wholeness represents the clearest response to the attempt of altering reality into one's liking when facing a diversity not classifiable within the limits of correspondence-course sapience.
As per the introductory notes, "improvising musicians develop acute sensitivities to body clock, breath, pulses and the silent transformations of time-between-time". If there was a need to understand why acquiring essential frequencies by mute listening is preferable to the accumulation of untrustworthy information in a saturated brain, here we have an obvious explanation. This work, conceived in 2017 and recorded a year later, will serve as an example for decades to come while confirming Davies as a musician of rare profundity."-Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes