The Squid's Ear Magazine

Block, Olivia

Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea

Block, Olivia: Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea (Room40)

Evoking oceans of sound accompanied by a recurring bass pattern of seven notes leading each of the six compositions in this deep water opus, sound artist Olivia Block uses a vintage Korg synth organ, an Organelle, a Mellotron, tapes & field recordings to create a cohesive work that references the isolation of Anna Kavan's sci-fi novel Ice amidst our own time of pandemic.
 

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product information:

Personnel:



Olivia Block-Korg CX3 organ, Organelle, tapes, field recordings and Mellotron.


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Matte laminate and embossed sleeve, plus a fold out poster featuring visual works from Olivia Block that meditate on these recordings.

UPC: 764227692478

Label: Room40
Catalog ID: RM 4170CD
Squidco Product Code: 31716

Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 2021
Country: Australia
Packaging: Cardboard sleeve, sealed
Recorded in 2021. Mellotron was recorded at Electrical Audio, Chicago, engineered by Greg Norman. Mastering and some mixing by Tomas Korber.

Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

"With Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea, Olivia Block charts out a deepening current of work that condenses her longer form approaches into a series of richly fluid vignettes. Each piece is led by a bass pattern, the same seven notes, which reappear throughout the album in different configurations. The tonal repetition creates an overall sense of reduction and amplification; an extreme realization of focus.

Tracing waves of warped Mellotron melodies and harmonies, the album celebrates an unfolding of the acoustic horizon, and dwells in a perpetual release of revealed frequencies and pulsing of waves which merge together to unite, and then divide, in time. Easily her most articulate and considered work to date, Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea reads as the first chapter in a new book of sound to come.

From Olivia: "During the lockdown, unable to do anything in the world, I turned inward and adopted a regular practice of listening with intention, while on psychedelic mushrooms. The mushrooms helped me to listen somatically, pulling my ears towards low tonal patterns and the warped sounds of a broken Mellotron. I started playing in my studio, creating bass-driven pieces on my vintage Korg synth organ, using a very limited tonal palette.

The pandemic seemed like a strange dream or a surrealistic science fiction story. I re-read the brilliant surrealistic science fiction novel, Ice, by Anna Kavan, which describes a frozen post-apocalypse. Mentally, I connected Kavan's ice-world with the isolation of the lockdown. I approached this album as the soundtrack to this speculative science fiction film. It's an attempt to translate my emotions about this surreal and strange historical moment into sound."-Room40


Matte laminate and embossed sleeve, plus a fold out poster featuring visual works from Olivia Block that meditate on these recordings.

Artist Biographies

"Olivia Block is a media artist and composer. Her body of work includes sound recordings, audio-visual installations, performances, sound design for cinema, and scores for orchestra and chamber music concerts.

Over the last twenty years, Block has pioneered the utilization of audio field recordings and found materials in the realms of music and sound art. She combines field recordings, chamber instruments and electronic textures, resulting in mysterious and vivid electroacoustic sound pieces including Pure Gaze, Mobius Fuse, Karren, and others. Block creates multimedia installations and performances utilizing found sounds from micro cassette tapes, field recordings, video, and curated 35mm slides.

Block's work reflects her interests in site specificity, ethnographic sound, architectural sound, and found/archival materials from the 1950's-1990's. Her work with expanded cinema and film artists has led to interests related to cinema sound, and visual phenomena like shadows and reflections. Block has developed a body of partially-improvised compositions for inside-piano with various materials, including metal pieces and shards of broken glass. Her scores for orchestra and chamber instruments emphasize timbre and dynamics. Her most recent orchestral pieces include portions of "easy listening" inspired music from the 1970's, playing underneath recordings of room ventilation, white noise and commercial spaces like malls. Her solo performances include partially improvised pieces for electronics, amplified objects, and piano, presented in a slow and deliberate gestural style that Steve Smith of the New York Times described recently as having "palpable sensations of volition and emotional involvement."

Block has performed, premiered and exhibited her work throughout Europe, America, and Japan in tours in festivals including Incubate (Tilburg), Festival del Bosque Germinal (Mexico City), Sonic Light (Amsterdam), Kontraste (Krems), Dissonanze (Rome), Archipel (Geneva) Angelica (Bologna), Sunoni per il Popolo (Montreal), and many others. Additionally, she has presented work at the ICA (London), MCA (Chicago), La Biennale di Venezia 52nd International Festival of Contemporary Music, The Kitchen (NYC), ISSUE Project RoomExperimental Intermedia (Brooklyn), and TIFF (Toronto).

She has completed residencies and premiered works at Mills College of Music, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and The Berklee College of Music. Block has presented talks at additional universities in film, music, media arts, and anthropology departments, including Yale University, University of Chicago, and Indiana University.

Block has created sound installations for public sites and exhibition spaces including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, CONTEXT (Miami and NY), Millennium Park (Chicago), the library at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, the Lincoln Conservatory Fern Room (Chicago), and at the "Echoes Through the Mountains" exhibit at the 2006 Winter Olympics (Turin, Italy).

Her 2013 LP/download release, Karren (Sedimental, 2013) was chosen as "Best of 2014″ by The Wire, Pitchfork, and Artforum, among other publications. She was selected as a 2014 "Person of the Year" in the Chicago Reader. Aberration of Light, her latest solo release, is now available on NNA tapes. She recently completed her large-scale multi-speaker sound installation, Sonambient Pavilion, in Chicago's Millennium Park, utilizing sounds from Harry Bertoia's Sonambient sculptures. She is currently working on several projects, including a multi-speaker presentation of her forthcoming release, Dissolution (Glistening Examples), and pieces for piano and organ. Olivia Block is based in Chicago."

-Olivia Block Website (http://www.oliviablock.net/bio-2/)
4/19/2023

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.


Track Listing:



1. Axiolite 05:52

2. Laika 04:38

3. Great Northern, 34428 05:09

4. En Echelon 05:51

5. Through Houses 03:27

6. Rivers in Reverse 10:13

Related Categories of Interest:


Electro-Acoustic
Electroacoustic Composition
Piano & Keyboards
Organized Sound and Sample Based Music
Field Recordings
Solo Artist Recordings
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