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Cello Games

Friday, April 1st, 2011

cello games

Sit and listen: Classic album Sundays

But this is DJing with a difference. She only plays one album, and you listen to it, from start to finish, without talking.

It’s a fantastic idea and brings up loads of debate about how we listen to music today. As she states: “actively listening to a whole album from beginning to end involves a fair amount of concentration and requires us to set aside some time.”

Taking the time to listen to an album, with no other distractions is an increasingly rare past time but undeniably allows you to hear so much more. Colleen chooses albums that are beautifully recorded and has an audiophile set up so that she can really do the vinyl justice. She’s not just on a mission to promote vinyl but to promote sound quality too – how could we not love her?

Currently taking place at a pub in Islington, the next event is this Sunday, February 13th and the album is Stevie Wonder’s Inner visions.

When you listen to the Ramones first album, you are not listening for transparency and clarity; you’re listening for amphetamine-fuelled rake-thin teenagers playing in a garage band.

In fact that’s the operative word; I like my garage bands to sound like they were recorded in a garage.

Let me explain. I was in Boston performing a concert of solo cello and interactive electronic music back in March 2009, when @bowers Wilkins started following me and we started talking. I remember it well – it was raining, I was jet lagged and drinking coffee in Starbucks on Boylston; it was concert day…

In the months that followed, the tweets turned to coffee and the coffee turned to contracts – it was decided: I would and record an album for the Society of Sound! I was chuffed – being an aspirational audiophile; I was excited to produce something that, by its own commissioning blurb, would have to add to “a unique library of stunningly recorded music”.

Producer and co-composer Milton Mermikides and I set to work as soon as we got back to London – at that time, the only fixed piece was Steve Reich’s mammoth Cello Counterpoint, and the other pieces you will hear on the album were but twinkling sketches in my compositional eye, so there was plenty of work to be done, and not that much time!

Having written, edited and recorded guide tracks for the 6 new pieces, we arrived at Chippenham train station in time to catch dinner and last orders at the local pub.

By this point, a game of Scrabble with breakfast was standard protocol; some members of staff would come and offer me advice, others would simply offer to make the coffee. Being resident at Real World spoils you, and I am slightly apprehensive about going to a non-Scrabble-tolerant studio.

There are a lot of wide influences in the production of this album; the oscillating triplety gated electric cellos at the very start of “-” were initially influenced by Peter Gabriel’s gated guitar used on the Wall-E soundtrack; the high shrieking sounds in “Flight Path” were made by pitch shifting a reversed and pitch shifted pizzicato sample, which was then harmonized. This was all done to sound, bizarrely, like a bit of a Rihanna record that I particularly like.

Take inspiration, if you don’t happen to live in Islington, set up something yourself.

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” Extended Games ” – Avant-garde Cello computer – Patrick Dorobisz Part 2/2 (2009)