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MONEY
$HOT
Released
early this year on my own label, casestudy.
Sold in select shops, including downtown music gallery in
New York City and on
this site.
A Review of Money $hot by Soft Pink Truth
It begins with
physical contact, the gestural immediacy of fluttering plastic,
keening styrofoam, creaking leather. Intimacy amplified into
threat. Hard-panned creaks and scrunches hopscotch across
the stereo-field of the opening track "Cushion / Ejects Bolster"
like some kind of crazed maquiladora. Sound as action.
But just when you've
settled in for a "scuttling improv" ride, you run smack into
a wall of synthesis, huge low end and shivering sine waves
implying contrary geometries, receding planes, recursive staircases
of sound. This double exposure of utterly-controlled, crystalline
synthesis juxtaposed against crinkly, abrupt improvisation
with enough surrealist percussive objects to fill a gallery
full of Joseph Cornell boxes (twigs, latex gloves, tissue
paper, bubble wrap) determines the palette here.
It's an inspired
choice, one that teases the borders between hot and cold,
nearness and distance, matter and motion. I've no idea how
she achieved the sudden-ness and intricacy of "Walks", but
in its rapid transformations it's as if Zeena Parkins is making
musique-concrete in real time. Yes, this music began its life
as a through-composed score to accompany a dance performance.
As a listener who has never seen said performance I can vouch
for the absolute independent vitality of this music.
Jumping high and
free of the "you-had-to-be-there" problem which dogs so many
scores, Money $hot is compelling music in its own right
in the same way that Popul Vuh's, or Artemeyev's, or Takemitsu's
scores are at once responses to visual media and entirely
thrilling on their own. Carving canyons of tambura twang and
breakcore rinseouts (see "Big Kitty", I'm not kidding) with
equal aplomb, Zeena Parkin's Money $hot sees her legendary
improvisatory skills and raises them, manifesting dazzling
compositional range.
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WEIGHTLESS
ANIMALS
Released March 26, 2004 on Annetteworks
A 12" picture disk to accompany the website weightlessanimals.com
created by Kaffe Matthews (London), Mandy McIntosh
(Glasgow) and Zeena Parkins (Calgary/New York) produced
in collaboration with Ham
and Enos, which explores the sonic environments humans
and animals experience through space travel.
The website consists
of interactive sonic space cartoons and the disk is a ninetrack
response in audio working in tandem to speculate upon what
travel in space sounds like.
PHANTOM
ORCHARD
Released
June, 2004 on Mego
Zeena and
Ikue Mori's first duo project, recorded mixed and mastered
by David Kean at the Audities studio in Calgary.
The Audities Foudation generously provided numerous
rare and beautiful keyboards for me to play for these recordings.
Phantom Orchard has been awarded an Honorary Mention for the
Prix Ars Electonica Digital Music category in 2004.
DEVOTION
Released June, 2004 on Table of the Elements
Part of the Lanthanides,
a series of 14 single-sided limited edition LP's pressed on
clear vinyl and silk-screened on the reverse in glow-in-the-dark
ink.
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