A Collection of Scores for Dance Works, 2002-2008. "Stephan Moore has spent the last five years touring with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as a core member of their live band, alongside such notables as Christian Wolff, Takehisa Kosugi, David Behrman, John King, and William Winant. At the same time, he has been collaborating with a number of younger choreographers to create sound scores for their performance works. To Build A Field collects the best of these pieces, drawn from six of his commissions by four very different choreographers.
The CD's title refers to Moore's view of his role in these collaborations: designing and executing sonic structures that define the emotional and rhythmic topography of time. Each track negotiates a balance between acoustic sound sources and electronics, live performance and studio composition, and human vs. algorithmic control of sound materials. Time is continually bent into new shapes, challenging the listener, and his collaborators, to think beyond the easy comforts of a regular tempo, and confront rhythm as texture instead of a reliable grid. Brooklyn-based sound artist Stephan Moore's recent musical work centers around the collection and use of real-world sound, the creation and perception of sonic environments, and technological manifestations of improvisation and interactivity. He develops his own performance software and builds point-source loudspeakers for use in his performances and sound installation work.
His current ongoing collaborations include the Xenolinguistics performance project with visionary video artist Diana Reed Slattery, projects with choreographers Yanira Castro and Kimberly Young and performance artist Kyle DeCamp, sound design for the Nerve Tank theater collective, and the performing/recording duo Evidence with sound artist Scott Smallwood. He curates a concert series at the Merce Cunningham Dance Studio called Experiments in the Studio, and co-curates an annual month-long Floating Points festival of performances and sound installations at the ISSUE Project Room in Brooklyn, pairing the permanent sixteen-channel installation of his Hemisphere speakers there with diverse artists."
"As a piece, To Build A Feel treads through a veritable history of late 20th century electronic and experimental genres, both sonic portraiture on display for all to see and a tidy summation of what has gone and what can still be accomplished by determination and no little amount of personal grit. A work such as "Escalation" rewards the listener on more levels than simply the visceral; it is an exercise in transcendent melancholy, eclipsing Master Eno's similarly stoked early ambient trials. And the closing "Dream Tango" even recalls some of the Teutonic pioneers (Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, early Kraftwerk) who share its sparkling trills and delightfully nostalgic tonal bleeps, as Moore and company dance under the Moog-lit night." -Phil Zampino, The Squid's Ear.
Six Track Audio CD - DL39-2009CD
Deep Listening, 2009
