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Tech & Techno is the fifth installment in American Composers Orchestra’s series of Orchestra Underground digital releases that reinvent the orchestra with exciting new compositions, eclectic influences, unusual instruments, cutting-edge experiments, and multidisciplinary collaborations.
The music on this album inhabits a musical zone that is part underground dance club, part computer science lab, and part symphony hall. There’s hip-hop, trip-hop, techno, laptops, and a “cyborg” fiddle. Intrepid new music that is never timid—it’s neither afraid to groove, nor afraid to stretch WAY OUT. We hope these genre-bending artistic explorations will have you rethinking what an orchestra can be (and can do) in our evolving streaming/downloadable sound-world.
So put on your dancing shoes, and maybe your thinking cap, too, and enjoy.
available for purchase on iTunes, Amazon and InstantEncore
Edmund Campion: Practice
“Practice does not make perfect, it is a process that generates change; change governed by unseen gravitations and rituals that, in the end, determine form…”
Justin Messina: Abandon
“In the early 1990’s, while American automobile manufacturers were fleeing Detroit, the deserted city saw an electronic music renaissance based in its many underground dance clubs… a new musical language since dubbed ‘Detroit Techno.’ This work is a sort of analog homage… ”
Anna Clyne: Tender Hooks
“Tender Hooks features technologies and instruments created and developed by laptop-artists. The orchestra is a source for live processing incorporating a wide variety of input devices such as microphones, foot pedals, controllers, drawing tablets and one of the earliest electronic instruments, the Theremin.”
Neil Rolnick: iFiddle Concerto
“A concerto for a new kind of instrument, one that combines the computer and violin into a single musical instrument… a cyborg violin.”
Mason Bates: Omnivorous Furniture
“The thumping electronica beats of an underground club—which are other-worldly sounds to some listeners of 200 year-old acoustic instruments—can provide an interesting stasis that an orchestra’s myriad textures can explore.”
Rolnick, Campion, Bates and Messina conducted by Steven Sloane and recorded live on March
18, 2006. Clyne conducted by Jeffrey Milarsky and recorded live on April 27, 2008