Volume 26 Issue 1 - September 2020

DAVID SUTHERLAND
VIKTOR RICHARDSSON
CEE in the Media Lab at Carnegie Mellon University. Left to right: John
Kameel Farah, David Jaeger, Jim Montgomery, Rose Bolton, Paul
Stillwell. David Sutherland is missing - he took the photo!
performances with exhilarating dynamics that swept between quiet
fields of spatialized chirps and squeaks to tremendous waves of drone
and thrilling thunderous noise. A few days later, when the students
walked onstage with CEE and Pauline, they did so with confidence
and eager excitement. That concert was one of the finest performances
in which Exploded Ensemble had ever participated.”
At that final concert, the two ensembles played together, and
the CEE performed two of its own works, including a homage to
Larry Lake, in which the CEE improvised variations on a signature
Lake gesture. Lake’s Psalm for solo oboe and electronic tracks was
performed by oboist Hanna Senft, a gifted graduate student. And
the impressive undergraduate violist Sara Frankel delivered a brilliant
performance of my Sarabande for viola and live electronics. We
departed Pittsburgh on February 28 feeling gratified that we had left a
positive impression with the students and buoyed with the connection
our music had made. Paul Stillwell said, “The success of our recent
trip to Carnegie Mellon University shows that we are relevant to both
longtime fans of electronic music and younger students of the craft.”
Just a few days after our return to Toronto, we learned that the CEE
was the last foreign group to be allowed to visit the CMU campus,
as international borders began to harden, and then to close. But the
feeling of such a fabulous visit lingered with us, and with it, a sort of
creative momentum. Jim Montgomery wrote in his blog on the CEE
website, “As the reality of social isolation and physical distancing set
in, we decided to try doing some music while maintaining our isolation.
The result: the Pass the Track (PtT) project.”
Building on the buzz – “Pass the Track
John Kameel Farah, who has had a thriving
international solo career, describes what
happened: “I felt unable to make solo music
because of the stress and isolation of the
COVID-19 pandemic, which left me feeling
very little creative inspiration. I thought
maybe the answer would be instead to be
creative in a collaboration, so I asked Paul
Stillwell to send me some electronic sounds
to work with. He sent me a beautiful synth
drone and I added piano over it. Then we
passed it to other members of the CEE
and each added another layer. After that
was done, we had enjoyed it so much that
we thought to do more tracks, but with
each starting with a different person, each
adding in a different sequence. Each got the
chance to be first, last and in the middle.
The biggest challenge,
if you were a
‘starter’ was to try to
leave enough musical
space so that three or
four musicians could
make a meaningful
contribution without
feeling the space
had already been
taken up, or without
the whole thing
Rose Bolton
becoming an overflowing
cacophony.”
Rose Bolton further pointed out that, in the collaborative
method we used, “The process of layering on tracks
revealed that the person who puts down the first track in the
piece, often sets the tone, shape and sound of each movement.
So how each movement sounds, is greatly affected
by the musical sensibility and choices that the first person
has done.”
As accustomed as the CEE members were to collective
composition, this was a fresh approach to collaboration,
born out of the COVID lockdown, and the results were highly satisfying.
It seemed that those few days on the CMU campus, steeped in
intensive interaction with both students and faculty, had energized
the CEE and had the members constantly engaged in demonstrating,
analyzing and explaining how their music works. And it had helped to
refresh the CEE’s own processes with a clarity among the members of
the group, enabling us to immediately jump into the creative opportunity
that the pandemic presented. No click tracks were needed as
the PtT pieces came together – just the free flow of layer after layer of
freshly minted electronic music that blended smoothly and naturally.
David Sutherland wrote, “When the CEE was founded, electronic
music was pretty much confined to electronic music studios in
universities. In 1978 Brian Eno released Music for Airports and called
the music ambient. Today there are thousands of people around the
world who make ambient electronic music and they have no connection
to universities. This expansion of interest in electronic music has
both created a much larger audience than existed in the 1970s and in
some ways made our music less exceptional.
“What surprises and delights me is how well the recordings of
the past stand up in today’s music, and how well we can still play
together. In some of the later tracks, there is some really outstanding
playing that would stand on its own compared to much of the music
produced today. Then you have everyone else adding to the whole and,
where I thought there wasn’t any more room, someone has found just
the right thing. I find that quite remarkable and inspiring.”
There are now six episodes of PtT, pieces that range widely in terms
of style, temperament and duration. Two of the pieces are accompanied
with digital animation, the
skillful work of Paul Stillwell, who
also did the audio mixing. The full set
of six pieces is due for fall release on
the CEE’s Bandcamp page: thecee.
bandcamp.com. People can have
a preview right now, however, on
YouTube at youtu.be/asGiXXoyC1o
(PtT 1) and youtu.be/0D7QPeUcVJ4
(PtT 5).
John Kameel Farah
David Jaeger is a composer,
producer and broadcaster based
in Toronto.
MARC DEGUERRE
28 | September 2020 thewholenote.com