Presences: mixed suite for five performers and nine instruments is a multimovement collaborative composition by composer, improviser, and sound installation artist Matthew Goodheart. Working with his Broken Ghost Consort (featuring Georg Wissel on clarinet and George Cremaschi on bass), the group is expanded by noted trombonist Matthias Muche and veteran tubist Melyvn Poore. Goodheart, known for his “reembodied sound” technique of activating musical instruments using surface transducers, brings this technique to the ensemble as a whole, harnessing the player’s instruments with transducers so that they produce electronic sounds as the performers play. The group of musicians is additionally surrounded by four transducer-activated metal percussion instruments, creating an expensive hybrid ensemble that blends performance and sound installation.
The collaborative nature of the work emerges from the compositional design. While Goodheart provided an overall framework, each musician recorded a set of instrumental sounds of their own choice. These sounds were then and manipulated according to the compositional parameters, generating the electronic components to be played back in concert through the attached transducers. The ensemble essentially performs alongside a “ghost” of themselves and the autonomously sounding metal percussion.
Over the course of four movements, this process becomes a multi-leveled platform to explore complex timbres, spatialized sound, instrumental acoustics, interaction, and the nature of time and materiality in sonic creation.
1. Prelude in Disintegrations
2. Interlude
3. Impulse Response Variations
4. Closing Forms
Composer: Matthew Goodheart
Broken Ghost Consort:
Georg Wissel – clarinet
Matthias Muche – trombone
Melvyn Poore – tuba
Matthew Goodheart - piano
George Cremaschi – bass
Produced by Georg Wissel
Recorded June 13, 2019, The Loft, Köln
Recording Engineer: Stefan Deistler
Mixed by - Matthew Goodheart
Mastered by - Jonah Rosenberg at Blooming Lightways
