Dread Sea is a confluence of two streams of electroacoustic music that started to emerge in the fall of 2020 and continued through the spring of 2021. The pieces started as improvisations on an mbira and a tiny accordion, both going through complex systems of electronic treatments. These heavily transformed instruments resisted “playing” in the traditional sense, but contributed their own layers of sonic material: feedback, transpositions, distortions, intentional or accidental patterning. All of the material was played live, improvised in real time, and much of it was recorded on a mono cassette machine through its internal mic, placed a few feet away from my amplifier. The long form emerged gradually, through unexpected linkages discovered through editing, layering and collage.
As I listened back to these multi-layered pieces, I kept thinking about water, especially about traveling on water, like a long day trip on the Amazon River I found myself on in 2006, during which I encountered a heavily drugged juvenile sloth who tried to attack me. It traced a long, slow arc in the air with its claw. A story started to emerge along with the music, a journey from the place in Amazonas where the water of the Rio Negro meets the Rio Branco, to the village in the reeds where I met the sloth, to a frozen lake in Northern Maine some time in the distant past and back. The music doesn’t follow that story so much as it mirrors the process of time and geography flowing together, in waves of rhythm, tone and noise, all interacting and blurring into each other, like bodies of water.
-Ted Reichman
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Ted Reichman was born in Aroostook County, Maine in 1973. He began studying jazz piano at the New England Conservatory Preparatory School in 1987 and went on to study experimental music and ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University with Alvin Lucier, Sumarsam, and his most important early mentor, Anthony Braxton. At Braxton’s urging, Reichman began playing accordion, the instrument that would become the basis of his work in music. After beginning his professional career with Braxton while still a student, Reichman moved to New York City where he worked with a panoply of musical greats in styles ranging from improvised music and jazz to rock and roll and various forms of Jewish music. In addition to his work with Braxton, which includes the first recordings and performances of “Ghost Trance Music,” he is best known for his ten-year-plus tenure with John Hollenbeck’s Claudia Quintet.
He also founded the music series at alt.coffee which would evolve into Tonic, one of the world’s most crucial venues for avant-garde music. He has been on the faculty of the New England Conservatory for over ten years and spent four years as an Assistant Professor of Film Scoring at Berklee. He currently lives outside Boston where he records, produces and mixes albums and composes music for films at his studio Subtext Sound System. His essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books and poetry in the The Brooklyn Rail and other publications.
Side A
Part 1 - Prelude/Sloth Story
Part 2 - Pine Marten
Part 3 - Deep Ankle
Side B
Inner Horizon Parts 1,2,3
Dread Sea's Return
Ted Reichman - accordion, amplified mbira, electronics, prepared piano, synthesizers, tape
Recorded October 2020 - May 2021
Cover Photo by Susie Ibarra
