The Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States: Music from SEAMUS Volume 34

Andrew Burke’s immersive multimedia project, I Wasn’t Thinking, is inspired by guided meditations. It uses fixed-media electronics, projections, and audience cell phones to create a loosely coordinated soundscape. The audience is given a choice of two QR codes to scan, taking them to separate videos, which they begin on cue to play more or less simultaneously. This recording is of a performance with a live audience at the University of Pennsylvania.

In Praise of Shadows is an evocative electroacoustic composition, sharing its name with the revered book by Japanese novelist Jun'ichirō Tanizaki. This piece is a reflection of Kerem Ergener’s lifelong enchantment with shadows. The composer ‘fondly recall[s] moments from [their] youth, lounging on [their] mother's pristine white linen couch, eagerly awaiting the spotlights illuminating her art collection to cast their shape-shifting shadows.’ Tanizaki's masterwork elucidates the Western tendency to flood spaces with light, contrasting it with the nuanced play of dim light and shadows central to Japanese aesthetics. This piece encapsulates the essence of watching the shadows' emergence and disappearance. Listeners are invited to immerse themselves in the ebb and flow of shadows painted by the instrument's luminescence, accentuated by the harmonious interplay of electronic resonances and gentle acoustic murmurs.

Images was conceived by Liann J. Kang as a “sonic cycle” for varied instrumentation and media seeking to convey intangible, abstract ideas as a series of sonic images. The first two pieces of the cycle, Blue Air and Traces, were commissioned by saxophonist Jack Thorpe. The live electronics for both were developed by composer Victor Zheng.

​“When you look in the mirror, what stares back at you?” is the question asked by Mickie Wadsworth’s Mirror, Mirror, a piece that came from a deep place of vulnerability. It is the composer’s hope that as a community we continue to grow, accept, and be open to experiences both within and outside of our own.

Oliver Harlan (who also makes music as iyrliaes) begins xerox In with a fractured, granulated, and relentlessly rhythmic texture that gradually reveals a background harmonic structure which may or may not have been present (but unperceivable) from the beginning. The work climaxes with a dramatic cadence signalling the arrival of a richly contrasting texture and static harmonic world.

Twelve year-old Aleu Botelho and Paul J. Botelho collaborated on the creation of the rain washed away the fear, for two voices and fixed-media. The haunting work features the Botelho’s complementary voices in a contrapuntal texture augmented by extended vocal techniques. Their vocal performance is often mirrored in electronic processing of the voice and explores the dramatic ambiguity of masking the source of what we hear—is it a vocal expression, the result of digital audio processing, or the seamless of one into the other?

– Scott L. Miller