Celebrate with us on Sunday, March 23, 2025 at the Center for New Music in San Francisco.

Sunday, March 23, 2025
7PM
Tickets: $25 general/$20 for members
Center for New Music
55 Taylor St. San Francisco, CA

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2025 is the 10th year of Aerocade Music and the first year as a non-profit record label. Celebrate with us at our Birthday Concert featuring performances by Aerocade Artists Isaac Io Schankler, Nick Norton, Elizabeth Robinson, Alchymie & Gregg Skloff, and Chelsea Hollow & Taylor Chan. Arrive on time for a pre-concert reception catered by local musician and vegan chef, Philip Gelb!

Nick Norton will provide a live spatial mix of his new piece for four harps, recorded by Elizabeth Huston. Soprano Chelsea Hollow and pianist Taylor Chan will perform selections from "Cycles of Resistance," a cathartic and resilient journey through international resistance movements from the last 120 years. Flutist Elizabeth Robinson will perform "Death Whistle" for solo piccolo by Nicole Chamberlain. Isaac Io Schankler will premiere some nascent works for accordion + electronics. Alchymie & Gregg Skloff will present "TRITION: Echoes from the Ice Moon," an improvisational performance weaving deep drone, ambient textures, and ethereal soundscapes to evoke the mysterious beauty of Neptune's largest moon. Through shifting sonic currents, the keyboard and contrabass duo explores Triton's icy geysers, retrograde orbit, and haunting solitude in the vastness of space.

Performers:

ALCHYMIE

Alchymie /aka Jennifer Theuer Růžička/, was created in 2013. Through electronic and acoustic instruments, sound loops, improvisation and field recordings Alchymie spans ambient soundscapes, electronica, new age and drone; painting textural atmospheres of sound for recordings or performances with a conceptual focus. Alchymie explores sound as a way to provide multidimensional well-being, create community, and open discussions about the power of sound in our world today.

Jennifer has been composing and performing professionally for over 30 years. Classically trained in piano performance with an eclectic background in R&B, funk, fusion, rock, jazz, pop, new age, and experimental. Diving into esoteric electronica as a member of the Beta Lyra project, exploring the cosmos by collaborating with experimental drone artist Gregg Skloff, and performing & recording internationally— having toured with Alexander O’Neal, former Paisley Park artist David “T.C.” Ellis, Mallia “The Queen of Funk” Franklin from Parliament-Funkadelic and Parlet; and performances with Czech legends Pavel Bobek, and Karel Šůcha and Laura A Její Tygří(Laura and Her Tigers). Collaborations with Fred Johnson- acclaimed jazz vocalist/author/arts educator and artist-in-residence at the Straz Center for the Performing Arts in Tampa, Fl; The Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Fl for the exhibition Dalí’s Floral Fantasies.

She has taught piano throughout her career both in the USA and Czech Republic to young and old, helping them to discover the joy within music and in learning an instrument.

Jennifer continues to follow Alchymie in music, searching for the beauty that is transformation.

GREGG SKLOFF

Noticing contrabassist Gregg Skloff [he/his] carrying his instrument on a city sidewalk, a passing stranger once asked him, “Classical or jazz?”

Gregg’s reply: “All of the above AND BEYOND!”

This remark, while glib, is quite apt; as his album The Glacial Enclosure (Eiderdown Records, 2016) – along with his other work – can demonstrate, Gregg Skloff manages to combine and transcend many lineages and languages of composition and improvisation.

Gregg’s scope has encompassed various forms and hybrids of rock, folk, jazz, chamber music, noise, sound-object installation, and non-idiomatic improvisation. His solo efforts have largely inhabited the realm of minimal electro-acoustic ambient drone, heard to profound effect on albums such as This Time The Ride Belongs To Us (2014), Mamua Baso Suite (2019), and River Cat Cenotaph (2021).

Based in the Pacific Northwest since 1997, Gregg Skloff has played in ensembles led by Bhob Rainey, John Gruntfest, Urs Leimgruber, Moe! Staiano, Matana Roberts, and Gino Robair, among others. He has been a member of The Naked Future (also featuring bass clarinetist Arrington de Dionyso, pianist Thollem McDonas, and drummer John Niekrasz), whose album Gigantomachia was released by ESP-Disk’ in 2009, and more recently of Humming Amps Trio (led by Kevin Doria of GROWING). From 2011 to 2019, Gregg hosted the “And Otherness” program on Coast Community Radio, where his affinity for innovative, ethereal, and/or outré sounds led writer Robert Ham to describe him as “one of the Oregon coast’s finest supporters of experimental music.”

CHELSEA HOLLOW

Dazzling audiences with her easy coloratura, storytelling, and passionate performances, Chelsea Hollow loves finding new ways of connecting her art to the world around her. She “shows how it’s done” with her “fun and effortless” performances curated to welcome audiences into the intimacy of recital seamlessly weaving together music from all eras and genres. Recent operatic performances include Birds and Balls with Opera Parallèle, Dolores with West Edge Opera, and Albert Herring with Pocket Opera. Known for her “soaring high range” and “stage panache,” favorite traditional roles include Die Königin der Nacht (Die Zauberflöte/Mozart), Zerbinetta (Ariadne auf Naxos/Strauss), Blonde (Die Entführung aus dem Serail/Mozart), Olympia (Les Contes d’Hoffmann/Offenbach), Lakmé (Lakmé/Delibes), and Marie (La Fille du régiment/Donizetti). Concert appearances include Concerto for Two Orchestras (Gubaidulina) with the Berkeley Symphony, Carmina Burana (Orff) and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony with the Golden Gate Symphony Orchestra and Judas Maccabaeus by Handel with the San Francisco City Chorus.

Chelsea Hollow “has rewritten the book on the potential of musical activism” creating art that invites her audiences to think collectively and gain perspective. In 2023, she released her debut album, Cycles of Resistance, including 22 commissions in 8 languages chronicling international stories of human resilience. In recognition of this project, Chelsea presented on a panel hosted by the United Nations’ Office of Human Rights to discuss Art and Activism. Hollow cherishes her mission as an artist to build capacity for empathy, harness a venue for community healing, and amplify marginalized voices.

In addition to her solo work, Hollow createdAllowed to be Loud (2021) for the students of San Francisco Ruth Asawa School of the Arts (RASOTA) Vocal Department, commissioning song repertoire for young voices using texts by Bay Area high school students, The Kids and Art Foundation, and other anonymous community members. Highlights from the 21 commissioned songs include, “Being a Student in 2020” (Emily Shisko), “The Future Holds Water in a Wicker Basket” (Joel Chapman), and “I am Growing” (JooWan Kim). For more information on Chelsea’s work, please visit chelseahollow.com.

TAYLOR CHAN

Taylor Chan learned the art of collaboration—in music and in life—while completing her M.M. in Collaborative Piano at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. There, she is currently a staff accompanist and coach to students in Voice / Opera Studies, and has the pleasure of regularly performing alongside them in musical theater and opera productions. She has also held various administrative positions at SFCM in production-adjacent roles, enjoying projects that involve technical writing, data management, creating efficient systems, and identifying ways to optimize collaborative workflow.

Most recently, her relationship with music has expanded in the direction of pedagogy, as she actualizes her general life-calling of knowledge transmission. She would like to pass on her methodologies of self-led skill acquisition to younger artists’, in order to enable them to transcend the limitations of their personal challenges, to raise their ceilings of self-expression and self-actualization.

In addition, she enjoys analyzing piano technique and articulating principles of its physics and physiology, approaching it as a simultaneously scientific and spiritual study. She wishes to change the culture in which chronic repetitive-stress injuries are a given, yet rarely openly discussed.

Her favorite past performances include: the full-length version premiere of Mortal Lessons (2018), a medical oratorio by Ryan Brown (b. 1979); Meredith Monk’s Ellis Island, with pianist Kate Campbell, in a side-by-side concert between SFCM and San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (2018); Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians at the 2019 Hot Air Music Festival, and Philip Glass’ La Belle et la Bête with Opera Parallelè.

Outside of music, her interests include interpersonal psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, writing, design, visual art, and cats.

NICK NORTON

Nick Norton makes things out of sound. His debut album Music For Sunsets caused electronica.org.uk to proclaim him a composer and sound artist to be reckoned with, and Foxy Digitalis called the album an expensive sonic treat.

Born in Los Angeles, Nick grew up going to shows in the Ventura County punk scene, playing sax in his school’s jazz band, and spending summers on Catalina Island. He went to college at UC San Diego, where he discovered minimalism, noise rock, and avant garde classical music, and graduate school for composition at King’s College, London, and UC Santa Barbara. While earning his PhD Nick assisted electronic music pioneers Clarence Barlow and Curtis Roads with their work and got hooked on using audio technology to make art. During this time he founded and ran the experimental concert series Equal Sound, completing his doctorate with a dissertation titled “Concert Production As Composition.”

After a couple years as an adjunct professor Nick bailed on academia to pay the rent. While picking up recording and live sound gigs to support himself he started learning the ropes of post production. He now hops back and forth between cutting music and sound for film and TV, producing and engineering albums and concerts, and making music with his friends.

Nick has lately been interested in AI tools and ethics, live spatial audio, and field recording. He is very active in his community—he serves on the Emerging Technology Committee of the Motion Picture Editors Guild, regularly produces projects in support of charitable causes, and teaches music production at Santa Monica College. Nick enjoys good company, fantastic meals, political philosophy, travel, sci-fi, nature, board games, Zen Buddhism, and dogs.

ELIZABETH ROBINSON

Flutist and educator Dr. Elizabeth Robinson is an active soloist, orchestral, and chamber performer. Known for her infectious energy and boundless enthusiasm, Dr. Robinson has shared the stage with orchestras and wind ensembles across the country. In addition to her current position as Marvin Maydew piccolo chair of the Topeka Symphony, she has performed regularly with the Colorado MahlerFest orchestra, Heartland Opera, and dozens of other groups.

Her debut album, Aviary, can be found on Aerocade Music. Described as “…worth a listen, and these performers and composers are worth watching” (Flutist Quarterly), Aviary features a collection of Robinson’s audience-friendly commissions for solo flute, piccolo, and flute quartet. Among them is Kim Osberg’s Fowl Play, a piece inspired by the coffee table book Extraordinary Chickens. The album was honored by the American Prize in the chamber music category, as well as the Ernst Bacon American Music category.

Aviary has blossomed what is now Aviary Quartet, a group of professional flutists dedicated to exploring the whimsical side of chamber music. The 2024-25 season will feature choral transcriptions by Dale Trumbore, as well as a whimsical ode to the American hippo bill, Lake Bacon, by Lisa Neher.

Robinson’s most recent project was the creation of the Chamber Winds of South Dakota, a modern-day ode to 18th and 19th century Harmoniemusik which brought musicians from around the Midwest to South Dakota for a weekend of chamber music. The Chamber Winds debut album is anticipated in early 2025.

In an effort to expand the flute repertoire, Robinson co-founded the Flute New Music Consortium (FNMC), and currently serves the organization as Vice President. Since its start in 2013, FNMC has commissioned new works from composers including Zhou Long, Carter Pann, Valerie Coleman, Samuel Zyman, and Reena Esmail.

Robinson coordinates FNMC’s annual composition competition and is proud of collaborations with several of its winning composers. In addition to organizing performances of the works commissioned by FNMC, Dr. Robinson often promotes works from the competition. For her efforts in growing FNMC, Dr. Robinson has been recognized in the National Flute Association’s Flutists’ Quarterly Magazine and by the Atlanta Flute Club Newsletter.

Dr. Robinson was appointed to the faculty at South Dakota State University in 2022.

ISAAC IO SCHANKLER

Isaac Io Schankler (they/them) is a composer, accordionist, and electronic musician interested in how technology complicates the ways we create and consume music. Their music has been described as "beautiful, algorithmic, organic, dystopian" (I Care If You Listen) and “remarkable listening” (Sequenza21). They have collaborated with a variety of musicians and ensembles, including the Ray-Kallay Duo, Friction Quartet, the SPLICE Ensemble, Autoduplicity, Nouveau Classical Project, gnarwhallaby, the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet, Lorelei Ensemble, Juventas New Music Ensemble, Nadia Shpachenko, Scott Worthington, and Meerenai Shim. Additionally, Schankler has written music for acclaimed video games like Ladykiller in a Bind and Analogue: A Hate Story.

Schankler is the artistic director of the concert series People Inside Electronics, and Associate Professor of Music at Cal Poly Pomona.

This article originally appeared in Issue 43:2 (Nov/Dec 2019) of Fanfare Magazine.

Because Patterns • Isaac Schankler • Aerocade 011 (42:11)

Sometimes, not often, a sound just gets you. There is an immediate resonance that impels further listening. Such was the case with the opening of Isaac Schankler’s Because Patterns/Deep State. While the idea of using a prepared piano carries inevitable echoes of John Cage, and indeed there are certain passages that may reference Sonatas and Interludes, Schankler’s world is unique. It’s good to see Aron Kallay there, too, as he pretty much blew Fanfare reviewer Robert Carl’s mind with his disc Beyond Twelve (which included a piece by Schankler that reimagined a Chopin étude, entitled Alien Warp Étude). Schankler’s piece Pheromone was reviewed by myself in Fanfare 40:2. 

The idea of this disc is to explore three ways in three pieces of manipulating patterns. Because Patterns carries with it resonances of Feldman’s Why Patterns. This is rule-generated music in which a system of parameters used on one measure generates the next, a process referred to as cellular automaton. Here, it is mixed with a performance of Deep State for double bass and electronics. Whereas the upper frequencies move swiftly, with clear Minimalist tendencies, the lower stratum seems to reference an eternal. Because Patterns was commissioned by the present performers, the Ray-Kallay duo. The best electronic music shared with the best Minimalist music a sort of emotional cleanliness, and that is precisely what we get here. Even the ruminative, deep moments (both in pitch area and emotional intent) and the ruminative ones pitched high on the spectrum exhibit that cleanliness. In a sense, this changes the way we listen: Instead of a straightforward beauty experienced from music, there is an element here of beauty examined like an object held out at an arm’s reach and then beauty experienced. 

Cellular automaton is a process that, while simple on paper, can generate highly complex results in a number of areas of which music is only one. Although the idea was developed in the 1940s, it was in the 1970s that the idea was brought to popular science via Cambridge mathematician John Horton Conway’s book The Game of Life. Although a seemingly dry mathematical construct, the concept of cellular automaton can be found in nature in sea shells; and a reflection of that beauty is, perhaps, its appearance in music here. 

The performance is wonderful: clean-cut, perfectly calibrated both rhythmically and in the cut-crystal recording. Let that not imply there is no subtlety; the quiet re-emergence of the piano from an atemporal electronic hum later in the piece is beautifully managed. Out of the final droplets of sound emerges a throaty violin note. The piece Mobile I has the electronics reacting to violinist Sakura Tsai’s playing; an ongoing spectral analysis that initially is hardly even felt, only whispered, but becomes more insistent as the piece progresses. The composer, in the liner notes, acknowledges Tsai’s mastery, “improvised and polished at the same time.” 

On a different plane, at least on an immediate level, is Future Feelings for piano, played with real understanding by Nadia Shpachenko. The piece was written at the time of the birth of the composer’s first child, and Schankler wanted to create “a quiet, soothing version of noise music.” So the first part of the piece is actually built around a decidedly Romantic sound world, exuding a sense of nostalgia only underlined by the musical bedfellows on this disc. There is a sense at one point that any rose-tinted spectacles come off in an acknowledgement that a return to that past is impossible. 

Unique and thought-provoking, Schankler’s voice needs to be heard. Often restful and thoughtful and yet often subtly disturbing in its way of destabilizing fields of calm, this music offers myriad ways to reflect on the nature of how one expresses oneself via the medium of sound. And all that in just over 40 minutes. 

Colin Clarke

Many thanks to textura for reviewing Isaac Schankler’s Because Patterns!

“Benefits accrue to composer and performer alike from this presentation of three electroacoustic works by Los Angeles-based Isaac Schankler. Currently Assistant Professor of Music at Cal Poly Pomona, Schankler is a composer, accordionist, and electronic musician whose material is realized exquisitely on the forty-two-minute recording by pianists Aron Kallay and Vicki Ray, double bassist Scott Worthington, violinist Sakura Tsai, and pianist Nadia Shpachenko. The Ray-Kallay Duo appears alongside Worthington on Because Patterns/Deep State, whereas Tsai and Shpachenko present solo performances of Mobile I and Future Feelings, respectively. Describing them as such isn't perhaps entirely accurate, however, when the pieces seem more like collaborations between the performers and electronics. Regardless, the material benefits mightily from the high-level artistry of the musicians, and one's impression of Schankler's composing ability is enhanced in turn by their performances. All five players bring impressive credentials to the project: Shpachenko, for example, is, like Schankler, a Professor of Music at Cal Poly Pomona University, whereas Ray is head of keyboard studies at the California Institute of the Arts.”

Read the rest at textura.org.

The Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review says:

“No person is an island and perhaps every piece of music connects in some way to every other piece of music whether local or world-widely, contemporary to ancient. That may be more to chew off on this rainy morning than I can safely address on the blog, but it explains my feeling listening to Because Patterns (Aerocade Music 011). I get a distinct window on experiencing a piece of today that is electroacoustically enmeshed with what has happened in Electronica and the Post-Progressive in Rock, on one hand, soundscaping ambiance, and the whole spectrum of the Modern Contemporary Classical on the other.”

Read the rest of the review here.

Thank you Grego Applegate Edwards for taking the time to listen to and review Because Patterns!

Many thanks to I Care if You Listen and Nick Stevens for taking the time to review Isaac Schankler’s Because Patterns!

“Because Patterns has it all: killer liner notes, evocative performances from musical dream teams, and balance between coherence and variety. The impeccable recording, engineering, and mixing by Schankler, Vanessa Parr, Ben Phelps, Scott Fraser, Barry Werger, and others certainly help. Four years and eleven records into its existence, Aerocade Music can claim another victory with this release.”

- Nick Stevens, I Care if You Listen

Read the entire review here.

Thank you Paul Muller and Sequenza 21 for reviewing Isaac Schankler’s Because Patterns!

“The entire album is remarkable listening and represents a new benchmark of just how highly evolved the combination of acoustic instruments and electronics have become in the service of musical expression.”

- Paul Muller, Sequenza 21

Read the entire review here.

Equal Sound presents:
Isaac Schankler Album Release & The Furies

April 4, 2019
8:00 pm
Art Share L.A. (801 East 4th Place, Los Angeles, CA 90013)

Equal Sound’s First Thursdays series at Art Share presents an album release concert for Isaac Schankler’s Because Patterns in a performance featuring collaborations with Vicki Ray, Aron Kallay, and Scott Worthington. Intersectional feminist performance art violin duo The Furies join the bill with their project A Cure For Hysteria, featuring the music of Elizabeth A. Baker, Eve Beglarian, Olga Neuwirth, and ThunderCunt.

All attendees will receive a free download of Because Patterns.

Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/isaac-schankler-album-release-with-special-guest-the-furies-tickets-54837916685

Program

OLGANEUWIRTH ad auras...in memorium H.
THUNDERCUNT Incidental Music I
ELIZABETH A.BAKER A Cure For Hysteria
THUNDERCUNT Incidental Music II
EVEBEGLARIAN Well Spent

ISAACSCHANKLER Because Patterns

We welcome Isaac Schankler to the Aerocade Music roster!
Read more about Isaac here.

Isaac Schankler (Photo: Gabriel Harber)

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Meg Wilhoite previewed Isaac’s upcoming album Because Patterns and interviewed them to learn more about the album and their process.

In their aptly-named album Because Patterns, composer Isaac Schankler explores three approaches to creating and manipulating musical patterns, carrying out a full integration of electronic sonic environment, mathematical compositional procedure, and acoustic performance. The overall effect of the title track, “Because Patterns/Deep State,” is that of finespun electronic swells punctuated by the percussive sounds of the piano, performed by the Ray-Kallay Duo, who commissioned the piece. Incorporating a mathematical model called a cellular automaton, the musical patterns begin with a single seed and shift organically according to the rule assigned to it. As the title suggests, there is an element of Deep Listening in this piece—performed by double bassist Scott Worthington—as from minute 17:30 to 20:30 we settle into a sotto voce electronic hum that is present-only, with no sense of past or future. Subtly, quietly the piano returns, a distant echo from earlier in the piece, nestled deep within the electronic texture. 

The electronics and violin in “Mobile I” are interlaced by means of spectral analysis, as the electronic sounds are a reaction to violinist Sakura Tsai’s fragmented statements. The former keen and hum around the latter, creating the sense of a large, open structure in which the violinist is centrally situated. The final minutes of the piece shift to a more active texture, the electronics and violinist merging in polyrhythmic arpeggios. The final track, “Future Feelings,” performed by Nadia Shpachenko, features alternately swirling and languid piano figures overlaid with hissing static and Morse code-like blips panning between the ears. Later on in the piece, the electronics also provide occasional low, reverberant hums. While the piano hints at past styles of lush vibrations, the electronics pull the listener into the noise-filled, pulsating present.

Because Patterns will be released on May 31, 2019. Sign up for our mailing list to be notified when Because Patterns comes out.

Meg: Is Because Patterns a nod to Feldman’s Why Patterns? 

Isaac: It's a nod to the title more than the piece or Feldman's music. I always thought “Why Patterns?” was a strange kind of question, because really patterns justify themselves. We can't help but make sense of the world through patterns, through making connections between disparate things. That's one thing people and machines have in common too, and much of our lives is now mediated by patterns created by algorithms, for better or worse. So for a long time I’ve been interested in what happens when there’s too much or not enough information to truly discern a pattern. What happens when a person or machine starts seeing patterns that aren’t really there? So a lot of the piece Because Patterns/Deep State consists of gestures or motives that are moving either too quickly or too slowly to really get a handle on. So you have to make a decision about what's really important, and maybe in the end it's not the patterns? Maybe it's something else.

Meg: What program(s) do you use to make the electronic tracks? I'm particularly interested in the "ongoing spectral analysis" you mention for Mobile I. 

Isaac: I use a variety of things, but mostly Max/MSP for anything involving live electronics. The "ongoing spectral analysis" in Mobile I is basically a glorified pitch tracker that also detects harmonics, but what I liked about it for that piece is that it was a little unpredictable. It wasn't perfect, so sometimes you'd get the correct pitch, but other times you'd get another pitch that was related. So there were these microdeviations that you could use to create textures. If the pitch tracker worked perfectly the piece wouldn't be nearly as interesting. This is something I worry about actually, if the pitch tracker gets updated the piece might become obsolete. It’s also a tricky thing for the violinist to react to the electronics and remain on track, and I love the way Sakura Tsai plays it on the album, how it manages to feel improvisational and polished at the same time.

Meg: At what part of the compositional process do creating the electronics and writing the instrumental parts first meet? Do you generally start with one or the other, or do you develop the two strands concurrently?

Isaac: I wish it was more tidy, but often it's a kind of back and forth where the electronics will affect the instrumental material and vice versa, so sometimes the process takes a lot longer than I would like. Because Patterns was originally an acoustic prepared piano piece with plinky music box-like material that was composed with the help of some algorithms (specifically cellular automata). It was written for the Ray-Kallay Duo, and it demands a lot of precision and tight coordination from them. Deep State, which was written for Scott Worthington, is almost the opposite. It was originally a somewhat improvisatory piece with low bass drones being frozen and extended by electronics, and Scott provided a ton of valuable input that really shaped the piece. But while those pieces worked great live, they seemed strangely incomplete on a recording. We expect recorded music to saturate the frequency spectrum. Also the pieces seemed to be in dialogue with each other, working out some of the same kinds of ideas but at very different time scales. So I thought it would be fun to mash the pieces together, which made the mixing process vastly more complicated than I anticipated! I added a lot more electronic sounds after the fact, including sampled pianos that would frequently double the recorded pianos, bringing out different aspects of the sound like mechanical key noise, pedal resonance, things like that. For a while I had a lot of inner turmoil about whether or not I was allowed to do this, to ruin the real piano sound with "artificial" samples.

Meg: I'd love to hear more about your compositional process. For instance, in terms of the piano part, “Future Feelings” has a very Romantic vibe in places, particularly in terms of the figuration—how does music of the past inform your process? 

Isaac: That piece in particular is deliberately nostalgic, not just for Romantic era music but also for the time in my life when I was most engaged with that kind of music, i.e. an angsty teenager. At that time I wrote that piece my kid had just been born and it was really surreal to watch him react to music, to essentially discover music, and it brought up a lot of thoughts and feelings about the music that first really moved me. I was also thinking a lot about noise and the soothing effect noise has on babies, and I really wanted to make a quiet, soothing version of noise music. The first part of the piece is based around that, and the Romantic-inflected music gradually emerges from that texture. Nadia Shpachenko, who commissioned and premiered the piece, specializes in this kind of repertoire, and she really makes this part sound incredibly gorgeous. But I'm also suspicious of nostalgia, so there's a moment where that material cracks open, because in the end you can't really go back to that era. I guess it's fueled by a kind of hope and optimism that my kid, and by extension all people younger than me, will go beyond me in ways I can't even imagine. I want to see them break the patterns of the past.

Meg: Earlier you mentioned allowing yourself as a composer to double the pianos in the first track: Over the years as a composer, has there been anything you wish you could go back in time and tell your younger self?

Isaac: Oh geez, so many things! But I think most of all I wish I could tell my younger self to take the advice of my teachers and mentors with a grain of salt, and that it’s okay, even good, to go against their advice sometimes. I realize this is a slightly dangerous thing to say as a teacher myself. But I’ve found that a lot of composers, especially highly successful ones, have never really interrogated their own aesthetics and processes, and assume that they are universal ones. They then try and pass these biases on to students, instead of teaching students to listen to and develop their own instincts. I’m still trying to unlearn a lot of anxieties and hangups I internalized a long time ago, and it’s something that I hope the next generation of composers doesn’t have to deal with.

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Meg Wilhoite (Photo: Katie Muffett)

Meg Wilhoite is a writer, electronic musician, and former professional organist. For over a decade she blogged about the New York City new music scene, in addition to programming concerts and working with various collectives and ensembles. When she's not listening to and writing about new music she likes to program her beloved synthesizer.

Thank you Fanfare Magazine for another review for Meerenai Shim's Pheromone!

This article originally appeared in Issue 40:2 (Nov/Dec 2016) of Fanfare Magazine.

PHEROMONE • Meerenai Shim (fl); 1Jacob Abela (pn) • AEROCADE 001 (44:01)

FIELDSTEEL Fractus III: Aerophoneme. G. C. BROWN Huge Blank Canvas Neck Tattoo. O’HALLORAN 1Pencilled Wings. LAUSTSEN 60.8%. SCHANKLER 1Pheromone. M. J. PAYNE Étude for Contrabass Flute and TI83+ Calculator

This is an all-electroacoustic album. The inspiration was actually the first track, Fractus III: Aerophoneme (2011/12) by Eli Fieldsteel for “flute and live electronic sound”. Replete with extended performance techniques for the soloist and electronic sounds that seem primal in origin (the Supercollider software was used). There is also the feeling of great expanses around the ten-minute mark, while to the present writer at least the subsequent effects around eleven-twelve minutes in seem to evoke some sort of post-nuclear wind. Shim is a superb soloist, her virtuosity seemingly endless.

There is virtually no gap between the end of the Fieldsteel and the wonderfully titled Huge Black Canvas Neck Tattoo by Gregory C. Brown (2014). This piece, for alto flute and digital delay (using Ableton Live software) is, despite the images evoked by its title, much more approachable. Tape loops as used by Stockhausen spring to mind as the lines accrue and begin to interact and co-mingle; the very lowest register of this flute is so resonant it comes across as a bass flute, although only alto flute is credited. The busier sections are remarkably effective, as are the whimsical, flight moments elsewhere. The same software is used in Douglas Lausten’s 60.8% for bass flute and electronics (2014). The title refers to the unemployment rate in Greece and the piece is inspired by the hardship encompassing the Greek nation of late. The ghost of rebetiko music underpins the material, while the Greek flavor is unmistakable.

Elusive and soft textured, Emma O’Halloran’s Pencilled Wings, also of 2014, features pianist Jacob Abela (on a Yamaha concert grand). The soft-grained stereo playback audio file that underpins it all creates this relaxing ambience. The piece from which the album gets its name, Pheromone by Isaac Schankler (2014) is for flute (standard and bass), piano and electronics (MAX/MSP). The piano’s contribution is initially very gentle, and beautifully managed here; the piece gradually slows to a meditative space before inviting in frenzy.

Finally, Matthew Joseph Payne’s Etude for contrabass flute and TI83 Plus graphing calculator. Shim records audio directly from the calculator. There is a quite involved story of how the piece came to be a half-step lower and slower than the original because of a memory leak bus destroyed the original calculator part before the composer recorded it. What we really need to know, of course, is that the piece is phenomenal fun. Brief and to the point, it is also wonderfully unique in feel. Somewhat otherwordly, some might feel; others may find it links to computer game “soundtracks” (if so they could be called in those days) of the 1980s.

Colin Clarke

Another great review for Meerenai Shim's Pheromone!

This article originally appeared in Issue 40:2 (Nov/Dec 2016) of Fanfare Magazine.

PHEROMONE • Meerenai Shim (fl); 1Jacob Abela (pn) • AEROCADE 001 (44:01)

FIELDSTEEL Fractus III: Aerophoneme. G. C. BROWN Huge Blank Canvas Neck Tattoo. O’HALLORAN 1Pencilled Wings. LAUSTSEN 60.8%. SCHANKLER 1Pheromone. M. J. PAYNE Étude for Contrabass Flute and TI83+ Calculator

As is often true of new music in the classical sphere this program is eclectic and owes as much to jazz, folk, and popular music, as it does to any tradition handed down through the concert and recital hall. All pieces are commissions, except the Eli Fieldsteel work, made by San Jose-based flutist Meerenai Shim for this first release on her new indie classical label, Aerocade Music. The music is all electroacoustic, with instruments ranging from the standard C flute to the behemoth contrabass two octaves lower. The electronic accompaniment is provided by a number of sources: fixed media, real-time audio synthesis using SuperCollider, Ableton Live, and Max/MSP, and the output from a Texas Instruments graphing calculator running sequencing software. (Who knew?) To those who do not follow electronic music, this may all sound like gobbledygook. Bottom line is that the electronics provide an orchestral palette of sounds, almost infinitely malleable, and capable of either responding within preset parameters to what the performer is doing, or creating a rich setting to which the performer can respond.

Received concepts of electronic music don’t apply. Expression of human emotions is very much the purpose, and it is in this that Shim, pianist Jacob Abela, and the various composers have excelled. Fieldsteel’s Fractus III: Aerophoneme, whatever the method used to achieve it, is a dramatic unfolding of cooperation, conflict, hope, and eventual dissolution with the electronics as the often menacing rival. Gregory C. Brown’s Huge Blank Canvas Neck Tattoo for alto flute and digital delay reflects on personal setbacks and triumphs in the composer’s life. In it, statements made by the soloist become the background—often enhanced—for future discourse. Emma O’Halloran uses a “tape” track and piano duo to accompany—and sometimes overwhelm—the flute’s fantasy flights in her Pencilled Wings. Douglas Laustsen’s 60.8% for bass flute and electronics ponders the devastating impact of unemployment on the youth of Greece since the imposition of austerity, using, as an inspiration, rebetiko, a once disreputable style of 20th-century Greek urban folk protest music. Schankler’s Pheromone deals, logically enough, with attraction and bonding, and Matthew Joseph Payne’s quirky Etude for contrabass flute and TI83+ calculator is, with its combination of low-res early video-game-like sounds and the mellow contrabass flute, two minutes of unadulterated nerdy delight.

Shim is an amazingly dexterous flutist, and works brilliantly with her electronics and her live keyboard collaborator. The sound is close, in the manner of popular music recordings, but it is appropriate to the music. Notes are minimal and hard to read in the type chosen, but are expanded to usefulness online at meerenai.com/pheromone. One small complaint: If Shim was offering “original cover” LP reissues at a few dollars a disc, I would say nothing about a timing of 44 minutes. But a new mid-price disc that is little more than half-full feels like short measure. Otherwise, that which is offered is wide-ranging in style and timbre, extraordinarily inventive, often wildly entertaining, and not for a minute dull. Pheromone is therefore warmly recommended to anyone who wants to explore some of the more accessible frontiers of new music and the alt.classical fringes of the flute repertoire. Ronald E. Grames