MacLean, Steve - Frog, Bug, Guitar, Computer
SKU
RERSM3
"Steve MacLean has performed with guitars in every conceivable format, from tightly-knit compositions in bands and ensembles to extreme guitar improvisations with heavy processing and computer manipulation. Frog Bug Guitar Computer represents a completely new musical format: a collaboration between acoustic guitar and ensembles of frogs and insects in which the guitar has to adapt to natural forms, while the bugs and frogs adjust to the times and frequencies of the human domain of ‘music’. This is where the computer, with its massive power to analyze, process and recombine materials enters the equation, enabling the insect and batrachian collaborators to be time- and pitch –shifted in order, under rules compatible with human musical discourses, to converse with the guitar. The guitar heard here was played solo, mostly outdoors and in complete solitude, responding only to the static, but constantly shifting, murmurings of the earthly nightscape. Most of the bugs and frogs were recorded separately on different nights. Then, for the next few months, MacLean struggled with the symmetries and time/pitch patterns of his virtual natural collaborators, which, although they retain their exact real world time relations, now also acquire substitute instrumental qualities, suggesting pitches and patterns assigned to drums, bass and guitar; sometimes being translated directly into the pitches and rhythms played by other instruments. Together these pieces explore the similarities and differences between the three compositional elements: frogs, bugs and guitar. Is there a universal language or have we invented the one we inhabit? There has never been a record like this for the simple reason that, until very recently, such complex calculation and reintegration was technically impossible; so this CD is a first: a meeting of cutting-edge audio-processing, and recording technology, with its diametrical opposite: the natural world of sound, here represented by bugs, frogs and unmediated guitar improvisation captured in situ as it responds subjectively to the moods of the night."