Fragile Pitches 2CD *REDUCED PRICE!* ICR DISTRIBUTION

*REDUCED PRICE!*

Fragile Pitches is a new music composition by Colin Potter and Michael Begg (Human Greed, Fovea Hex) It was originally commissioned by Unique Promotions to be performed in St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, Scotland, as part of the city’s formal New Year Fire & Light celebrations. The event was very sucessful & saw somewhere in the region of 1200 people experience the performance. The juxtaposition of a formal, yet familiar space(thecathedral)with the less familiar musical aspects of electronic sound beds,drones, samples, effects and treated instrumentation created a compelling scene, and provides a long overdue convergence of the avant-garde with the commonplace.The musical arrangement combines electronically generated sounds, treatments & effects with moments of formal melodic composition. PRESS REACTIONS : “Fragile Pitches… attracted huge, appreciative crowds with its thoughtful rhythms of creation, resonance, emergence and dispersal.” Joyce McMillan, Scotsman “Fragile Pitches allowed the sizeable audience to breathe deep on its frosty atmosphere. By far the most radical event to grace this year’s celebrations… In turns eerie, contemplative and majestically other-worldly… magnificently put the avant-garde into a populist arena without ever labouring the point. Here, then, was a real festival for the people. Which, by definition, constitutes something resembling revolution in its most creative form.” Neil Cooper, Glasgow Herald REVIEW FROM VITAL WEEKLY : Two members from Fovea Hex, but also from Nurse With Wound and Monos (Potter) and Human Greed (Begg) were commissioned to perform a work by Unique Events in Edinburgh in December 2009 in the St Giles Cathedral. Both sets of the night are captured on these two discs, whereas on the third disc, a limited CDR (120 copies) there is material that was featured between both and recorded earlier. If you know Potter’s work with Monos, Fovea Hex or solo, then you know what to look for in this collaboration: dark atmospheric music. They use laptops, effects and guitars and create lengthy sets of eerie, flowing music. Slow, minimalist changes of glacier like moving masses. Well over three hours of this kind of music is obviously a long sit through, but this is of course the kind of music that needs its time to develop. Potter and Begg keep the idea of playing in cathedral in mind, by using a bit more of that kind of church organ like sounds. A great work indeed. The bonus disc is the one that seems to have the most silent music of the three, which would be either a good start or good contemplative ending. One could argue, like so many of the current drone works around, that this isn’t much news, but as always Potter is one of the masters of the genre, and this release is easily one of his best. (FdW) From Tokafi : Celebrating a major public new year’s party with a performance “reflecting themes of light, space and fire in sound structures that compliment the experience of being in St Giles’ Cathedral at night” sounds as unlikely as Merzbow outselling Lady Gaga in the billboard top 100 singles charts. And yet, that’s exactly what happened at Hogmanay, a spectacular five-day street-festival featuring music, dance, art, conversation, fireworks and street theatre. The creative minds behind the ambitious event, staged under the name of Fragile Pitches in Edinburgh 2009, were Sound Artists Michael Begg and Colin Potter, known both for their widely respected solo works (with Begg’s mainly published under his Human Greed guise) as well as their collaborative involvement with Clodagh Simond’s Fovea Hex project. In terms of sonics, it is easy to see why the duo’s hallucinatory hypnogogics, drawing (but never merely copying) from genres like drones, dark ambient and micronoise alike, would benefit from the cathedral acoustics of 800-year-old St Giles. At the same time, the challenge lay in establishing a form which could work equally as a tactile environment, which visitors were free to enter and leave at will, as well as an engaging long-form composition, both as a subtle, subcutaneous soundscape and a rich, resonant wall of harmonics. In the end, the gig turned out to be a remarkable success, reaching and exciting an audience far beyond the usual handful of fans usually present at experimental music events. Which is why, in addition to a lot of other fascinating conceptual aspects, Begg regards Fragile Pitches – which has just become available as a magisterial and exquisitely designed 2CD set on Begg’s Omnempathy imprint and Potter’s ICR – not just as an open concept, which can be ported to and performed at various venues – but also as a cultural test case for society about its willingness to take risks and expose a wider audience to a kind of music with the potential of touching them on a deeper lever and changing their lives. The full article, with an interview with Michael Begg about the CD & performance is here : http:///15questions/interview-michael-begg/