OOR
TAK ENSEMBLE
With works by Tyshawn Sorey, Erin Gee, Natacha Diels, David Bird, Ann Cleare, and Ashkan Behzadi, this visceral collection of works primarily written for the ensemble highlight fierce virtuosity, uncanny blends, and otherworldly timbral landscapes.
Artist: TAK ensemble • Album: Oor • Format: CD | Digital • Release: May 18, 2019 • Label: TAK editions Cat. No. TAKe001 • Label Code: M9-518 • UPC/EAN: 5149709357
• Label + Promotion: Laura@TAKensemble.com •
TRACK LISTING:
Mouthpiece 28 - Erin Gee
Az Hoosh mi.. - Ashkan Behzadi
Series Imposture - David Bird
unable to create an offscreen world (c) - Ann Cleare
Ornations - Tyshawn Sorey
The Colors Don't Match - Natacha Diels
PRESS:
ABOUT TAK
TAK is a quintet that delivers energetic and virtuosic performances of contemporary classical music. The ambitious ensemble “impresses with the organicity of their sound, their dynamism and virtuosity — and, well, just a dash of IDGAF as they slay the thorniest material like it’s nothing” (WQXR, Q2 Music). Dedicated to the commissioning of new works and direct collaboration with composers and other artists, TAK promotes ambitious programming at the highest level, fostering engagement both within the contemporary music community and the artistic community at large. Their debut album Ecstatic Music: TAK plays Taylor Brook was released by New Focus Recordings in September 2016, to critical acclaim; it was featured as Q2 Music’s Album of the Week by WQXR, and was listed in the Top 10 Classical Albums of 2016 by The Boston Globe, which praised the “young, fearless players... fluid grace and confidence.”
Their second album, Sanctuary, with Mario Diaz de Leon, was released on Denovali Records in Sept 2017 and described as “a ritualistic masterwork of modern classical music...with visionary intensity—21st century chamber music that combines crystalline clarity with the disorienting turbulence of a sonic vortex” by WIRE Magazine.
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TAK is:
Laura Cocks, flutes / Carlos Cordeiro, clarinets / Marina Kifferstein, violin / Ellery Trafford, percussion / Charlotte Mundy, voice
Unable to Create and Offscreen World (c) features guest cellist, Meaghan Burke
Artwork by Erika Kari McCarthy: erikakari.com
Recorded by Ryan Streber at Oktaven Audio 2018-2019
Produced by David Bird, Taylor Brook, and Laura Cocks
Mastered by Chris Botta
Album Design by David Bird and Laura Cocks
Ⓟ & © all rights reserved TAK ensemble / TAK editions 2019
MOUTHPIECE 28
It was an absolute pleasure to write this piece for Charlotte Mundy and the TAK ensemble. I am so grateful to them for their huge musicality, and their extremely incisive and energetic interpretation and performance.
In the Mouthpieces series, the voice is used as an instrument of sound production rather than as a vehicle of identity. Linguistic meaning is not the voice’s goal. The construction of the vocal text is often based on linguistic structure—vowel-consonant formation and the principle of the allophone—and is relatively quiet, with a high percentage of breath.
In the Mouthpiece series of works for voice and ensemble, the articulatory possibilities of the mouth are often mapped on the instruments, mirroring and expanding the vocal sounds to form a kind of “super-mouth” that can move beyond the physical limitations of a single vocal tract. Merging the voice with both the instruments and with breath, the sounds repeatedly return to “formlessness” through "a more (or less) pronounced utterance of the mouth." This has been the main idea behind the entire Mouthpiece series, which began in 1999 and consists of more than 30 works for different instrumentations, devoid of semantic text or language. Not pre-meaning, simply never in the direction of meaning.
– Erin Gee
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AZ HOOSH MI..
Az hoosh mi.. written for soprano and violin, is based on a poem with the same name by Reza Baraheni, a prominent contemporary person post-language lyricist.
Composed in 2013, the possibilities of lyrical interaction between voice and violin is the core idea of this piece. The expansion of the musical dimensions of the text, a modern erotic Persian poem, creates a heterophonic relationship between the two voices. The text in Az hoosh mi.. reflects the moment in which the lover faints as he expresses the excitement of seeing his beloved. His sentence “I am fainting” remains incomplete as he physically passes out, and therefore we only hear “Az hoosh mi..”
Az hoosh mi.. explores such ecstasy by elaborating upon the fragile state of this expressive and erotic moment—arching the musical aspect of the text through the duration of the
— Ashkan Behzadi
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SERIES IMPOSTURE
Series Imposture is inspired by the “Rosenhan experiment,” a famous experiment done to test the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. The study was conducted by the psychologist David Rosenhan and published by the Science journal in 1973 under the title “On being sane in insane places.” It involved the use of healthy associates or pseudo-patients who faked auditory hallucinations in an attempt to gain admission to different psychiatric hospitals across the United States. All pseudo-patients involved in the study were admitted to these facilities and diagnosed with mild-to-serious psychiatric disorders. Soon after their admission, the pseudo-patients attempted to make a public “show” of their sanity but were unable to convince their caretakers. All pseudo-patients then were forced to admit to having a mental illness and ingest antipsychotic drugs as a condition of their release. These patients spent an average of 19 days in these institutions, and one patient remained in one for nearly two months.
– David Bird
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UNABLE TO CREATE AN OFFSCREEN WORLD (C)
unable to create an offscreen world (c) is the third piece in a series of three pieces, which explore ideas of wrongness, incompatibility, and inability with ferocious streams of energy, confidence, and hope.
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ORNATIONS
Ornations was written for TAK in the fall of 2014.
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THE COLORS DON’T MATCH
The yellow wire connects to the yellow clip.
The red clip connects to the red button.
The green button connects to the brown lead...
And all chaos ensues in a battle between labels and willpower.