[microsound-announce] John Hudak - sotto voce (reissue) | third and final edition on con-v

[conv]

Third and final edition (limited to 60 numbered copies) of 2005 album 'sotto voce' by NYC microsound master John Hudak.

Poised somewhere between mechanical music & chamber pieces (for pizzicato cello), these tracks herald the return of the avantgarde to her original locality: the salon, this heart of 'bourgeois' society. The non-communicative qualities of the modernistic literary avantgarde (of which James Joyce & Gertrude Stein in particular may be considered iconographic), we find here in the sublimated form of tranquil and austere monophonies, the unique character of which - each voice, each work, each individual genius - now comes to reside purely in the abstracted prosody of midi-triggered cello samples. This is altogether an undeniably 'post-modern' take on modernism: the unrelentless and self-consuming presence of the original art of which these pieces are derived (the pieces are taken from the voices of Gertrude Stein and James Joyce reading from their works) has now taken a much more diluted and yet more immanent form: a music which having soaked up all the
 heavy-weighing ambiance of artistic ideals & pretension and, having become satiated, now softly leaks out into the salon as conversation pieces, bringing human life in all its 'ordinariness' (the inverted comma's, being the trade-mark of postmodernity, signifying its own special character) back into the room, and perhaps breathing new life into the idea of the salon.

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