Event

Music for Mycologists: Concert and CD Release

American composer John Cage was an avid mycologist. Cage often quipped that music and mushrooms have nothing to do with one another except for the fact that they appear next to each other in the dictionary. Experimental Music Unit will puts the veracity of this statement to the test with their album Music for Mycologists, a collection of compositions by Paul Walde, Tina Pearson, Czech composer Vaclav Halek and the EMU trio. Music for Mycologists focuses on relationships between music making and mushroom hunting, exposing the sometimes fragile process of discovering sounds of rare and raw beauty that exist just beyond perception.

The recording includes Paul Walde's Interdeterminancy (for John Cage), a set of eight large mushroom spore prints intended as a music notation to be interpreted sonically when exhibited; a collectively created EMU process work called Death in the Experimental Garden; Tina Pearson's Hunt (3), a set of graphic instructions for sonic attention states that reflect her mother's memories of lifelong mushroom hunting; and four compositions by Vaclav Halek, from his large collection of short scores transcribed from sounds he hears directly from mushroom species near his home in Czechoslovakia. Referenced in Hunt (3) is Cage's 4'33", through a mix of field recordings of five outdoor performances of this iconic work during mushroom season.

EMU is a sound ensemble from Victoria British Columbia featuring Tina Pearson (flute, accordion, voice and percussion); George Tzanetakis (clarinets and saxophones) and Paul Walde (bass guitar and percussion). During the past 4 years EMU has developed a reputation for sonic investigations of relationships between the natural world, sound and music, and between notation, improvisation and attention states in music making.