Crow Versus Crow is honoured to present 'The Waste Land', the fourth body of sonic exploration from Brutalust, the Huddersfield, West Yorkshire-based duo of Maria Sappho and Colin Frank.
/////////////////We made noise that day, and this was what was most important. Putting forth sound with intermittent interjections. A heap of broken images/////////////////
These seven pieces are composed primarily for piano and percussion, accompanied by musical saw, theremin, synthesizers, and voice, and layered with distortion and live electronic manipulations.
Bricolage, in essence, layers of references to high Modernist poetry, masterful works of contemporary solo piano, and esoteric philosophies, shift within expansive juxtapositions of harsh discordance, delicate contrapuntal melody, structured rhythmic pattern, and open, wild improvisation, to form tactile, textural whorls of episodic flux.
From deconstructing Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya’s '6th Piano Sonata', to mangling doctrines that prize verifiable statements and ego-motivated pleasure, 'The Waste Land' articulates ideas of struggle with saturation, order, and clarity.
/////////////////long after time had ceased to be noticed… we shared what we had found and then lost/////////////////
All music composed and performed by Brutalust.
Colin Frank - Percussion, Electronics.
Maria Sappho - Piano, Saw, Theremin, Synth, Voice, Electronics.
Recorded in Phipps Hall, Huddersfield, in March 2022.
Recorded, Mixed and Mastered by Colin Frank.
Artwork, Layout and Design by Andrew Wild.
Available as 320k MP3 or 24bit FLAC
Tracklisting:
1. Psychological Hedonism - 04:30
2. Hans - 02:31
3. Hauntology - 04:34
4. Verificationism - 04:31
5. Hylozoism - 03:50
6. T.S. - 07:25
7. Galina - 04:44
Maria Sappho (USA) and Colin Frank (CA) are Brutalust, a piano and percussion duo specialising in
contemporary experimental composition and improvisation. Their works include a rendition of Ionesco’s ‘The Lesson’, premiered at the Leeds Sounds Like THIS festival (2020), which used a large, amplified string grid to investigate niche and the degradation of language; ‘The Abusers of Power’, which premiered at the Electric Spring festival (2020) with the Noisebringers and Weston Olencki; and ‘Domains’, published in the MASS issue Inhuman (2020), a posthuman audio-visual trilogy for dance and electronics. They have released three albums since the pandemic, aspects of which have been broadcast on BBC radio 3 (Unclassified, 2021), with their composition ‘Tapestry’ released by verz (2021) and an upcoming single on Accidental’s album Antechamber.
