“Minimalism” (Used 23 times)

Duane Pitre, performing on the same bill as Master Musicians of Bukkake with Important Records in the courtyard at 2 p.m. this Sunday at ISSUE, tends toward calm and extreme concentration. His electric guitar is usually tuned to some form of just intonation—a tuning schema where all notes are whole-number ratios of some single pitch center—and he often plays it with a bow. This is the case in his newly released album Origin, on Root Strata, featuring an ensemble of bowed and retuned guitars. Pitre also curated an album of works in just intonation called "The Harmonic Series," released on Important Records in 2009.

At its peak, his music is a contiguous mass in which everything is shifting but nothing moves. In fact, it seems that the composer is absent, save for a few notes: a three-sentence score (printed on the album page, and after the jump) provides the underpinnings of an entire work, the rest to come later. But the composer is far from absent in these works. Pitre plays in nearly every performance of his music (as he will on Sunday), usually alternating between Niblockean drones and freely rhythmic figures (as in "Feel Free," at Zebulon in Brooklyn, after the jump).

The piece below, Perfect/Imperfect, is from Pitre's Artist-in-Residency at ISSUE in Spring 2009. Perfect/Imperfect is, on an aural level, a "focus-piece, a concentration-piece, for both performers and audience." In it, the string players each match a computer-generated sine tone—that steadfastly and coldly stable stalwart of computer music—and as the humans' pitches fluctuate a few hertz one way or the other the entire room seems to shift and spin. On a conceptual level, the piece is about the strive for perfection among imperfect beings: whether a computer or human can "do the job better." On a human level, the piece is a welcome respite from the "50+ hours" that Pitre said he spends in front of a computer every week. It's these imperfect, human fluctuations that make the music move.

"Nine days of Winter" is an album of spontaneous, minimalist music for piano. By mid february my piano was to be tuned, and each time that happens I think that is a waste not using that days in which the piano keeps an almost-perfect tuning to record something. As I had no new stuff for piano, I decided to call my friends and fellow musicians from Madrid to meet during 9 days just to play, create spontaneous music and record everything, in order to publish the music later.

Unfortunately, none of my friends could join me for that nine days, so I decided to play and record them myself. The process took place between the 20th and 28th of February, days of cold weather, rain, wind and snow here in Madrid. This album is the result of that nine days of winter, a disc of melancholic, intimate, minimalist music. The songs are all improvised as they were recorded just while the music was being played, directly in first takes. Hope you'll enjoy it.The cover pic is the work of my good friend and best photographer Diego Sevilla.

Last year on a short trip to London, I had the good fortune of catching a gig by the duo Brethren of the Free Spirit, a collaboration between guitarist James Blackshaw and lutenist Jozef Van Wissem. As I listened to the players interact, I remember feeling that the music was somehow modern and ancient at the same time. Shades of art music, classical music, and folk music colored what I heard, but none of those terms adequately described the hypnotic, gauzy yet focused sounds coming from the stage. James Blackshaw's circular guitar playing anchored the duo, but what really got to me was that lute player, whose brightly plucked instrument added something almost spiritual to the music.

That was my introduction to Jozef Van Wissem, the lutenist whose records under his own name are among the most satisfying acoustic records around. His record on Important from last year, It Is All That Is Made, is a sublime piece of work that I can't seem to get tired of. I soon found out that the prolific gentleman has been recording since 2000, and he has made a bunch of records. Listen below to a track from his 2008 album, A priori. It's a beautiful track that captures a lot of what is special about his sound. And, if you like this track, the whole album can be downloaded from the FMA for free here.