“An imaginative and beautiful sonic vision of a truly original composer-musician.”- Salt Peanuts
“Aviva Endean has proven time and time again that she is an expert of the aural adventure.“
–Loud and Quiet
Australian composer and clarinetist Aviva Endean has developed an impressive capacity for creating work that merges intense control (of breath, of instrument, of composition) and a willingness to allow the music to lead. On Moths And Stars, her second solo work, she charts out a sound world that is equal parts timbre and tone, placing sounds relationship to space as a paramount focus for her pieces.- Lawrence English (Room40):
“Rich worlds revealed in slow motion”– Brad Rose (Foxy Digitalis)
“Breathtaking innovation in woodwind technique and sonic vision” – Martin Ng”
“(Aviva’s) expressive spatial variation becomes both polyphonic as well as multiphonic with the use of electronics” (The Wire)
From Aviva Endean: Coming from a background as a performer and clarinet player, the opportunity to record my own music opened up a whole new context to think about music. Sounds are freed from being con-fined to one place, one time, or even one perspective. I wanted the recording to have a right-up-in-your-ear kind of intimacy – so close, that you could hear the beating of a moth’s wing, but I also wanted the listener to experience the expansiveness of the recorded space, like the vast night sky. The microphones became extensions of my instruments, getting right up close to capture the microscopic, creating tones of feedback which captivated me, or zooming out to capture multiple acoustic spaces. My recording and composing process became more intuitive and explorative, another form of play. I could start creating and see where the piece would take me, and notice how new relationships were formed as I folded multiple time/spaces in and over each other. Sometimes I would begin by gleaning sounds from my archives, and listening to how they could be reimagined and transformed alongside the discoveries my microphones and instruments were finding. In ‘Nightwork’ I wanted to find a way to revisit some microtonal humming that I had recorded for a sound design project, and then discovered the Leslie speaker as a way to spin my bass clarinet sound around the microphones, creating bass tones emerging as waves out of the densely layered pitches. Sometimes a new instrumental fascination, such as the e-bows and magnets on ‘Mirror Signals’ or the binaural microphone feedback on ‘Moths & Stars’ would call for me to find further layers of clarinets and field recordings to be woven into their story.
Read this if you would like to hear about the process and inspiration behind each track in more detail.
Recorded and composed by Aviva Endean, on unceded Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Djaara Lands.
Field recording on What Calls in the Quiet made with Justin Marshall. Strands of Same River, Twice recorded by Bob Scott, and Leo Dale.
Mastered by Lawrence English at Negative SpaceThank you to Room40, my friends, family, and community.
This project was supported by The Australia Council for the Arts and the Peggy Glanville-HicksComposers’ House.