A collection of works for voice and electronics performed by Andrea Young

ANDREA YOUNG’S DEBUT ALBUM WILL BE RELEASED SERIALLY ONE TRACK A MONTH THROUGHOUT 2022!

TRACK 5
Müllerian Mimics (2021) 
for voice, electronics and turntables 
Improvisation: Andrea Young and Michael Yr Jeannouxa Day
Performed & Recorded by: Andrea Young and Michael Yr Jeannouxa Day
Mixed and Mastered by: Brendan Byrnes

Andrea Young and Michael Yr Jeannouxa Day met in California 2012. They discovered they were born only hours apart in the latter part of 1978 and that their sonic practices, with voice controlled electronics and prepared turntables, were nearly indistinguishable to their own ears. Improvisations ensued in North America and Europe, and provided the seedlings that expanded into EXO/ENDO. “Müllerian mimicry is a natural phenomenon in which two or more well-defended species, often foul-tasting and that share common predators, have come to mimic each other’s honest warning signals, to their mutual benefit.” (“Müllerian Mimicry”- wikipedia, n.d.)

TRACK 4
Intimacy Alphabet (2020)
for performer and microphone 
Composer: Erin Gee
Performed & recorded by: Andrea Young
Mixed and Mastered by: Brendan Byrnes

Intimacy Alphabet (for performer and microphone) 2020 
Erin Gee: “This is a piece for emotional survival in difficult times. I wrote it in October 2020, during a deep state of mourning for the intangible social connections that were absent not only in my life, but in the lives of others that needed support. The pandemic had me in a state of emergency, and craving repair. Queer studies scholar Eve Sedgewick stated that the reparative is a reconstruction of shattered objects so that they can bring us pleasure, and the reparative’s affect is love. I assembled a score that symbolically shattered music not into notes, gestures, or textures, but into an alphabet of affect and intent, hoping to inspire myself and others to create moments of intimacy, care and repair through microphones and camera.”Each performance of Intimacy Alphabet is organized through psychosomatic “triggers” in the spirit of internet phenomena Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR). Each trigger is its own universe, but there can be some overlaps. Some listeners might recoil in horror from these sounds, but others draw in closer. Under musical aesthetics of affect, the invitation is for one to open up to the performer’s intent to transfer touch and reparative intimacy through sound: the listener’s imagination closes the circle, or not.

Track 3
ThisSoundSilence (2017)
For four amplified voices or multiples thereof
Composer:  Ulrich Krieger
Performed & Recorded by:Andrea Young
Mixed and Mastered by: Brendan Byrnes

ThisSoundSilence is an anarchic canon for whispered, yet forceful noise sounds. By always staying close to the microphone, the pronounced formants and harmonic features overlay and coincide, producing the perception of a time-stretched noise-voice.

Track 2
En Monochrome
Open Score
Composer: André Cormier
Performed & Recorded by:Andrea Young
Mixed and Mastered by: Brendan Byrnes

En Monochrome is based on only one unison pitch but divided into four parts: Intensité follows a dynamic curve, Hauteur follows a three-line staff that ranges from a semitone above and below the chosen pitch, Timbre follows four chosen variations, and Durée follows a re-articulation that ranges from slow to tremolo. The score is also in proportional notation; however, each system has different timings from one to another. Performer(s) must make a choice of durations as indicated, to apply to their individual part; each duration in their chosen line applies to each system respectively of their own individual part.

André Cormier maintains a busy schedule as a composer by fulfilling commissions and presenting work, all in an effort to greater understand what makes sound and silence so irresistible.

TRACK 1
Audible Ecosystemics n.3b (Background Noise Study, in the Vocal Tract) (2005)
For live electronics with performer using microphone and mouth
Composer: Agostino Di Scipio
Performed & recorded by: Andrea Young

Audible Ecosystemics is a series of background noise studies by Agostino Di Scipio, where the notion of an audible ecosystem is achieved through an interaction between the performer, the electronics and the environment.

The performance of the “Background Noise Study, in the Vocal Tract” requires a miniature microphone to be placed within the mouth. Every 20 seconds, the background noise from the inside of the mouth is collected and then amplified into the concert space, which is ultimately returning back into the oral cavity. This feedback loop is accentuated with an intricate graphic score that requires filtering the noise within the oral cavity through formant shifting, as well as adding tiny glottal utterances, teeth clicks, and hyper attention to the involuntary muscular movements inside the mouth. At any point, the oral cavity may collect or create too much sound and the overall sonic ecosystem will fall out of balance. This highly sensitive interaction includes the performer, the space and the audience: the smallest sound may push the system out of balance, yet through withholding input and reducing the sonic input, the system may gradually return to an equilibrium.

“As a phenomenon of human experience, sound is never really object and is always event. We can attend to it as the audible manifestation of relations and interactions in the space-time unity of experience, in the here-and-now. A non-objectifying attitude is at work here, sensitive to the ecology of the living, embodied process that auditory perception is. This is something that the body knows well, but that we have unlearned: sound is difficult to objectify (electronically generated sound is no exception). Sensed in its unfolding in time across the tridimensional space, sound spreads around and within the listening body, as well as across and within the body of the sound source. As it takes place (and that takes time), it also takes on the semantic connotations of the place, an event in and of the environment.” (Agostino Di Scipio, from Contemporary Music Review, 2014)

Echo to the Sense is available from:

TK491 © 2021 Redshift Music

---

Andrea Young is a performer-composer of instrumental and electroacoustic music, working specifically with acoustic, processed and resynthesized voice, as well as a sound-controlling voice enabled through feature extraction and data-driven live electronics. Recent commissions have been for Architek Percussion, Quatuor Bozzini, and Arraymusic and presented by Le Vivier, NO HAY BANDA, The Music Gallery, Arraymusic, Vancouver New Music, Calgary New Works and Innovations en Concert. Her scores, recordings and articles have been published by The Leonardo Music Journal (MIT Press USA), Éditions Musique Sisyphe (Moncton NB, Canada), EXOENDONOISE (Canada/USA), and La Camera Verde (Italy). www.andrea-young.ca/