One-Page Score Project: Gwenda Ellwood/Lee Hutzulak

One-Page Score Project w/Vancouver Electronic Ensemble

“Tribe of Humans”
One-Page Score created by Gwenda Ellwood
Music composition and performance by Lee Hutzulak

This special spring edition of Vancouver New Music’s One-Page Score Project invites workshop participants to create their own one-page graphic score, and collaborate with a member of the Vancouver Electronic Ensemble to realize their creation.

Starting on Tuesday, May 19, 2020 we’ll host the live premiere of 2 new scores weekly at noon (PDT) for 4 weeks right here on our YouTube channel. We invite you to join us live, or listen later at your leisure.

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Artist Statement – Gwenda Ellwood
This is a message for the old gods whose names are long forgotten: We suddenly remember we are one people and one planet. If you can help out, now would be good.

Artist Statement – Lee Hutzulak
Distortions of Memory is an epic soundscape commissioned by Vancouver New Music, and written to accompany Gwenda Ellwood’s graphic score Tribe of Humans.

The piece starts with a skipping record played on an old Califone turntable. Fade in a Hallicrafters shortwave radio, cello and a dreamy Prophet 6 synth pad. In field recordings, a stereo pair of microphones capture bicycles whirring along the seawall beside Science World and, later, dramatic impacts inside the long metal tube-slide from the nearby playground. Vocals were recorded on a handheld cassette player while walking through Mt. Pleasant along the Flats behind Emily Carr and beside the train tracks.

The recording process started as a sync’d hardware jam with drum machines and synthesizers. The resulting 12 minute improvisation acted as scaffolding for overdubbing and mixing in more and more sounds. Eventually most of this original beat-driven session was edited out in favour of the free floating soundscape that arose around it. An open autoharp is lightly strummed as the denser section melts away into the ether, before returning to earth for the stunning epilogue.

The music took on its own life as it came together, but when interpreting Tribe of Humans as a graphic score this is how it began:

1: soft floating sounds as if we were a bird flying high above Stanley Park
2: circular forms: drum sounds (kick and toms) a skipping record player, and a field recording of bikes on the sea wall.
3: cello for the black charcoal / dry brush marks: and musique concrete cut up for the scrabbly sketchy pencil lines
4: 3 crosses represented as 3 impact events where the music stops and resets

5: vocals – a msg to the old gods

Sync’d instruments: Korg Volca FM + SQ-1 / Volca Drum / 2 X Moog Mother 32s + Strymon Flint / DSI Tempest + Strymon El Capistan / MFB Tanzbar || Overdubbed instruments: 4/4 Gliga Cello / Sequential Prophet 6 + Strymon Big Sky & run through a Sony TC-570 1/4” Reel to Reel / Elektron Digitakt / Oscar Schmidt OS73C Autoharp || Samples, Field Recordings & SFX: 1450K Califone Turntable + Strauss Waltz / Hallicrafters S-40B SW Radio / Bikes along the sea wall, sky train and Quebec St. traffic / Steam Iron / Clare Hecla open piano harp / Danelectro N-10 Honeytone tinfoil feedback / Olds Trombone gurgling water / Slinky / The Epic Frying Pan / Treeworks Tre 20 Music Tree

http://leisurethief.bandcamp.com/track/distortions-of-memory

Based in Vancouver, LEE HUTZULAK has been writing, recording, releasing music and sound art since 1991. His 2017 album, “Twilight, Sound Mountain” by Dixie’s Death Pool was called “flat-out amazing” by the Georgia Straight. In his home studio he has an arsenal of acoustic, electronic and hand built instruments, tucked away, but never out of reach. Currently, enjoying this new time of self-isolation, he is working madly on a new Leisure Thief album called “Psychology Today”.

Lee’s interest in musique concrète, field recordings, and foley sounds owe as much to his exposure to the movies as they do to music and music history. Check out the almost 500 videos he has uploaded on You Tube, an ongoing documentation of his practice.
http://leisurethief.bandcamp.com/album/psychology-today
http://www.youtube.com/user/leehutzulak