I have worked with ICE as a sound engineer, and sometimes sound designer, for concerts since around 2005. That year also marked the first time ICE performed my music: a work entitled Echoing Your Voice Just Like the Ringing in my Ears.  (Yes, for any of you 90’s roll playing nerds who were wondering, that is a reference to a Nineinchnails song on Pretty Hate Machine)

I now work with ICE when they are in Chicago, recording their concerts and really trying to document this moment in history, as the group is becoming larger than life in many ways… or at least in the way the are approaching new music.  I recorded a Xenakis concert, and more recently a Sarijaho concert they played at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and got goose bumps during both concerts as the headphones enveloped me in pure sonic expressions straight from the guts of the musicians.  I hope that is not too gross a way to describe it, but that is how it was from a pair of ears placed right at the edge of the stage and many feet up.  Xenakis as absolute bliss instead of an exercise in subdivision.

So, that is how I feel about ICE.  I think they are one of the few groups in existence who can really TOUCH the listener with music that is often interpreted distantly and “objectively” (whatever that means in music).  I am not suggesting they engage in any kind of overt romanticizing of the music, but perhaps that they bring a somewhat Baroque sensibility to it.

ICE has also performed on a few projects I have organized, including GPS-trans, a project conceived by my friend and mentor Marek Choloniewski, and a collaboration with the world-renowned painting duo the Zhou Brohters in 2008 entitled New Music Plus Painting.

This piece is the first in a series of chamber works inspired by and incorporating text by Pablo Neruda.  Neruda has been one of my many mentors despite working in a different medium than I do, and his observations of the physical world using emotion to describe it, or his description of emotion in terms of the physical world around us has inspired certain paths of though and discourse in my music.  ”The Memory of you Emerges from the night around me, the river mingles it’s sad lament with the sea” as he writes at the beginning of his Song of Despair, uses imagery of the river flowing, moving, and becoming lost in the sea to describe a current feeling of loosing the present moment as a memory recalled takes his mind away from that moment to a sad memory.  In “The Great Ocean” as this poem is translated, I feel Neruda uses the ocean to describe an invisible structure that the ocean truly is, not just the water that fills it in or the plants and animals that inhabit it.  This invisible structure or pattern gives us a glimpse of the vibrations that create all matter and energy.  Sound also gives us a glimpse of these vibrations being the only naturally occurring vibrations that we can perceive.  In this piece, I use various delay patterns for each of the 4 instruments to create a “pattern” that is then filled in with the sound of each instrument.  I then use the process of convolution to color pre-recorded text with the sounds the instruments play.  The text is read primarily by my friends Elbio Barillari and and Guillermo Gregorio.  Additional samples were read by Shannon Budd, Claire Chase, and Mary Mazurek-Kahn.