Available through BandCamp
Involution
CD1: Involution 1 (Meta-Slendro) / Involution 2 (Prometheus and Marwa in Centaur) / Involution 3 (Double Hexany)
CD2: Hexany Permutations 1 (Catalog Order) / Hexany Permutations 2 (Sorted Ascending) / Hexany Permutations 3 (Sorted Descending) / Hexany Permutations 4 (Reversed, Sorted Ascending) / Hexany Permutations 5 (Reversed, Sorted Descending) / Hexany Permutations 6 (Reversed Catalog Order)
The following text by Dean Rosenthal, from the liner notes
The work contained on this recording represents Dave Seidel’s second foray into the realm of releasing a full-length recording. But this new milestone was not reached until he had long immersed himself in the experimental scene in NYC in the 1980s and 1990s, working closely with established experimental music pioneers Lois V Vierk and Guy Klucevsek among others. Seidel’s own composing and performing grew, blossoming into live performances in the 2000s and 2010s, allowing further exploration into programming and experimenting with sonority and algorithmic sonification. What we hear on this recording is the care and detail of his passion for these two features of composition and a steady integration of them. This leads us to the two pieces heard here: Involution and Hexany Permutations.
In thinking of sonority, Seidel has spoken of the strong influence of La Monte Young’s use of perfectly-tuned intervals and Young’s ideal of previously unheard sounds, those that may engender new sensations and emotions in the listener. But Seidel also confirms the influence of the work of Alvin Lucier, in particular the Orpheus Variations. For Seidel and his sonorities, he has found little use for the 12-note chromatic tempered system, no doubt the ubiquity of this universal tuning of Western music having too few possibilities for his ear. The question then appears: how does he apply this desire to explore new forms of sonority outside the well-tempered system and, for our purposes, in these pieces?
The first CD in this set presents Seidel’s composition Involution, heard in three sections. The music is presented as an expansion of slowly-changing sonorities that explore the harmonic spaces inherent in certain microtonal tunings and scales, or modes within those tunings. Each section employs a different tuning and a different set of scales or modes and uses a combination of all the different technologies Seidel has been working with over the past several years: Csound, modular synthesizer, and pedals
Hexany Permutations, the music that the second CD of this release contains, hints at the same concerns of sonority heard in Involution but tackles the composing slightly differently, with musical results of differing proportions. In this piece, the structure of the piece plays an equal if not more dominant role than the microtonal sonorities explored.