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Bottle Music, Vol. 1

by AD/SH: Arthur Durkee & Stuart Hinds

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1.
Bottle Music, part 1 41:20
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2.
Bottle Music, part 2 39:47
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about

Bottle Music may sound chaotic, but in reality it is experimental music: structured improvisation, partly composed, mostly improvised following the structured segment(s). In the legacy of musical experimentation since John Cage, Bottle Music is full of unpredictable sonic invention.

To make Bottle Music happen, the creators, with the help of friends, drank and saved a lot of beer and pop bottles during pre-planning. I normally rode my bike around Ann Arbor, but I got a ride to the station studio to get the circa four dozen bottles there for the evening's performance.

The bottles are played by blowing over the lip to make a sound, like a pan-flute. Bottles were tuned to sets of pitches by the amount of water poured into the bottle. Stuart did a careful job establishing the upper and lower pitches. No set was tuned alike, so that when played together clusters of tones are heard. Pitch sets were intentionally chosen to be non-diatonic tunings, in both narrow and wide spreads, including microtonal scales.

While SH was tuning the bottles, AD wrote out a performance score by hand. This initial composed portion is what you will hear during the first section of Part 1.

The initial composed section was recorded live, and played back at random times during the evening.

After we performed the written score for Bottle Music, we improvised sound gestures and ideas using the tuned bottles, vocal effects, percussion effects on bottles with hands or objects, AD’s collection of flutes and small percussion, the studio piano played as a percussion instrument, sound samples, stairwell percussion, drums and thumb pianos, tape feedback and echo, and more. Anything you can think of! No idea was discarded, free play was the rule.

The live performance feed was continuously recorded on reel tape in the broadcast booth and production rooms—both of which had two reel decks and mix boards—then played back in original and manipulated forms. Gradually over the three hours of performance, sonic textures thickened. The reel tape decks in the production rooms and broadcast booth were used to add effects such as tape-delay echoes, feedback, sound-on-sound recording, and tape-speed manipulations by hand. Thus the original “pure” performance of the Bottle Music score keeps returning, layered into the mix, mutated, reabsorbed.

Further liner notes can be found in the album booklet.

credits

released November 9, 2022

Bottle Music
Volume 1

New Forms in Experimental Music (series)
Vol 4: Bottle Music, Parts 1 & 2

Conceived, Written & Produced by Arthur Durkee & Stuart Hinds
Performed by Stuart Hinds, Arthur Durkee, Mark Murrell, Case Krell,
& friends

Recorded live on-air radio performance
WCBN-FM Ann Arbor
originally broadcast live 11pm–2am, June 5–6, 1984
Engineered by MM, AD, & friends

Remastered 2022 by AD at Dragonsweyr

© 1984, 2022 Arthur Durkee. All Rights Reserved.

Album artwork & design © 2022 by AD.

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Arthur Durkee Ann Arbor, Michigan

Arthur Durkee is a composer & songwriter who records & performs on Chapman Stick, bass, analog modular synths, bamboo & wood flutes, keys, frame drums, and voice. He has won awards for composed, notated music as well as for his recordings, & is a published poet, & designer & illustrator. ... more

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