String and Machine at the Project

String and Machine at the Project

New recorded works for stringed instruments were commissioned from Dónal Lunny and Leopold Hurt and then used as source material for 'digital recompositions' by David Donohoe and Eamonn Doyle together and by Stephan Mathieu working alone.


Pictured clockwise are Eamonn Doyle and David Donohoe, Dónal Lunny, Leopold Hurt, and Stephan Mathieu

String Machine is a project that has emerged out of the now dissolved Dublin Electronic Arts Festival (DEAF). Co-ordinators Eamonn Doyle and David Donohoe are electronic musicians but they share a background in guitar playing and Irish traditional music, and have been drawn to explore the relationship between such analogue source material and electronic processes.

The project’s first incarnation, supported by the Arts Council last year, involved the music of Dónal Lunny (Ireland, bouzouki), Wu Fei (China, guzheng), Pierre Bensusan (France, guitar), Lisle Ellis (Canada, double bass) being worked on by Doyle and Donohoe. Extracts of the resulting work will shortly be available online, while the second outing, involving German musicians, is coming together in the form a live performance in October to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Goethe-Institut in Ireland.

New recorded works for stringed instruments were commissioned from Dónal Lunny and Leopold Hurt (zither). These works were then used as the sole source material for ‘digital recompositions’ by David Donohoe and Eamonn Doyle together and by Stephan Mathieu working alone. A key element for Doyle, with whom The Journal of Music spoke, was that all sounds in the recompositions had to be generated exclusively from the stringed instruments using various digital processes. He wanted to encourage exploration of the sounds themselves rather than the kind of layering that can lead to something like ‘techno trad’. This ‘tight parameter’ for the project is Doyle’s and Donohoe’s purism, as electronic composers, and within that context Doyle does not see ‘a huge conflict’ between the two approaches.

The concert, in the Project Arts Centre, Dublin on 28 October, will feature solo performances from each of the artists, as well as live improvised performances of the pairings of Dónal Lunny and Stephan Mathieu, and of Leopold Hurt and Donohoe and Doyle. Doyle is, comfortably, not sure how the live performances will work, and it is important to the experimental nature of the project that there should be no prescribed plan for it. As an example of the exploratory ground being walked, Mathieu requested Lunny to re-record his composition at a much slower speed (see below) so that he could get as much as possible to work with from the source material.

A CD featuring the four prerecorded works will be given out free on admission.

http://www.projectartscentre.ie/programme/whats-on/1438-string-machine-ii

Donal Lunny - Composition for bouzouki [excerpt] by String Machine 2

Stephan Mathieu - Re-composition from bouzouki [excerpt] by String Machine 2

Leopold Hurt - Composition for zither [excerpt] by String Machine 2

David Donohoe & Eamonn Doyle - Re-composition from zither [excerpt] by String Machine 2

Published on 27 September 2011

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