Coppice was founded by Noé Cuéllar and Joseph Kramer in Chicago in 2009, as an inquiry into the capture and generation of music and its relationship to its physical sources.

Its compound studies include Bellows & Electronics (prepared pump organs, shruti boxes, and tape processors) between 2009–2014, and Physical Modeling & Modular Syntheses between 2014–2018; focusing on the interactions between direct and reproduced sound, and the perceptual links between original and emulated sources, respectively.

Its third study in Phonography & Fiction (in progress since 2018) scrutinizes the dynamics between its previous two studies, and their relationship to architecture and time: the acoustic preservation and obsolescence of the Yerkes Observatory’s refractor and reflector telescopes in Williams Bay being the locus of investigation.

With sustained interest in sound’s capacity to cross domains, Coppice crafts pathways between music and technology in a cross-disciplinary language, resulting in work that is an overarching documentation of experimental music in-formation. Operating in cycles of instrument construction and modification, recordings, and live presentations, its productions incorporate sound design, sculpture, installation, software, images, and video.

Pied

Recorded 2011-2012 in Fljótstunga, Iceland and High Concept Laboratories, Chicago. Thank you to Halldór Heiðar Bjarnason & Lilián Pineda.

Since late 2009 we have developed compositions using a modified boombox – a tape loop machine that records and plays back simultaneously. Sounds that enter it are released within seconds, sounding gentle feedback. Our first compositions using this boombox and a shruti box marked the beginnings of our collaboration as Coppice, and a phase of up-close entwinement of both instruments in decidedly quiet gestures. Since then, we have expanded our dynamic palette and range of instrumentation to include more bellowed instruments, custom instruments and other electronic processes.

Last Fall we began imagining what has become Pied, a composition for tape, pump organ and the boombox. Its form contrasts the tapes’ fibrous processing with the more tabular appearances of microtonal pump organ transpositions – performed quietly but loudly amplified to bring out interferences and resonances by means of the original microphone techniques.

On one hand, Pied is a stark display of our sounds as solo artists, but in a borderline duet: five pump organ sections (recorded in Summer 2011 at Fljótstunga, Iceland) alternating with their boombox mediation and trails.

On the other hand, developing this piece at High Concept Laboratories has been a careful and entangled collaborative process, working directly with tape, scoring multiple generations of processing, and using a variety of acoustic resonators for coloration.

Although our compositional ideas may be fixed, the boombox’s response to these ideas is inherently oracular. Sections of Pied switch between several takes of the same content on tape, each sounding completely different from the other. We decided to keep many sonic incidentals and utterances across the many coats of the boombox’s reflections, also as a way to reveal the audible transparencies in the tape that didn’t erase. Towards the end of the piece, a snippet of our piece Seam seeps through the layers (what may perhaps be a recording from a performance in November of last year).

It is in this dendritic way that our work continues to develop, with fractions of past works refracted, and with certain sonic aspects highlighted at the expense of others.

February 2012

Format: C40
Label: Notice Recordings (NTR024)
Artwork: Evan James Lindorff-Ellery
Including: Acoustic Filters, Modified Boombox I
Date: April 2013