After the small-band versions of Carbon as heard in the eponymous first record, Datacide, and Fractal, the next manifestation was in 1987 in the form of a large ensemble with 13 members: the first concert of Orchestra Carbon. This group premiered the composition Larynx, commissioned by Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival and performed November 13-14, 1987. This cassette recording is of the dress rehearsal on Nov. 13, 1987. While there is some distortion at the outset due to the high input level, overall, the sound quality has surprising depth.

“Larynx” is analogy: the orchestra as throat. It follows as corollary to the throat as orchestra: throat-singing as practiced by the Arctic Inuit and the hoomii singing of Siberia and Mongolia, as well as by related jawharp techniques found throughout the world. The natural overtone series is the melodic core of much of these musics and of much of Larynx. The Fibonacci series was again used to generate tunings, rhythms, and melodic/harmonic material as well as structural proportions while my studies in fractal geometry provided a conceptual framework to hang the sounds and interactions on: an expansion of the techniques used in the Fractal album. I wanted the music to dance on the always-changing boundary between a Cartesian geometry derived from the Fibonacci series and a fractal geometry of turbulence, chaos, and disorder. The explicitly-ordered materials are embedded in a dense flux of multiple processes – layers of micro-melodies and micro-rhythms, active cross-talk between the players. In the five interludes between the six major sections, new landscapes and new processes emerge. The opening and closing use all four drummers while the remaining sections each feature one with the others playing slabs or samples. Each drummer has developed a unique sound and vocabulary; I enjoy the contrast between them as well as their singular understanding of my strategies. This also applies to all of the musicians in Carbon who are given instructions of varying degrees of specificity in the different sections (ranging from exact rhythms, notes, or playing techniques to more general notions of density and texture). The same processing algorithms are mapped into each section, cross-referencing them while yielding radically different sonic results. One is transported (via the interludes) into each section – the terrain is different yet the functional identity of process is the same (an analogy from topology applies: a torus is a torus is a torus). The interludes form a cycle of their own while connecting the cycle of main sections. All string instruments were tuned to the Just ratios of 1/1, 3/2, 8/5, and 5/3. Throughout the piece, string instruments were predominantly played using only open strings or their overtones while brass instruments used open pedal tones of these notes and their overtones. There are, however, a number of places in Larynx, where the players are called upon to use the variety of their own idiosyncratic extended sound-production techniques, well outside any system.

(Notes are excerpted from the E# book IrRational Music.)