Laura Steenberge

*150 copies limited edition* A beautiful edition of only 150 glass mastered CDs in a clear poly sleeve with hand stamped cover and a 22 page full color booklet featuring photos, drawings, and text by Laura Steenberge, with additional text by Michael Winter, Rebecca Lane, and Catherine Lamb.

 

"In medieval chant, music seems to have come from elsewhere.  It is the angels that are singing, they said, like gourds  hung up for purple martins. By the time notation started coming  around, hundreds of chants were already hundreds of years old.  New chants followed in their footsteps, trying to seem unwritten.  In some monasteries, the monks sang for six hours a day. Through  the daily toil of reenacting eternity, subtler shapes become audible.  Sometimes the angels show up when the consonants are taken  away, or some other change is made that renders the language  unintelligible. Swedenborg said there are some angels who speak  with U and O and other angels that speak with E and I, but that in the  center, inmost heaven, language is made of patterns of numbers.  The labor required to hear the angels is mundane and physical.  Singing for hours a day sounds idyllic but also laborious. Singing  for so long in such reverberant spaces, I wonder about the  complexity of harmonics, combination tones or whatever other  sonic artifacts that the monastic singers gained sensitivity to.

In this collection there is a piece for one performer, a piece for two performers, a piece for three performers, and a piece for four performers. But even in the solo it is about relationships, as the two parts are created with the same breath. The demonic energy is in between things, the sounds cast shadows upon each other." - Laura Steenberge