Breath Line by Henry Fraser

Henry Fraser bores into the sound of the double bass to explore the endless patterns of its otherwise hidden contours. The instrument acquires its own dynamic landscape, its own body, and its own mode of perception – opening a space of acute, granular perceptivity in which presumed boundaries are blurred: between center and periphery, sonic and tactile, instrumentalist and instrument, performer and listener.

"When the poet, Charles Olson wrote, “the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE/the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE”, he articulated a balance to be struck in making work, between a discriminating self and a universal rhythm. In conceiving Breath Line, I sought to activate a dialogue between sounding and listening - a process of listening my way into the music. Through several months of recording and listening, a collaborative perspective of sound as embodied emerged, a space within which alternate states of perception might become available - this is the driving force behind Breath Line.
There is a collaborative ethos to this work, running from its initial conception through to the space I hope it offers listeners. I have always been inspired by the work Eliane Radigue and Charles Curtis did together on Radigue’s first instrumental work, Naldjorlak - the way in which the piece developed out of dialogue between the artists as opposed to a fixed score or plan, how systems unique to Curtis’ cello (the wolf tone in particular) were included in that dialogue as a kind of third collaborator, how a glacial sense of musical time can reveal endless patterns. These ideas are central to Breath Line because they showed me the way to make a collaborative solo music, grounded in a dialogue between myself and my double bass. With the help of Ben Greenberg’s brilliant engineering, this recording captures a way of both playing and listening more than a piece of music per se. It has a spaciousness in which lines are blurred between listener and performer, sonic and tactile, instrumentalist and instrument."

- Henry Fraser

Dinzu Artefacts is focused on the contemporary art of sound by musicians interested in experimental practices, modern composition, improvised music, noise and field recordings.

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