Huntress by Joseph Clayton Mills

"The music is stunning.... Fantastic, unusual work." -- Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear

«Huntress» is an experiment in cross-media collaboration between poet Carrie Olivia Adams and musicians Joseph Clayton Mills and Deanna Varagona that reimagines the moon—understood both as a celestial body and a cultural trope—as an elaborate recording device, positing the disc of the lunar surface as a literal and metaphorical site of inscription, projection, and mirroring. Taking the twenty lunar lacus—the “lakes” of the moon—as a formal structuring principle, Adams composed a poem in twenty five-line stanzas. Simultaneously, Mills translated topographical data about the landscape of the moon into a series of pitch relations, durations, and other musical parameters that provided a framework within which Varagona improvised on piano and cello. Varagona’s performances were then augmented with electronics, field recordings, and additional instrumentation—including samples drawn from historical and archival recordings ranging from Dvorak to the moon landings—and were reconfigured and expanded by Mills into a series of pieces that explicitly and implicitly draw on Adams’s text for their imagery and inspiration. In the 50-page <<Huntress>> booklet that accompanied the albums initial release, Adams’s poem was accompanied by a series of found images that provide a supplemental, parallel narrative, referencing both the text and the accompanying music and bridging the gap between the two.

Joseph Clayton Mills Is an artist, composer, and performer working at the intersection of language, composition, and archival practice. He is an active participant in Chicago's improvised and experimental music community, where his collaborators have included Adam Sonderberg and Steven Hess (as Haptic), Michael Vallera (as Maar), Noé Cuéllar, Jason Stein, Michael Pisaro, and Olivia Block.