Vessels: Spellbook in the House of Hearts, by Christopher Poovey

Vessels: Spellbook in the House of Hearts

by Christopher Poovey

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	1.	formula for giving away your heart, spell 26 03:30
	2.	formula for protection against songstress snakes, spell 37 03:22
	3.	formula for granting a memory, spell 25 05:20
	4.	formula for taking any form one wishes, spell 76 07:54
	5.	formula for removing blindness from the heart of man, spell 14 04:59
	6.	formula for making the heart joyful, spell 106 05:04

about

Songs from Vessels: Spellbook in the House of Hearts is a
collection of songs from my VR micro-opera cycle Vessels. Each
song is a kind of evocative painting, intertwining technology with
the sensual, the poetic, and the eerie.Spells 37 and 25, depict a
gramophone with a spider at its base and a snake as the speaker.
Interactive electronics reacting to timbre and amplitude
emphasize stark and unsettling sounds from the tenor, stressing
the sinister and foreboding quality of the spider. The snake,
meanwhile, floats ethereally through a dynamic mesh functioning
as reverb and chorus, blurring the lines between the two like
smoke drifting through an empty bar. Spell 76 evokes a pen
cascading a river of ink representing the flow of ideas; granular
sampling pulls ideas from the beginning in a current flowing
through the end, pulling fragmented memories of the
instrumental timbres into the present and stirring them into both
real and synthetic water sounds. This emphasizes the friction of
writing as a creative process that stems the tide of the artist’s
ideas into a crystalline entity- an imperfect and beautiful
distillation represented by the frozen timbres of the voice, flute,
and viola. Spell 14 is a look into a mutoscope, a machine playing
a short, “scandalous” film that frames a dancing woman as an
object of desire. This song frees the woman, contrasting the
mechanical and cold nature of the mutoscope with the woman’s
own desire and longing for something real.

credits

released January 6, 2023

All music by Christopher Poovey
christopherpoovey.com

Libretto by Bea Goodwin
beagoodwin.com

Libretto: Bea Goodwin
Soprano: Júlia Coelho
Tenor: J. Andrew Smith
Flutes: Anne Dearth
Clarinet: Brooke Miller
Viola: Amanda Hamilton
Bass: Conner Simmons
Percussion: Kohei Sakai
Conductor: Garrison Gerard

Recording, Mixing: Christopher Poovey,
Recorded in Denton, Texas
Executive Producer, Kory Reeder
Sawyer Editions, 2023
sawyereditions.bandcamp.com
sawyereditions@gmail.com

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Sawyer Editions Texas

Sawyer Editions is a small-batch label specializing in contemporary, experimental, and improvised music, especially of new and unreleased artists.

Demos always welcome.

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