In drawn only once, Due East (Erin Lesser, flutes / Greg Beyer, percussion) features two of John Supko’s multimedia projects, Littoral and This window makes me feel, presented in both CD and 5.1 surround-sound DVD formats. Littoral melds the lustrous timbres of flutes, electronics, and an extensive array of percussion instruments with texts by contemporary Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom and 16th century English writer Richard Hakluyt. Supko calls Littoral “music of shifting terrains, each with its distinct sense of time and color and space.” The piece is accompanied by an entrancing video by Kristine Marx, with rapidly changing geometric forms superimposed over transient oceanic landscapes. The second of Supko’s pieces, This window makes me feel, is based on New York-based poet Robert Fitterman’s brilliant poem of the same name, which makes use of completions of the poem’s title based on hundreds of Google searches, chronicling a vast range of human experience. The work is scored for Due East plus mezzo-soprano (Hai-Ting Chinn), keyboards (David Broome), and electronics, and is accompanied on DVD by a video by Don Sheehy, which captures the hysteria of the congested cityscape that visually amplifies the pre-recorded poetic whispers (Trish McKenna) of Fitterman’s poem. Get a copy here.
Read Steve Smith’s 5-star review of drawn only once in TimeOut New York here.
Read the album liner notes – a kind of "interview" with Jeffrey Edelstein – here.