ALBUM
Ephemeral Rivers : CD
Like all portraits this CD can be read in different ways: it represents a moment in time, not just the artist’s time but our collective time; it is intimate, but in its intimacy it shows us something of the society in which this music was made.
The moment in time covers the years between 2011 and 2015, the period in which Cat Hope made the five works gathered here. Each of them inhabits what the composer herself describes as a ‘nexus of electronic and acoustic instruments, animated notations, drone and noise’ and although all of them might be described as chamber music, none of them is a chamber work in the classical sense of music for an exclusively acoustic instrumental ensemble.
Instead, in each case the sonic resources of acoustic instruments are located within a musical frame that includes other elements: sometimes, as in Cruel and Usual, the live electronics extend the sounds of the instruments; sometimes the sounds created by the musicians are augmented by, or juxtaposed with other sound sources, such as the AM radio static in Miss Fortune X.
– Christopher Fox