Jewel Box

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 1992

Label: Tellus

A Harvestwork 15th anniversary production.

Editor: Brian Karl
Assistant Editor: Susan Kruglinski

Additional Technical:
Bob Bielecki, Tom Cora, Brenda Hutchinson, Connie Kieltyka and Richard Lainhart
Reproduced by Tape Specialty Inc., No. Hollywood, «A. Mastered using Sound Tools by Digidesign Inc., Menlo Park, «A.
Tellus Editorial Board:
Claudia Gould, Brian Karl, Joseph Nechvatal and Carol Parkinson
Supported in part by a grant from the Jerome Foundation, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Liner notes:
Linking the lyrically poetic, the unrestrictedly narrative and the slyly political, the artists on Tellus#26: Jewel Box reveal many of the aesthetic facets currently possible in audio composition. At the same time they exhibit the creative uses of the electronic technology which has developed around the audio recording industry in recent years.
The artists whose work is collected on Jewel Box use this technology to its fullest. Through electronic manipulation, the limits of both classically traditional instruments (such as Anne LeBaron's "Blue Harp") and unusually ordinary objects (like the small plastic ruler which Mary Ellen Childs "plays") are transcended, magnifying the qualities which make these sound-making devices unique.

The artists on Jewel Box also offer radically different methods of storytelling, commenting on events woven into the larger patterns of social consciousness. These events are sometimes woven so deeply into conventional thought that they require fresh techniques to extricate a masked meaning or emotion. For example, in Michelle Kinney's "Coordinated Universal Time", the composer breaks up Chen Shi-Zheng's vocal interpretation of a short-wave radio broadcaster, calling into question this "absolute" measure of time (and, implicitly, other established orders). And Bun Ching Lam's "EO-9066" accomplishes a de- and re-construction of an emotional response to historical events by stretching and fragmenting human utterance. Both employ sampled voices not only as abstract sounds but also as a compositional tool.

While the content of these pieces can be heard as material retrieved from some collective pre-consciousness, the sounds themselves also carry a certain familiarity. Although initially novel to our ears and minds, they have always been embedded in the sonic landscape, but in such a way that they have been only almost already heard until just now.