album name

Emperor of Daffodils

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by Joe Frawley

Emperor of Daffodils Cover Art
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about
A sonic essay on narcissism and the idolatry of beauty.

Joe Frawley Ensemble is:
Joe Frawley - piano, found sounds, electronic processing & arrangement

Rachel Rambach - singing

Greg Conte - guitars, electronic effects

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Liner notes by Agostino De Rosa

This is how it begins: a repeated sigh, of hummed and incomplete phrases; a piano chord struck iteratively, ethereally; a sound texture delineating a deep echo of future moments, but which may never get a definitive shape. A wait, a moment when belief is suspended and the senses collapse under the weight of wonder. Joe Frawley’s new album shows an important turning point for the Connecticut composer, who has built his inimitable key feature out of bringing together ‘in poetic reaction’ sound fragments chosen from different sources, both musical and extra-musical. The conceptual theme, motionless, around which is articulated Emperor of Daffodils, is that of an image, captured maybe furtively, of a woman seen in the instant, modest and exhibitionist at the same time, applying makeup at a mirror. Prolonged and hypnotic actions, rituals which seem to resurface everyday, identically, from a remote past, but drawing our attention, subtly, towards uncanny matters, beyond the apparent hedonistic appeal of the gesture. First of all, there is the acoustic emergence of the myth of the double, profoundly rooted within the classic Greek tradition, but also within the Indian sapiential, translating the original form of the meeting with our own reflection, what the German philosophers called Doppleganger. In our lives, the first meeting with our double is represented by the shadow, followed by aquatic reflections, by images both painted and projected into mirrors, and especially, for Joe Frawley, by acoustic reflections coming from a world external to him, yet providing a continuous drone of speculation upon what leads us to doubt our own identity, both visual and acoustic, but in the end confirming its original status.

“I am the other”, as Arthur Rimbaud noticed in the Lettre du voyant, and this awareness always characterizes Joe Frawley’s compositional structure: the ability to articulate the original musical texture- with acoustic scraps and fragments extracted from the infinite world of sounds- comes to its maturity in this new work, and seems to hint at new paths of development for the future. The mirror set by Frawley to greet the resonances of that fading and complex world, which stays outside of his studio but also within himself, is similar to those bronze basins employed in antiquity to observe eclipses, or celestial bodies’ radiance: the acoustic image he extrapolates is therefore deformed, made opaque to the point of becoming a thing different from its original carapace. In Frawley’s work, it happens that the shadow-sound emancipates from the homo suus, from the individual-sound object of which it is a projection, becoming autonomous, independent, taking on a new significance, received also from the context in which it is set: here the new acoustic landscape is built out of Rachel Rambach’s evocative voice and Greg Conte’s long sustained guitar notes, as well as out of Frawley’s digital alchemies and inspired use of pianistic fragments. Like an interplay of mirrors, the musicians have been invited to improvise, while being in different locations, upon Frawley’s sound textures; subsequently he electronically re-shaped what he received, to rebuild a credible and fascinating universe of sounds, phrases, and vocal and documentary fragments. According to this acception, the metaphor of the mirror perfectly fits the way Emperor of Daffodils has been ideated: the Latin word for ‘mirror’ is in fact speculum, indicating not only the action of looking at our own reflection, but also, if transferred into feminine (specula), “the place from which to spy”, or the voyeuristic act of watching not ourselves, but what we couldn’t otherwise watch, because it would be interdicted from vision. The visionary ability characterizing all of his works allows Frawley to peer, from his place, at the poetics of the two musicians, almost in a telepathic way or, more precisely, psycho-emphatic, managing to extract from the vocals’ syllables, and from the guitar chords’ ambiances, the exact missing fragment needed to start, develop or close a composition. For the ancient Greeks the mirror is catoptron, optical prosthesis magnifying the gaze and taking it to the borders with divination: here arises the second archetype operating in Frawley’s new album, the one indicated by the sensual flowers evocated in its title, the myth of Narcissus. As Conon tells, it is grounded upon the individual (Narcissus) who, so in love with himself and with his own image, eventually dies, turning into that flower which grows and blooms in humid and reflecting places. But in Ovid’s version – in his Metamorphoses he is so careful in documenting living beings while transforming their states into other selves – Narcissus is loved by Echo, the nymph punished by Juno for her logorrhoea by being deprived of the discoursive faculty, and condemned to repeat ad infinitum the words of the others. This iterative and compulsive destiny – the one of becoming an acoustic reflection of the others’ words and sounds – is offered with all of its hypnotic beauty in Emperor of Daffodils, inviting the listener to enter an Other dimension, by exiting out of the secular acoustic space, and accessing a universe of spiral sounds where semantic levels melt, and sound planes continuously mismatch. The consequent acoustic image is therefore perpetually changing and shifting. But besides the perceptual and sensory effect produced by Frawley’s music, it must be underlined that it induces a spatial and temporal suspension, which means that it succeeds in nullifying the spatial-temporal conventions of the listening experience, yet leaving us conscious and aware, as in a lucid dream. More and more often with Frawley a theme emerges, one of doubling and reflection, which reveals itself sometimes in reference to the Duchampian aesthetics of collage, and sometimes in the choice of expressive forms more similar to the ones of a suite, where the digital technology balances the sonority of the western orchestral tradition.

Joe Frawley’s work, therefore, occupies a position not only relevant in the panorama of electronic and contemporary music, but also singular and interstitial in the world of artistic production, displaying how the sense of the whole lives in the details, in the meticulous and loving care for the most minute sound, restoring in modern and hypnotic forms the ancient principle of symmetry, the concurrency and harmony of the parts with the whole. At the centre of this “whole” there is sound, and therefore there are also Joe Frawley’s compositions, like adventures for the listener’s ears and soul.
credits
released 06 June 2009
Rachel Rambach, voice. Greg Conte, pedal steel guitar & electric upright bass. Joe Frawley, piano, found sounds, synthesized sounds, electronic effects & arrangements. All music composed & performed by Joe Frawley Ensemble, copyright 2009. Audio consulting by Sound of Fury. Substantial musical appropriations as follows: "Masque" quotes from "Music for a While" by Henry Purcell. Additional vocals on "Lipstick" by Jaimee Weatherbee (vocal sample from "Tourmaline", originally recorded by Low Beam on "Every Other Moment" c/o Cosmodemonic Telegraph, New London, CT, used by permission). "Lipstick," also samples from Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings". "The Supplicant" includes an excerpt from "O Holy Night" (music, Adolphe Charles Adam, words, Placide Chapeau) www.joefrawleymusic.info
tags
tags: experimental dark ambient experimental electronic sound collage New London
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Joe Frawley (b. July 4, 1971) is an experimental composer & pianist, working out of New London, Connecticut, whose works ... more blur the boundary between music and sound art. By layering and juxtaposing original music with processed found sounds, field recordings, and recontextualized speech fragments, the composer creates challenging yet accessible sound assemblages bearing a hypnotic dreamlike quality. less

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