PATRICK GRANT samples the
Semar Pengulingan Gamelan of
SEKEHE DHARMA PURWA JATI
Strange Music CD 007 - released March 2002
01. MONOGRAM FOR GAMELAN (2001) 4'13"
02. GAMELAMBIENCE (2001) 43'30
03. Kantilan 1 - 0'51"
04. Kantilan 2 - 0'40"
05. Pemade 1 - 0'44"
06. Pemade 2 - 0'45"
07. Calung 1 - 1'21"
08. Calung 2 - 0'55"
09. Jegogan 1 - 1'14"
10. Jegogan 2 - 1'20"
11. Trompong - 0'50"
12. Gender 1 -2'01"
13. Gender 2 - 1'43"
14. Kempli - 0'05"
15. Two Kendang - 0'11"
16. Ceng-Ceng - 0'05"
17. Kelendong - 0'06"
18. Kemong - 0'09"
19. Kempur - 0'21"
20. Gong - 0'20"First of all, a big thank you is to be given to Douglas Myers, director of the Yayasan Polosseni of Teges, Bali, for his wisdom in the totality of the Indonesian performing arts and for his extreme generosity in letting me digitally record (sample), note by note, their group of instruments in August of 2001. This is the Semar Pengulingan gamelan of their ensemble Sekehe Dharma Purwa Jati. The recording was done in a small back room of the foundation's banjar where they rehearse. We were up against a lot of adversary. Basically being an open-air pavilion, the banjar wasn't the most ideal place to do this kind of recording since we had to often stop for the frequent cock crowing, dog barking, and passing mini-buses and motor scooters. If you listen carefully to the raw samples, you may pick up a trace of some of these distractions. But, as Doug often advises, it is best to "leave it up to the Gods" and so doing, please consider any of these unintentional artifacts to merely enhance the integrity of these beautiful tones, not taken, but only borrowed from the island of Bali.
1. Monogram for Gamelan - this was a piece I wrote for the gamelan and work shopped with them in my study of Balinese ornamentation. It was written for a friend's wedding in the Palau Islands in July 2001 to which had been instrumental in bringing the gamelan to perform. I then continued on to Bali to develop the piece. This track represents my success in assigning the recorded tones to the keys of electronic keyboards of which I am the sole musician on this multitrack recording.
2. Gamelambience - Using the raw samples recorded in Bali, I used them to construct this large scale "sound sculpture" in which the intent was that one could enjoy the pure sensation of the instruments' sounds without any overt compositional narrative.
3. The remaining tracks are the edited recordings of the gamelan itself that I used to re-sample into my group's keyboards for live performance. I've left them as pure as I could since any further editing, noise reduction, etc. could always be done later thus preserving the richness of their full frequency spectrum here.
Patrick Grant - February 2002
All music and materials © 2002 Patrick Grant / sTRANGE mUSIC Inc.™
All titles published by Silent Treatment (BMI)=================================================================================
