Browse by Artist: DIDKOVSKY, NICK

Artist:	DIDKOVSKY, NICK
Title:	Ice Cream Time
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80667CD

"Nick Didkovsky (electric guitar, laptop); Thomas Dimuzio (sampling, live sampling, and processing); ARTE Quartett: Beat Hofstetter (soprano and baritone saxophone), Sascha Armbruster (alto and baritone saxophone), Andrea Formenti (tenor saxophone), Beat Kappeler (baritone saxophone). Nick Didkovsky (b. 1958) is an accomplished composer, virtuoso guitarist, and computer programmer who works on the cusp between the concert hall and the rock-and-roll club-territory that is only now beginning to be taken seriously. Didkovsky's compositions are rigorously conceived, yet leave plenty of room for spontaneous input. He has tapped into what one might describe as a typically American way of making music -- iconoclastic and formalist without being overly uptight. Combining complex rhythms, harmonies and textures with the visceral energy of rock music, he creates work that is cutting-edge (albeit more downtown than uptown), rigorous, and subversive. His employment of asymmetrical meters, gratuitous dissonance, and tonally ambiguous harmonies rubs against the pop sensibility implied by the compositional forms and instrumentation with which he works. The sense of compositional and technological inventiveness in Didkovsky's music bears resemblance to that of other maverick composer-hacker-performers such as Salvatore Martirano, Larry Polansky, David Rosenboom, and George Lewis. Didkovsky's music reflects current trends and practices including the use of live, interactive computer-assistance, genre jumping and blurring the distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow. Although the accoutrements of Western tonality are never far off, his musical sensibility allows for some radical departures from the stock-and-trade of tonality. Didkovsky is attracted to the ambiguous boundaries between human-generated and software-generated materials. 'Ice Cream Time' (2003) is a multi-movement piece scored for saxophone quartet, electric guitar, and live electronics. As might be expected, Ice Cream Time embraces, or engages with, a wide range of influences and material contrasts. Nine of the movements feature live sampling by Thomas Dimuzio, whose job was to capture and process the saxophone and guitar sounds in real time, using his Kurzweil K2600RS. Because the unaltered signals are also heard, a rich and subtle texture is produced."

Artist:	DIDKOVSKY, NICK
Title:	Tube Mouth Bow String
Label:	POGUS
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	POGUS 21042

Subtitled: Music for electric guitar, string quartet, computer, and live electronics. "These pieces are about the details of musical evolution that emerge from rule-based compositional systems. Using electric guitar, string quartet, electronics, and computer software, we explored territories held together by systems of agreements, forms specified in software, real-time musical choices, and notation.Two of the compositions here, 'She Closes Her Sister With Heavy Bones' and 'What Sheep Herd,' are process pieces whose scores fit very economically on one page. Each score specifies melodic material and a short set of rules. The music precipitates from the interaction between the score's specifications and the decisions that the musicians make during performance. By contrast, Tube Mouth Bow String is a thoroughly-composed piece which notates foot pedal movements, vocal behavior, and bowed string performance, overflowing very uneconomically onto many pages which we pasted onto large poster boards and set before each player. Closing the CD, 'Just a Voice That Bothered Him' sounds like it could have been composed systematically but evades rules instead, being composed intuitively by ear. The piece emerged in opposition to one vividly frustrating weekend of fruitless systematic composition, and for that, gets the last word."

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