Browse by Artist: SMITH, CHAS

Artist:	SMITH, CHAS
Title:	Nikko Wolverine
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	CB 003CD

"'Nikko Wolverine' (1999) is a three-movement piece scored for various bowed and struck metal instruments in non-tempered tunings. These instruments, which were designed and built by the composer, emit tones that are rich in complex harmonics and often sound more electronic than acoustic. 'Tons Tons Macoutes' (1999) is a texturally dense work for Smith's metal instruments. It is almost glacial in both its presence and its pace, and it might call to mind certain musique concrète works. 'Genus, Sho-Bud' and the hymn-like 'Near the Divide', both composed in 1999, feature the composer on pedal-steel guitar. The first of these works utilizes a highly processed sound and unfolds through series of harmonic suspensions. Chas Smith, a Los Angeles-based composer and performer in the American maverick tradition of Harry Partch, creates much of his music from exotic instruments of his own design."

Artist:	SMITH, CHAS
Title:	Aluminum Overcast
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	CB 007CD

"The six-movement set of variations that comprise Aluminum Overcast play with the listener's sense of time -- the perceived pace and the clock pace at which musical events take place -- as they slowly progress, the spare advancing to the dense. The first five sections/variations are built from shared/recurrent phrases -- melodic phrases (for bowed and struck metal), rhythmic phrases derived from geometric and Fibonacci structures, and phrases of 'harmonic noise' that vary in density. The sixth movement, something of a coda to the whole work, steps aside from the variations structure and into a purely textural, Ligeti-like soundworld. Aluminum Overcast is scored for metal instruments of the composer's design -- resonators that sprout rods, which are bowed and struck; large, clangorous sculptures of titanium; metal strings strung across multiple resonators; and vibraphone-like arrays of metal plates -- along with an understated touch of pedal steel guitar and electronically processed flute and woman's voice. Chas Smith is a Los Angeles-based composer, performer, and instrument designer and builder who, in the spirit of Harry Partch, creates much of his music for his own exotic instruments. His compositions, which always display his dualistic fascination with the scientific and the sensual, might owe their split personalities to the diverse collection of composers he studied with in the 1970s: Morton Subotnick, Mel Powell, James Tenney, and Harold Budd."

Artist:	SMITH, CHAS
Title:	An Hour Out Of Desert Center
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	CB 013CD

"Chas Smith -- composer, inventor, instrument builder, and performer -- has created his own musical world, complete with its own instruments and 'language.' It is a world of carefully sculpted textures that never sit absolutely still, textures that evolve and are always in the process of a slow change of aural perspective. Critics have repeatedly compared Smith's sometimes beautiful, sometimes brooding compositions to those of Ligeti. An Hour Out of Desert Center is scored for pedal steel guitars, composer-designed-and-built crotales and sound sculptures, zithers, and a 1948 Bigsby lap guitar (a one-of-a-kind instrument that was owned by famed steel player Joaquin Murphey, who played with Spade Cooley, Tex Williams, Sons of the Pioneer, and other classic country artists). Here, Smith's musical texture, evolving slowly and continuously over the course of the piece, is without dramatic flourishes. Like the spare landscapes around Desert Center, California, it simply exists in its muted beauty."

Artist:	SMITH, CHAS
Title:	Descent
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	CB 023CD

"With Descent, Smith continues to create the great, sometimes clangorous soundscapes that have fed the popularity of his earlier Cold Blue releases. The central pitch and structural ideas for the three pieces that comprise this CD were originally conceived for an evening of music that Smith presented at Los Angeles' historic Schindler House. Here, those initial ideas are expanded and developed. On this recording, Smith utilizes his large sculptural instruments, which are all made of various metals (and go by such unusual names as Copper Box, Que Lastas, Pez Eater and Jr. Blue), steel guitar, the recorded sounds of jet engines, and Smith's self-designed-and-built three-neck steel guitar, 'guitarzilla,' which he prepares (a la John Cage's prepared piano) with metal rods and plays with hammered dulcimer hammers."

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