Catherine Christer Hennix (b. 1948) started her creative career playing drums with her older brother Peter growing up in Sweden where she saw jazz luminaries such as John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Dexter Gordon, Archie Shepp, and Cecil Taylor perform at the Golden Circle. Directly after high school, Hennix went to work at Stockholm's pioneering Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), where she helped develop early synthesizer and tape music. After traveling to New York In 1968, she met Fluxus artists Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles and developed fruitful collaborative relationships with many composers in the burgeoning American avant-garde, including, most significantly, Henry Flynt and La Monte Young. Young introduced Hennix to Hindustani raga master Pandit Pran Nath, and she would later study intensively under him. While Hennix continued to make music performing alongside Arthur Russell, Marc Johnson, Henry Flynt, and Arthur Rhames, she also served as a professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at SUNY New Paltz and as a visiting Professor of Logic (at Marvin Minsky's invitation) at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In recent years Hennix has led the just-intonation ensemble the Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage. She currently resides in Berlin, Germany, where she is active as a composer and writer.
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LP
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BF 011LP
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Unbegrenzt is the third in an ongoing series of archival records of the unheard music of Swedish composer Catherine Christer Hennix, co-released by Blank Forms Editions and Empty Editions. It follows Selected Early Keyboard Works (2018) and Selections from 100 Models of Hegikan Roku, named the #1 archival release of 2019 by The Wire (BF 007LP, 2019), in addition to a two-volume collection of Hennix's writing titled Poësy Matters and Other Matters. Recorded in February of 1974 and featuring Catherine Christer Hennix (recitation, percussion, electronics) and Hans Isgren (bowed gong), Hennix's realization of Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Unbegrenzt" (German for "unlimited") from Aus den Sieben Tagen is an elaboration both rigorous and radically different from the canonical 1969 recording issued by Shandar. The collection of 15 text pieces written in Paris during May of 1968, Aus den Sieben Tagen, denies its performers notated direction and instead provides poetic cues that hinge upon Stockhausen's conception of "intuitive music," a Eurocentric perspective on improvisation antithetical to the vernacular forms Hennix had engaged with as a young drummer performing in Stockholm jazz clubs with musicians like Bill Barron, Cam Brown, Hans Isgren, Lalle Svenson, Allan Vajda, Bo Wärmell, and many others. While both Hennix and Isgren saw the formal prospect of Aus den Sieben Tagen as a productive development of and beyond La Monte Young's event scores, she here steadfastly counters his rationalization of intuition with the Principle of Sufficient Reason. (Cf. Brouwer's Lattice.) Eschewing the busy, conservatory-addled lapses into idiomatic citation of Stockhausen's 1969 recording, Hennix's alternative realization of the "Unbegrenzt" score's instructions to "play a sound with the certainty that you have an infinite amount of time and space" is based on her concept of "Infinitary Compositions", the trademark of her ensemble The Deontic Miracle which, at one time, considered adding Stockhausen, La Monte Young, and Terry Jennings scores to its repertoire. Taking a mature, minimal iteration of Stockhausen's compositional method of "moment-forming" to heart, her version's dark, controlled feedback and amplified bowed gong subtly shift through an immanent sequence of formative moments, step by step. Its bubbling computer noise, percussion, and repeated ominous transient sounds of temple blocks over the bowed gong terminate with the integrated recitation of exotic text fragments from Hevajra Tantra which faithfully take Stockhausen's score into deeper vistas of the unconscious and a more devastating opening to the unlimited time and space of a dreaming mind. Audio restoration and mastering by Stephan Mathieu, with an essay by Bill Dietz.
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IMPREC 398CD
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2021 restock. Central Palace Music, performed by Catherine Christer Hennix's just-intonation ensemble The Deontic Miracle, is the first in a series of archival Hennix releases to be issued via Important Records. This previously unheard piece was taken from an eight-day festival organized in the spring of 1976 at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm. The group features Catherine Christer Hennix on Renaissance oboe and custom sinewave generators, Peter Hennix on Renaissance oboe, and Hans Isgren on sheng. Central Palace Music is packaged in a deluxe letterpressed sleeve.
"She has created a sound that reliably taps into our subconscious and frees us from linear time" --The Quietus. Catherine Christer Hennix (born 1948 in Stockholm) is an artist, poet, composer, and philosopher with a strong interest in logic and formal music theory. In late-1960s Sweden, she was a pioneer of experimenting with mainframe computer-generated composite soundwave forms, and in the 1970s she was a key protagonist of the Downtown School along with La Monte Young and Henry Flynt, with whom she has collaborated on numerous occasions. She pursued studies with master vocalist Pandit Pran Nath and led the just-intonation live electronic ensembles Hilbert Hotel and The Deontic Miracle (featured on this recording). She was a professor of mathematics and computer science and assistant to and coauthor with A. S. Esenin-Volpin, for which she received the Centenary Prize-fellow Award from the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000. Hennix's interest in drone music and the meditative, trance-like state it induces is apparent in her exploration of similar music in many other cultures and traditions, including, for example, Japanese gagaku music and the 13th-century vocal music of Pérotin and Léonin.
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IMPREC 434CD
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Restocked. Live At Issue Project Room is the first recording of the expanded configuration of Catherine Christer Hennix's Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage just-intonation ensemble, documenting a 2014 performance at Issue Project Room. The ensemble of Hennix (voice) and Hilary Jeffery and Robin Hayward (brass) is expanded to include vocalists Imam Ahmet Muhsin Tüzer, Amir Elsaffan, and Amirtha Kidambi; brass players Paul Schwingenschlögl and Elena Kakaliagou; and Marcus Pal and Stefan Tiedje on electronics. Live At Issue Project Room is packaged in a deluxe letterpressed sleeve.
"She has created a sound that reliably taps into our subconscious and frees us from linear time" --The Quietus. Catherine Christer Hennix (born 1948 in Stockholm) is an artist, poet, composer, and philosopher with a strong interest in logic and formal music theory. In late-1960s Sweden, she was a pioneer of experimenting with mainframe computer-generated composite soundwave forms, and in the 1970s she was a key protagonist of the Downtown School along with La Monte Young and Henry Flynt, with whom she has collaborated on numerous occasions. She pursued studies with master vocalist Pandit Pran Nath and led the just-intonation live electronic ensembles Hilbert Hotel and The Deontic Miracle. Hennix's interest in drone music and the meditative, trance-like state it induces is apparent in her exploration of similar music in many other cultures and traditions, including, for example, Japanese gagaku music and the 13th-century vocal music of Pérotin and Léonin. In 2003 she returned to computer-generated composite soundwave forms or "soliton(e)s," of which Infinitary Composite Sound Wave Form Composition Soliton(e) Star (2003-present) was the first result. She subsequently formed the Choras(s)an Time-Court Mirage just-intonation ensemble; in 2012, Important Records released a performance by this ensemble of "Blues Dhikr Al-Salam (Blues Al Maqam)" as Live At The Grimm Museum Volume One (IMPREC 354CD). In 2012 Henry Flynt asked Hennix for a new, expanded realization of an "Illuminatory Sound Environment" for an installation at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, for his "Henry Flynt. Activities 1959 --" exhibition. In response Hennix realized a four-channel composition, Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis, her first four-channel computer-assisted composition since 1969.
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IMPREC 354CD
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2013 repress. "Blues Dhikr Al-Salam (Blues Al Maqam) for voice, brass, computer and live electronics in the mixed-media environment Nur/Soliton(E) Star. The world premiere of the infinitary computer animation NUR and the accompanying infinitary computer sound composition Soliton(E) Star were given at Diapason Gallery (NYC) for the celebration of La Monte Young's 70th birthday in 2005. Catherine Christer Hennix has now extended this installation in the venerable tradition of the pentatonic blues for a live-electronic ensemble. Recorded live on Sunday August 14, 2011 at the Grimm Museum, Berlin."
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