Our online listening club will be held from 7-8pm on the last Friday of each month and is a chance to come together regularly to listen to new music and find out more about today's composers.
We will invite a variety of different guest hosts who will explore the music of a different contemporary composer each time. You'll be invited to spend some time listening to one of the composer's works before we meet, but there will also be an opportunity to listen to the work during the session if you don't get around to it beforehand.
Like a book club but with less homework!
For this month's listening club we'll be exploring Dewa Alit's Likad for Gamelan Salukat.
The piece is from Dewa Alit's most recent album Chasing the Phantom (Available on his Bandcamp).
Note on the piece:
Likad, written during Covid-19 lockdowns, channels anxiety and uncertainty into musical form, resulting in a piece that, even by Alit’s standards, is stunning in its complexity and the virtuosity it demands of Gamelan Salukat. Its opening section is perhaps most remarkable for its mastery of texture, with rapid transitions between dry, muted strikes and metallic shimmers calling to mind the use of filters in electronic music. At points, the complex irregular repetitions of short melodic patterns, where the music seems to get stuck or be suddenly interrupted by a skip, recall the mad sampler works of Alvin Curran or the skittering surface of prime period Oval more than anything familiar from acoustic percussion music. Moving through a dizzying series of twists and turns, the piece ends with a majestic sequence of chords possessing an almost hieratic power. A major statement from a radical contemporary composer, one cannot help but agree with Alit when he sees Chasing the Phantom as an answer to the “question of the future of Gamelan music”.
The piece was selected for one of the New York Times' 25 best classical tracks of 2022 on their 22 Dec issue.
Dewa Alit
Born in 1973 to a family of artists in Pengosekan village, Dewa Alit has been immersed in Balinese gamelan from early childhood and is generally acknowledged as the leading composer of his generation in Bali.
Seeking a wider path for expressing his approach to new music in gamelan, Alit founded his group Gamelan Salukat in 2007, performing on a new set of instruments of his own tuning & design.
Please register in advance by clicking BOOK on the right hand side. After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the session.
You can join the session on Zoom via an internet browser on your computer or mobile device or you can phone in on either a mobile or landline to listen using the Dial by your location number.
If you have any queries please email info@sound-scotland.co.uk.
