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start this before dawn touches the skyscrapers

by duo B.

supported by
Thomas Howell
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Leyya Mona Tawil
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Brent Miller
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  • Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    vinyl release on Edgetone Records, with imagery by Mark Wilson

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  • Full Digital Discography

    9
    releases

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    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Glorious Ravage, avantNOIR, Shipwreck 4, Comeuppance, Hell-Bent in the Pacific, start this before dawn touches the skyscrapers, Cosmic Rift, CYLINDER, and 1 more. , and , .

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1.
Munnar Express (score by Aaron Bennett) 02:51
2.
Soft White (score by Heather Frasch) 03:34
3.
Tokyo (for duo B.) (score by Phillip Greenlief) 07:43
4.
Push/Pull (score by L. Mezzacappa) 03:14
5.
Postmark Tokyo (for a film by Mark Wilson) 10:43
6.
Bleckner (score by Jon Raskin) 04:21

about

Released on LP on Edgetone Records 2011.

Lisa Mezzacappa, acoustic bass
Jason Levis, drums/percussion (+ electronics on Postmark Tokyo)

The music on this record is a drawing, a photograph, a map, a scribble, a film, a collage. It is also one ensemble's love letter to the San Francisco Bay Area creative music community - a place where a duo of modest means can commission a composer friend with the promise of a burrito and a performance of the work. Where improvisers and composers comingle, collaborations across disciplines are commonplace, and where so many musicians have deep connections to visual art and film. Though graphic notation has a long history in contemporary music, on the West Coast and in the Bay Area in particular, a handful of composer/improvisers have been developing highly personalized visual languages for sound for some time. Here, a beautiful collage, a crayon city map, a fragmented photo or a scribbled and scratched line drawing can evoke and proscribe rhythmic relationships, layers of density, counterpoint, texture, dynamics.

start this before dawn touches the skyscrapers is the result of duo B.'s idiosyncratic, slightly obsessive processing, rehearsing, de- and re-constructing of compositions by some of their favorite San Francisco Bay Area composers working with visual scores. Some of the music was composed especially for the ensemble (Bennett, Greenlief, Frasch); other pieces they requested access to (Raskin) after hearing inspiring versions by other ensembles. The record’s title is drawn from the instructions on Phillip Greenlief’s map-based score Tokyo.

The composers represent a wide spectrum of Bay Area improviser/composers:

—saxophonist Jon Raskin of the ROVA Saxophone Quartet, who has an incredible portfolio of varied graphic works, often performed by his own superlative quartet

—multi-reedist, composer, bandleader, label master and educator Phillip Greenlief, who began creating a series of map-based scores several years ago for his favorite musicians

—saxophonist, composer, bandleader and musical straw whiz Aaron Bennett, whose deceptively ragtag scores, scratched onto recycled dot-matrix printer paper, belie his keen compositional intuition

—flutist, composer and electronic musician Heather Frasch, whose music revels in the possibilities of small sounds and textures

credits

released January 1, 2011

Recorded in 2008 by John Finkbeiner at New, Improved Recording, Oakland CA.
Mixed by
Myles Boisen at Guerrilla Recording, Oakland, CA.
Mastered by Myles Boisen at the Headless Buddha Master Lab, Oakland CA.
Cover: Film still from Postmark Tokyo by Mark Wilson.

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Lisa Mezzacappa Berkeley, California

Lisa Mezzacappa is a San Francisco Bay Area-based bassist, composer, improviser and bandleader. Please visit Queen Bee Records on Bandcamp for more releases!

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