Mattias Hållsten - Breathing, bowing DL

Breathing, bowing is the release of two new works by Swedish composer and musician Mattias Hållsten, both exploring tuning, breath and the idiosyncrasies of two very different but very traditional musical instruments.

The first piece is Solo #1 for shō and unfiltered saw tooth waves. The Japanese mouth organ shō, traditionally used to perform the ancient Japanese court music Gagaku, is here explored and expanded upon using justly tuned unfiltered saw tooth waves, with the pythagorean tuning of the shō as the harmonic starting point.

In Breathing, bowing Hållsten uses the bowing of the viola da gamba as a musical point of departure. The frets of the viol are adjusted to facilitate harmonies in seven-limit just intonation, welcoming the rich timbral characteristics of the viol and creating moments of harmonic fusion. Apart from the viol, the piece uses a 600x1000x0.75 mm suspended steel plate, excited by a transducer speaker, used primarily for playing back justly tuned sine waves. By using the plate for playing back the sine waves, rather than loudspeakers, the electronic sound is given a body and assumes a physical presence on stage.

1. Solo #1 (13:02)
2. Breathing, bowing (19:06)

Mattias Hållsten (1997) is a Swedish composer and musician. His music explores auditory perception and the boundary between acoustic and electronic sound by using different synthesis techniques and instrumentations combined with just intonation. In relation to this, he works with the aesthetic and affective characteristics of different intonation patterns. He is currently studying the traditional Japanese mouth-organ shō with Japanese musician Ishikawa Ko.