Matt Hannafin

"Eight Pieces in Suspended Time "
 
Eight solo improvisations for low drums and metals, exploring texture, harmony, and layered, continuous sound. Trained in Iranian classical and traditional music, Matt Hannafin approaches New Music improvisation by blending Asian and Near-Eastern timbres and modalities with those of western percussion and the urban-industrial soundscape, creating a totally unique sonic universe.

Phantom notes that didn't fit on CD package: These recordings document my musical/improvisational thinking as of mid to late 2002. All but the first and last tracks were played on a kit comprised of large, low-toned drums and various cymbals, bells, and sympathetic resonators, all tuned and positioned for optimum harmonic interaction. The high goal: what Hazrat Inayat Khan called "the sound of the abstract plain." Track 1 was played on two large stainless steel handbells of my own design. Track 8 was played on a Pete Engelhart tambourine shaker and four brass maracas. No effects were used except a touch of reverb at the end of tracks 4 & 5.

Thanks go to my teachers: Kavous Shirzadian, La Monte Young, Pandit Pran Nath, Jamey Haddad, Glen Velez, Layne Redmond, and John Amira. And to: cicadas, frogs, blowing leaves, the construction crew at Verdi Square, the tide at Cane Garden Bay, Sherman Square Studios' elevators, the Theater of Eternal Music, Niagara Falls, fountains and geysers, glaciers and seiche tones, bamboo, chain-link fences, stones and masonry, miscellaneous engines and generators, Einsturzende Neubauten and Z'ev, iron and brass, gagaku, the creaking of ships' lines, Iranian and Tibetan music, highway overpasses and elevated trains, John Cage and David Tudor, Iannis Xenakis, wind on the Ramapo reservoir, boats against piers, fire and crumpled newspaper, bricks poured from dump trucks, men with sacks of cans, Man with a Movie Camera, humpback whales, power tools, blizzards and hurricanes, hardware stores, foghorns, sirens, soil, and metalworkers everywhere.