ERNESTO DIAZ-INFANTE & MATT HANNAFIN: All the States Between

Ernesto Diaz-Infante & Matt Hannafin

All the States Between

© 2004 Itz'at Musica/BMI and Pax Recordings (646289026227)

CD IN STOCK. ORDER NOW. Will ship immediately.

(About MP3 downloads at CD Baby)

Extreme-ambient sound collage mixing electronics, field recordings, & radical turntablism with extended-technique percussion. "Open minded sound collage fans will find much to enjoy here." Jerry Kranitz, Aural Innovations

notes

Extreme-ambient sound collage mixing Diaz-Infante's electronics, field recordings, and radical turntablism with Hannafin's's extended-technique percussion. Unfolds in slow waves and jump-cuts, moving from meditations on bus engines and amplified acoustic guitar ground hum to bowed cymbal drones, TV-tube musique concrète, and the rumble-clatter of low drums and metals. 77 minutes to turn your head outside in. Matt Hannafin and Ernesto Diaz-Infante also have a track on the new Voices In The Wilderness: Dissenting Soundscapes & Songs of GW'S America Pax Recordings CD. Available on CD Baby, too. http://cdbaby.com/cd/vitwilderness


BIOS:
Born in Salinas, California, Ernesto Diaz-Infante, is Chicano (of Mexican descent). He received his MFA in Music Composition from California Institute of the Arts (studied with Wadada Leo Smith and Stephen L. Mosko) and has created musical compositions that span a broad perspective: transcendental piano, noise, avant-garde guitar, field recordings, lo-fi four-track manipulations, and experimental song. ED-I has performed throughout Europe and the United States, and his music has been broadcasted internationally. He has recorded more than 15 CDs of music and collaborated with numerous musicans. In 2000, his composition, I/O (for chamber ensemble), was performed by the California EAR Unit. He has been awarded residencies at the Centre International de Recherche Musicale (CIRM) in Nice, France, The Millay Colony for the Arts, Villa Montalvo, The Ucross Foundation, among others. He runs Pax Recordings record label which is dedicated to the documentation, preservation, and contagion of music from the margins of our culture and psyches. He lives in San Francisco with the filmmaker/video artist Marjorie Sturm and their son and daughter.

Matt Hannafin is a New Yorkbased percussionist active in both free improvisation and traditional Iranian music. He studied Iranian tombak (classical goblet drum) with master Kavous Shirzadian; frame drums with Jamey Haddad and Glen Velez; African and Afro-Caribbean percussion with John Amira, Magette Fall, and others; and voice with composer La Monte Young and master Pandit Pran Nath. For New Music performances he uses a percussion kit that blends the timbres of various Asian traditions with those of the orchestral percussion ensemble and the urban/industrial soundscape, allowing deeper exploration of sympathetic resonance, continuous layered sound, and organizational principles based on tonal decay, textural progression, and event sequencing.
Mr. Hannafin is a member of the improvisation groups Chainworks (with pianist Dan DeChellis and electronics player Brian Moran) and Two Moon Ensemble (with flautist Muriel Vergnaud, clarinetist Rich Gross, and bandurist Michael Andrec). He©ˆs performed solo and with tar/zarb player Kavous Shirzadian, bandurist Julian Kytasty, soprano Anita DeChellis, theremin player James Colemen, sax player Blaise Siwula, guitarists Chris Forsyth and Ed Littman, percussionists Hearn Gadbois, Glen Velez, and Jeff Arnal, and many others. In the 1980s he was a regular guest with NY/NJ dada-noise legends Children in Adult Jails and performed as half of the improv/industrial duo Alexis at Spala with electronics player C. J. Earner. In 199394 he was the first male drummer in Layne Redmond©ˆs previously all-female percussion ensemble The Mob of Angels, and from 1995 to 2003 was percussionist for the Iranian traditional/Sufi ensemble Soroosh, featuring singer/instrumentalist Amir Ali Vahabzadegan and ney/sorna player Omar Faruk Tekbilek. For the past several years he©ˆs been active as a teacher of Persian classical and traditional percussion.
Mr. Hannafin has appeared at the Miami Iranian Cultural Festival (1998 and 1999); the United Nations and the Iranian Mission to the UN, Symphony Space (NYC), the New England Conservatory (Boston), and scores of other venues, including performances for the World Music Institute and numerous cultural and arts groups. He's released two recordings with Chainworks (Red Rooms and Twenty Minutes in Brooklyn, 5-4-2003, both on Sachimay Records) and in early 2004 will release his first solo CD, Eight Pieces in Suspended Time, also on Sachimay. A duo recording with soprano Anita DeChellis titled Music for Dancer is planned for mid- to late 2004. Recent recordings include duets with San Francisco improviser/composer Ernesto Diaz-Infante.

reviews

Please log in to review this album.

  • ...there are a number of fascinating moments...
    author: Downtown Music Gallery

    Although bay area based Ernesto is most often known to play guitar and piano, here he plays cheap electronics, turntable, broken cd player, violin and other assorted stuff. He then sent his tracks through the mail to our good pal Matt Hannafin who plays exotic percussion, so that Matt could add his sounds to the mix. What we now get is two long tracks of mutated low-tech electronics and samples with lots of weird acoustic percussion. The two long pieces here (47 & 31 minutes) slowly evolve as the mutant electronics and samples blend with Matt's array of eerie percussion, rubbed, banged and manipulated in different ways. At about 77 minutes, this is a bit too long, but there are a number of fascinating moments. Perhaps not extreme enough for fans of Voice Crack, but certainly worth a listen

  • This is one of the more compelling ones...
    author: Dead Angel

    You could probably make a compelling argument that Ernesto plays on too many albums for his own good -- I've already lost count of how many DEAD ANGEL has reviewed, but it's a lot -- but he delivers the goods pretty consistently, and works with a lot of interesting people... besides, what's he gonna do? He's a guitarist, the whole point is to play live and put out albums, right? The thing is, even with so many releases floating around, nearly all of them have been significantly different, and he's had some interesting collaborations along the way. This is one of the more compelling ones, an "electro-acoustic work" constructed over time on two primitive four-tracks, with the two of them sending work back and forth in the mail. Materials used / recorded by the duo in the process include turntables, a broken cd player, snippets miked from the TV, MUNI / BART field recordings, violin, voice, keyboards, percussion, hand cymbals, handbells, Ghanaian windmill bells, newspaper, bentwood tambourine, rattles, shakers, and other esoteric stuff; the result is two long tracks of destroyed samples, electrohum, glitch electronics, and other damaged sounds. "Part I (tracks 1-7)" are largely more about electronics / noise, while "Part II (tracks 8-11)" more prominently feature the use of traditional instruments, but both long tracks spend plenty of time exploring the dimensions of sound inherent in their choice of noisemakers. The tracks are long enough (46:39 and 30:44) to allow plenty of room for development, and while some listeners may find that a bit on the long side, there's plenty of nice elements to latch onto. Recommended mainly for the patient.

  • ...have created a focused avant-garde electronic soundscape...
    author: Christian Carey, Splendid Magazine

    Recorded collaborations in which the artists exchange tapes via mail often end up being tedious affairs that only emphasize the distance separating the collaborators. Ernesto Diaz-Infante and Matt Hannafin, however, have created a focused avant-garde electronic soundscape. Multi-instrumentalist Diaz-Infante and percussionist Hannafin filled two tracks apiece on recycled (and consequently worn-sounding) 4-track tapes. The results include a host of sounds: turntables, field recordings, amplified television hums, samples from broken CD players, rattles, shakers, iron ankle bells, newspaper, violin and voice are just a few of them! The album is cast into two main (lengthy) parts, which are broken into multiple tracks. As you might imagine, the relative paucity of conventional instruments and plethora of damaged mechanical devices creates a kind of battered industrial texture for much of the album. Perhaps (I'm speculating here) it is meant to serve as some kind of dystopian commentary on technology. Indeed, much of this sounds like a tone poem for sick (or sad) cyborgs -- buzzes and thrumming succeeded by percussive attacks, clicks and bleeps. While it is a challenging listen, I appreciated its monolithic determination and exploratory character.

  • open minded sound collage fans will find much to enjoy here.
    author: Jerry Kranitz, Aural Innovations

    Sub-titled An Electro-Acoustic Composition in Two Parts, All The States Between is a mail collaboration effort between San Francisco based Ernesto Diaz-Infante on electronics, turntables and field recordings, and New Yorker Matt Hannafin on all manner of percussion and things you hit or shake. The CD consists of two lengthy sound collage workouts, taking plenty of time to stretch out and explore at 46 and 30 minutes each. At its core the music is ambient, though the duo make liberal use of noise, dense tonal assaults and percussive clatter. Like much of sound artist Hal McGee's work, Ernesto and Matt explore a highly textural but often spacey universe, with plenty of fun strangeness thrown in. Aliens bleeps and blurps coexist with phasing, shifting and grating radio wave tones, while the percussion noodles along busily but somehow keeps the proceedings on a steady course to somewhere. Overall it was the contrasts that kept me alert and interested. Throbbing, high volume electronic blasts mow down all in their path, while the percussion breezes along at a controlled and measured pace. The sounds of city traffic serves as the backdrop for a UFO freakout symphony. And lots lots more. It can be a harsh and challenging listen at times. But patient, attentive, open minded sound collage fans will find much to enjoy here.

email

Please log in to email this artist.