Mike Hovancsek
Temporal Angels
© 2003 Mike Hovancsek
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Temporal Angels is an adventurous sonic voyage into multi-cultural chamber music. for those who want to celebrate cultural diversity.
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About Mike Hovancsek:
Mike has been developing his own "multi-cultural chamber music" over the last eighteen years, both as a soloist and as a member of the experimental group,
Pointless Orchestra. His work has appeared in film soundtracks, public television, multi-media performance pieces, theaters, the Sundance Film Festival, recital halls, and on 20 CD releases. He has also received critical praise and has reached top airplay status on public and college radio stations around the world.
"Temporal Angels" is Mike's first solo CD release in several years. The music on this Cd brings together elements of baroque and renaissance music with Court traditions from Vietnam, China, Japan, India, and
a wide assortment of other cultures. These elements are mixed with improvisational and extended playing
techniques that create a blend of sounds and ideas that are at once familiar and completely unique.
The Guest Musicians
"Temporal Angels" features a stellar list of guest musicians, including Phong Nguyen (a Vietnamese master musician and ethnomusicologist who was invited to the White House to receive the National Heritage Award), Halim El-Dabh (an internationally acclaimed Egyptian composer who studied with Aaron Copland, helped to pioneer electronic music in the 1950s, and received multiple Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Fulbright awards), and Wah-Chiu Lai (an accomplished musician from China who has performed with the Chinese Classical Music Orchestra and the Taipei Municipal Chinese Orchestra in Taipei, Taiwan). The Unitarian Universalist choir also makes an appearance on one piece.
About The Music
The pieces on this CD bring together assortments of instruments and cultures that have never been tried before. The CD includes:
* A piece for harmonic vocals (a vocalist who can sing two or three notes at the same time), gu zheng (a Chinese zither), percussion, and vielle (a renaissance precursor to the violin).
* A piece for choir, koto (a Japanese harp-like zither), and oboe. This piece features a shifting tone center that weaves the music between two completely different scales, thus stretching the listener's ear beyond conventional tonality.
* A piece for dan bau (a Vietnamese one-string instrument), tambura (a string instrument, similar to the sitar. Traditionally, it is played by plucking the strings but in this piece it is played with a slide and struck with mallets), and gu zheng (a Chinese zither). This piece features master musician Phong Nguyen performing on the extremely difficult dan bau. The instrument is played completely in harmonics, which are bent in intricate ways from one pitch to another. This creates a haunting, ghost-like effect. Phong also performed on this instrument with The Kronos Quartet.
* A piece for erhu (a Chinese two-stringed fiddle), cello, gu zheng (a Chinese zither), and percussion.
* A piece for didgeridoo (an Australian wind instrument), oboe, shahnai (an Asian multi-reed instrument), and percussion instruments from around the world. This is one of the trobbing, tribal drum pieces on the CD that break up the tension from the more stately chamber pieces. It includes a shahnai part that begins with John Coltrane-like licks, blossoms into some intense hocketing, and then adds a chorus of additional reed instruments to push the piece over the top.
* A piece for harmonic vocals (a vocalist singing two or three notes at the same time), tambura (an Indian string instrument, similar to the sitar), crumhorn (a renaissance-era wind instrument), sitar (a classical string instrument from India), gu zheng (a Chinese zither), and percussion.
For more information please contact SRCA Recordings: info@standingrock.net
SRCA is a division of Standing Rock Cultural Arts: www.standingrock.net
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like the music of some undiscovered yet very sophisticated culture.
author: Carl Robbthis cd combines a staggering array of master musicians from many different cultures. in reality mike hovancsek has created this music from his own imagination. the combination of instruments and cultures is completely unique here. it is beautiful and exotic music. highly recommended!
Exotic and innovative
author: Lisa RiderThis music is beautiful and meditative. It is not, however, New Age fluff. It is a truly exotic and innovative CD that keeps the listener on her toes. Every single track is a unique combination of cultures and playing styles. The performances here are flawless and the guest musicians add a stellar touch. Highly recommended!!!
Elegant, textured music that sounds spare and understated yet is quite complex.
author: The Free Times (Anastasia Pantsios , writer)The founders of Standing Rock Cultural Arts Inc ., a Kent-based non-profit devoted to offering a variety of community arts programs, have a dream: They hope in the not-too-distant future to establish a full-service cultural arts center in Kent. In the meantime, the organization, founded by executive director Jeff Ingram and artistic director Gary Lockwood, presents theater, film festival, visual art exhibits, spoken word and performance art events and concerts in their tiny North Water Street Gallery, as well as other spaces around Kent. Now they've taken a baby step toward their dreams of artistic empire with the launch of SRCA Recordings. “We wanted to do a record label to celebrate the people around here that aren't getting represented,” says Ingram. “We have some great, culturally diverse music around here, and we thought it would be nice to get it out there and promote it more. We're not going to disqualify any music, but the areas we're going to be putting our energy into are the areas that are outside the radar.” SRCA's first release is Temporal Angels , a solo disc by SRCA associate director Mike Hovancsek, well-known in the area for his work with the sonically adventurous Pointless Orchestra. Hovancsek is a musician and visual artist who eagerly crosses artistic and cultural boundaries. He began to play around with unusual approaches to music as a kid when an early attempt to learn guitar met with putdowns from a hotshot teenage guitar teacher. “After a few lessons with him, I thought, ‘I am going to go underground, create my own approach to music, get really good at it and then re-emerge years later with my own approach,'” Hovancsek says. “I spent years making up scales and rhythms and different combinations of sounds. When I started at Kent State, they have just a world class ethno department, so while I was earning my degree in psychology, I was studying Chinese and Japanese music.” Through Kent's ethnomusicology department, Hovancsek got to know musicians from other cultures and had the chance to learn from them. In return, many played on Temporal Angels . In addition to Hovancsek's own work on percussion, cello, koto, sitar, tambura and gu zheng (a form of Chinese zither), the meditative music, which Hovancsek has dubbed “multicultural chamber music,” features guest performances by an impressive line-up of musicians. The list ranges from 82-year-old Egyptian composer Halim El-Dabh, Vietnamese master musician Phong Nguyen and Chinese musician Wah-Chiu Lai to fellow Pointless Orchestra member David Badagnani and the Kent Unitarian Universalist Choir. The result is elegant, textured music that sounds spare and understated yet is quite complex. “I've worked with people where it's just humbling,” says Hovancsek. “I think it's just because I've created this niche that people respect. I'm not a master of Egyptian music like Halim, but I'm doing stuff that's interesting to a guy like him. People who are really high-end like Phong or Halim are fascinated by the next levels of music beyond conventional concepts of how you construct music, and that's what I'm all about.” Hovancsek is quick to note that, despite the use of traditional Asian instruments, he isn't attempting to make traditional music. “A lot of people listen to my solo CD and feel like it's some sort of traditional music. I have a lot of respect for traditional music, but I'm just borrowing elements and mixing it with other things. I did study the traditional stuff, especially from China and Japan, but it seems to me kind of presumptuous to make that my focus because I'm not from those cultures.” Hovancsek's CD release party will feature pieces from Temporal Angels plus some new material “that only exists on the stage at that moment.” He'll be accompanied by his wife Stephanie Workman, percussionist Joe Culley and Pointless Orchestra members Mark Allender and David Badagnani. Three of the pieces will be played to videos designed especially for them. “A lot of our performances combine projected slides, video, dance, lighting and spoken text, with live multicultural music mixed in with all of it,” he says, adding that his goal is to startle people a little. “I'm interested in perception and cognitive processes, and that shapes all the stuff I do,” he says. “The brain is trained to look at something, categorize it and walk away from it. By creating these moments where people are on autopilot, and then putting in something that can't be categorized or conflicts, by mixing elements and sounds that they haven't heard, they have to stop and go, ‘Wait a minute, what is this?' It shuts off the autopilot function, and they're actually present in the moment, dealing with this different thing.”