Outer Sounds 001 - November 2020

The selection for November 2020 is Ellen Fullman’s Music For The Man Who Grew Common In Wisdom LP released by Besom Presse. The pieces on this record were commissioned by Deborah Hay for a 1987 dance performance in Austin, Texas. In Austin, Ellen met the recording engineer Glenn English who gave her access to his home studio & equipment. She created these pieces with a Studer Revox tape machine, a Sennheiser stereo microphone, a PCM digital processor (an early form of digital recorder that used VHS tapes to store the digital information) and most importantly the, new at the time, Prophet 2000 sampling keyboard (using an early Macintosh computer to control it). The Prophet sampler became the main composing tool for this music. She recorded & sampled many different sound sources: pieces of glass on stone, blowing on a bottle, water splashing in a bathtub, resonant pieces of cedar made into a large wind chime, a toy guitar, room tone / ambience, starter pistols, crowd noises, calliope music and her own humming voice. Then these elements were collaged & layered into discrete episodes to make the final pieces. While this music feels like a departure from her more well known work with the Long String Instrument, Ellen told me that she had worked with musique concrete & tape techniques before and she has also used collaging & sampling techniques with her Long String Instrument. Check out our interview with Ellen Fullman below about this album & her music in general!