RAIN INFINITYMIRANDA CUCKSON • MARIEL ROBERTS • EMI FERGUSON • AUGUSTUS ARNONE

BLAIR MCMILLEN • JOHN POPHAM • VASKO DUKOVSKI • JACOB BARTON • DANIEL LIPPEL

C H R I S T O P H E R B A I L E Y

1 Duo 1: Fast 1:46 Miranda Cuckson violin, Mariel Roberts, cello

2 Retreat 15:26

3 Duo 2: Mercurial 1:154 Timelash 9:33 Blair McMillen, piano; John Popham, cello Vasko Dukovski, clarinet; Miranda Cuckson, violin Carl Bettendorf, conductor

5 Duo 3: Dance 2:366 Rain Lullaby 5:38 Jacob Barton, udderbots

7 Duo 4: Amalgam 6:058 Passacaglia After Hall & Oates 2 8:04 Emi Ferguson, flute, Augustus Arnone, piano, Miranda Cuckson, violin

9 Duo 5: Slow 1:4710 Arc of Infinity 16:28 Daniel Lippel, guitar

11 Duo 6: TumbleJig 5:38 Total Time: 74:15

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o t h t h e t r i o , Fantasy-Passacaglia on Hall and Oates 2, and the Duo for violin and cello were begun as pieces for Collide-O-Scope concerts in the early 2010s. At that point, I’d written movements two, three, and five of the Duo. I then expanded the suite to include the brief opening piece, and the two much larger movements.

Retreat was written as a piece for workshopping at Untwelve’s Microtonal Re-treat 2016. I had composed the first third of the piece by the time of the retreat. Af-ter the workshop, I expanded the piece greatly, adding the central “chaos” section

and the long, reflective ending. This recording is a combination of some live acoustic elements and some electronically-realized elements. My model was the beautifully-produced music of Wendy Carlos, such as her album Beauty in the Beast. Retreat is in Just Intonation.

Rain Lullaby was written for Jacob Barton, performing on his Udderbot (blown bottle instru-ment with flexible pitch). I am thankful to his ever-sensitive ear and musicality for bringing this piece to life. Rain Lullaby is in 17 equal-divisions-of-the-octave tuning.

Arc of Infinity was written in the early 2000s. It uses what I called “crystallized Just Intonation”, (but I later discovered was called “intonalism” in some circles) the guitar is tuned in regular old 12-edo tuning, but the chords and harmonies in the electronics crystallize in Just Tuned sonorities around those guitar notes.

Timelash is the oldest piece on this album, dating back to 1999, with a few minor revisions since then.

– Christopher Bailey

B

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The six movement work for violin and cello, performed here by Miranda Cuckson and Mariel Roberts, is spread out through the recording in interstitial interludes. In each of the movements, Bailey establishes a vocabulary of gestures that are shuffled and reordered between the two instruments, creating a glitchy dia-logue. The opening track, “Fast,” contains a series of repetitive mechanisms, composed of strident double stops, accented piz-zicati, and nervous tremolandi. “Mercurial” is restless and em-phatic, as lines lean into closely spaced intervals before darting momentarily in the other direction. “Dance” establishes a more regular groove and playful spirit than the previous two move-ments. “Amalgam” is the longest and most melodramatic duo in the set. Shards of impetuous material burst out from both in-struments, pushing against the boundaries of the constrained motivic vocabulary from which they are made. A wry, whining figure of descending double stops asserts itself occasionally, add-ing a touch of dry humor to the fervent sonic landscape. “Slow”

opens with pads of harmonic color swelling from one instrument to the other. As the movement evolves, punctuated events dot a spare, charged texture. The final duo, and final track on the re-cording, “TumbleJig,” is animated by a similar rhythmic energy to “Dance,” but is more vigorous and jagged. After a rollicking open-ing, modular figures are twisted and turned around like puzzle pieces. Fast, repeated figures appear that evoke fiddle traditions, but through a distorted lens.

Retreat brings the listener from a chaotic street environment, heard in a short pre-recorded fragment at the opening, into a rar-efied world of subtle, tintinnabulating microtonality. A brief pas-sage of otherworldly vocoder style spoken phrases is surrounded by a halo of instrumental samples (what Bailey has termed “vir-tual instruments”) that harmonize the contour of the speech. Gradually, more urgent music eventually leads into a transition featuring stabbing chords that surround a melody on a record-er sound. The tempo accelerates for the following section, with

Christopher Bailey’s music mines eclectic sources of inspiration, channeling those influences through a focused set of compositional tools. Rain Infinity includes works for standard acoustic instrumentations, unconventional instruments, and virtual electronic instruments. Bailey’s approach to the material

across these contexts emphasizes his exploration of microtonality, fragmentary treatment of motivic and rhythmic ideas, and an interest in establishing composite timbral colors.

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percolating rhythmic material supporting a funky bass line in the lower register. Chaotic material on a harpsichord sound provides density before the texture begins to thin, leading into a haunt-ing choir of pipe sounds with occasional rolls evoking a dulcimer. The close of the piece becomes increasingly sparse, as marimba sounds join the harpsichord, pipes, and a brief return of the pro-cessed vocals, for splashes of instrumental color in a dissolving sonic pool.

Written for violin, clarinet, cello, and piano, Timelash (1999) features the largest instrumentation represented on the album, and is also its oldest work. In the piece, Bailey often treats the acoustic ensemble as if it were an electronic instrument, with hy-brid timbres that create unique sound envelopes. The piano is a key catalyst for these gestures, either articulating a pitch that is then sustained and shaped in one of the other instruments, or punctuating the end of a sustained phrase, underscoring a di-chotomy between short versus long that is key to the piece. Swells are passed between the instruments to continue a unified line while highlighting their differences in color. In a climactic pas-sage towards the midpoint of the piece, insistent Morse-code like syncopated attacks on central pitches, initially a minor second away and gradually expanding outward, are anchored by stab-bing non-pitched pizzicato in the violin and flutter tongue in the clarinet. A quasi-recap of material similar to the opening follows, with sounds passed between instruments as linked gestures. The final minute of the piece expertly fuses many of the ideas at play earlier; first we hear a brief echo of the Morse-code rhythmic fig-ures in a sotto voce statement, then a fluid klangfarben phrase, followed by a rare tutti rhythmic unison, before the piece closes with a short hybrid gesture that conjures music from the heyday of electronic studio tape music.

Rain Lullaby is written for an unorthodox instrument, the

udderbot, which is a blown bottle with flexible pitch. Performed here by Jacob Barton, the work relies on repeating oscillations be-tween pitches over which fragmentary melodies are heard, like disembodied foghorns echoing off of the walls of an abandoned river canyon. Barton’s skillful negotiation of the subtle microton-al discrepancies in pitch is notable, a crucial detail that elevates the piece from a novel use of an uncommon instrument to a fas-cinating examination of pitch and timbre.

Passacaglia after Hall and Oates 2 is a follow up to Bai-ley’s solo piano work Fantasy-Passacaglia after Hall and Oates which was included on his New Focus release Glimmering Webs (FCR164). Bailey describes his compositional approach to that work as “minimalism as a way into maximalism,” and a similar deconstructive approach to elemental materials can be heard here. After a quirky, angular flourish to open the piece, a repeated tonic pedal point is passed around the ensemble in a way that melds the colors of the instruments together. The angular flour-ish returns at unpredictable intervals, only to be pacified again by the static pedal point. The piano breaks the stasis with accented pitches a minor second above and minor third below the original central pitch, as new off-kilter grooves evolve from interlocking patterns. Embedded in these mechanisms are melodic fragments and occasional, airy pop chord voicings. Only in the final sec-tion of the piece do we hear music that is not subject to dissec-tion; first the violin and then the flute play lyrical melodies over a harmonic pad in the piano. In this case, the minimalism Bailey speaks of refers to the limited motivic and harmonic materials he lifts from a pop sensibility, and he applies a maximalist approach to generate myriad permutations of musical components.

Arc of Infinity places the guitar inside a sonic house of mir-rors composed of three "virtual instruments": bell-like sounds, a “dirty sampler” composed out of guitar notes from recent re-

corded repertoire, and flanged/delayed/filtered sounds. Bailey writes, "Although the guitar is tuned in the usual fashion, a lot of overtone-based "half-diminished" and "dominant 7th" har-monies are found throughout; these relate to the fact that the harmonies of the work often coalesce in Just Intonation around whatever pitch(es) the guitar happens to be focusing on at a given moment." The piece is divided into three large sections charac-terized by dense passages of rhythmically complex coordination between performer and electronics, alternating with three lyrical, solo guitar soliloquies.

Bailey casts a wide net in gathering his source material and then manipulates it with a rigorous and targeted intensity. The result is music that is dynamic and taut, but also playful and sometimes dryly humorous. While Rain Infinity skews more con-sistently towards modernist aesthetics than his earlier keyboard compilation Glimmering Webs, Bailey’s work resists easy catego-rization, and it is this unique stance towards an amalgam of mu-sical interests that makes his music so engaging and unique.

– Daniel Lippel

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Retreat (chorus)

Trial saints are speaking out

amongst the people

that see to their ev'ryday needs.

Borous populism inflates

their ev'ryday desires with impeachable half-truths.

---

Incoming signals

Spider

Green silver

Woops-ee-doo

Frightened Dreamer

Pine Central Control

Angry maelstrom

Wintertime

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Christopher Baileychristopherbaileymusic.com

Daniel Lippeldanlippel.com

Blair McMillenpianoblair.com

Emi Fergusonemiferguson.com

Mariel Robertsmarielroberts.com

Augstus ArnonePianist: augustusarnone.com

Mastering: hangingbellrecords.com

John Pophamjohnpatrickpopham.com

Vasko Dukovskidukovski.com

Miranda Cucksonmirandacuckson.com

All tracks produced by Christopher Bailey, except Arc of Infinity produced by Christopher Bailey and Daniel Lippel

Mixing by Christopher Bailey and Augustus ArnoneMastering by Augustus Arnone, hangingbellrecords.com

All tracks recorded at Oktaven Audio by Ryan Streber oktavenaudio.com except Rain Lullaby (recorded by Augustus Arnone at the Gesundheit! Institute) and Retreat, realized by Christopher Bailey

Special thanks to Thomas Scheurich and Clem Fortuna for their acoustic contributions to Retreat

Cover art: Lucas BaileyBack cover: adapted from Rasalhague by Bruce Bailey, brucce.comDesign: Marc Wolf, marcjwolf.com

Thanks to my family for adapting to my musical activities and unpredictable sleep schedule.

© Christopher Bailey 2021, All Rights Reserved, All Music Licensed by BMI.

Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited by Law

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