Premiere // Yves de Mey on Composer Built

An intriguing new compilation has been announced, taking the natural resonances of custom-built stones to create music. The stones, which don't look dissimilar to the Arrival spaceships, are at once objects of primordiality and futurism. The idea of making music from stones is so pre-historic that it is almost unsettling. This is a depiction of music at its origins: centuries before instrument crafting, millennia before recorded sound. Yet the stones used on this album have been cut with laser precision within a hair's breadth margin, to optimise the acoustic resonances of the object. Consequently, the sounds are strangely exotic, bursting with a riveting modernity.

This sense of modernity is bolstered by the artists featured on the record, all of whom operate at the cutting edge of contemporary music. The album comes bundled with a sound stone sample pack containing audio samples of the Halliday/Fessmann sound stone, as used on this album by the other artists. The album consists of nine experimental interpretations by a star-studded line up, featuring Jasmine Guffond, Paul Jebanasam, Afonso Ferreira, Tomonari Nozaki, James Leyland Kirby, Steven M Halliday, Monty Adkins, Yves De Mey and Rutger Zuydervelt.

Sound and Stone forms the final phase of Steven M Halliday's two-year research project into the Fessmann sound stones at the University of Huddersfield. You can hear the full Sound and Stone project on 26th October with Composer Built. Below, stream the mind-bending contribution from Yves de Mey as an exclusive for Stray Landings. You can also head over to the Composer Built Bandcamp to listen to other excerpts from Machinefabriek and Jasmine Guffond.

• Published
• Sep 23, 2018

• Credits
• Words by Georgie_McVicar