[S05E05] November 2023 - Andrew Levine

(photo credit: © 2022 Nuno Martins)


The November 2023 episode of the Theremin 30 podcast features ambient, experimental, and improvisational music from the USA, England, Australia, Portugal, and Germany. Host Rick Reid interviews Andrew Levine about his recent album Quadruple Quadrature Questions. (photo credit: © 2022 Nuno Martins)

FEATURED MUSIC*

*The full-length recordings featured in this show were used with the knowledge and permission of the artists and composers. Please support the artists by visiting their websites, purchasing their recordings, and attending their performances. 

ADDITIONAL MUSIC

INTERVIEW GUEST

CALENDAR OF THEREMIN EVENTS

MEDIA LINKS

CONTACT

CREDITS 

Copyright 2023 Rick Reid 


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TRANSCRIPT

Please note: This transcript was created with the help of speech-to-text AI.  It may contain some errors.

David Brower  0:04  
This is Theremin 30. 30 minutes of Theremin music news events and interviews with a new episode about every 30 days. Now here's your host from Denver, Colorado, USA, Rick Reid.

Rick Reid  0:19  
Hey, welcome to the November 2023 episode of the Theremin 30 podcast. For the next half hour I've got some new and not so new Theremin music from around the globe. I think we can all agree that the Theramin is an unconventional instrument that can be used to play conventional music. On past episodes, we've heard jazz, pop, rock, classical and other familiar styles. This time around though, I'm going to feature some unconventional music, ambient, experimental and improvisational performances that take the theorem and in some interesting and unusual directions. We'll hear recordings by Eric Ross, Chris Conway and Peter Whitehouse, and My special guest this month is Andrew Levine from Hamburg, Germany. He has several new albums out and we'll be talking about how he recorded one of them during his concert tour of Portugal earlier this year. And I do want to mention up front that the music selections for this episode were a bit too long to neatly fit in the 30 minute format of the show. So I'll be playing excerpts from the full length recordings. To get our Sonic journey started. Let's go back to the future from the 2014 Eric Ross album Music from the future here is a track called Pluto's court.

We started the show with a track called Pluto's cord from the 2014 Eric Ross album Music from the future for Theramin and ensemble. If you aren't familiar with Eric, be sure to check out my interview with him and the June 2019 episode of Theremin 30. After that, I played Theremin immersion a brand new track from Chris Conway. It's from his Theremin ocean dreams album, which is actually a stripped down reworking of his deep ocean dreams album. Chris edited a single version exclusively for this podcast. After the break, I've got the Theremin 30 calendar of events and another dreamy experimental Theremin performance from Peter Whitehouse. Then later in the show. I'll interview Andrew Levine about his new album quadruple quadrature questions. So stay tuned.

It's time now for a look at that Theremin 30 calendar of Theremin events. On Thursday, November 23. Charlotte Dubois has a concert in Turku of France on Saturday, November 25. The radio science orchestra performs at the National Space Centre in Leicester, England. On Sunday, the 26th supernormal are onstage in Portland, Maine, USA. On December 2, Torvalds. Jorgensen performs with the castle state orchestra in Kassel, Germany. It's the first of several concerts they're featuring film score music. On December 16. Miss Terry performs holiday music with organist Yan Willem doctor in our house Germany, and on December 17, electric storks are performing and Rotterdam, Netherlands. For details about these events and many more, check out the interactive calendar on Theramin thirty.com. If you have a Theramin related event you'd like me to list on the calendar send me a note with all the details you can reach me with the contact form on the Theremin 30 website. Peter White House of Brisbane Australia is a relative newcomer to that Theremin. But he has already shared some really interesting experimental recordings on his SoundCloud page. Here's an ambient drone piece he calls stretched cacophony.

That was stretched cacophony by Peter Whitehouse. You can find more of his experimental Theramin recordings on SoundCloud under his username Wanko 42. Right after this break, I chat with Andrew Levine. So stay right where you are.

Andrew Levine is an experimental electronic recording artists based in Hamburg, Germany. He has at least six albums out this year, including one called quadruple quadrature questions. I caught up with Andrew a few weeks ago to ask a few questions of my own. Andrew Levine, thank you so much for being on the Theremin 30 podcast.

Andrew Levine  16:05  
Yeah, thanks for the invitation. Rick, I'm happy to be here.

Rick Reid  16:09  
You have some of the most interesting and different music than I've ever played on the show. I don't know if you'd call it new music or experimental. What's the word you give for that style of music you play? Well, I

Andrew Levine  16:20  
usually say free improvised music, but there is actually so many potential names for that. The first one, actually talking about this kind of music was Karlheinz Stockhausen. And he called it intuitive music.

Rick Reid  16:37  
What does that mean to you?

Andrew Levine  16:38  
Well, it means to me that basically you go into a concert or a recording session with like, no preconceived ideas. The only thing you will definitely talk about his how long you're going to be playing. And maybe who was going to start, but sometimes even that is not defined.

Rick Reid  16:55  
There are no rules other than the length of the performance. 

Andrew Levine  16:59  
Yeah, there are really no rules, you would listen to what is happening, good listen to what happens when you try to play the instrument. I mean, we all know the Theramin. So especially if you try to use the full range, so maybe like five or six octaves or something, then the techniques that are developed for what I call Theramin plus, so just using the Thurman to determine the pitch and using my other hand to mix different cameras in real time, you don't really know what you're going to be getting. I mean, you know, this is going to be a high note, this is going to be a low note, this is going to be somewhere in between. But depending on which Thurman you play, is the ether wave. Or is it the Clara Vox which is quite linear,

Rick Reid  17:46  
you play the open Theremin to you. 

Andrew Levine  17:49  
Yeah, I play the open Theremin. And that's actually really nice for for traveling because it's really small as everyone else. And it's quite a good Theramin. And the calibration function works well, although sometimes it drifts. But with this kind of music, you can basically also depend a bit on what you get from the instrument. The thing is, if you try to listen to what is happening with your fellow musicians, and if you just like see what you get from the instrument, you're going to find, hopefully, find the direction that you want to move in and then you just take that direction, and then possibly you pick up something that here somewhere else or you're contrasted, you try to develop a small melody just because you feel like it, you might quote something I mean, why not? You just try to keep an open mind and see where the music will take you

Rick Reid  18:44  
Did you start out with more traditional mainstream music education?

Andrew Levine  18:48  
Yeah, so I've been playing the violin since I was about six years of age. And then at some point, I started singing. And when I was about 1718, I spent one year in the United States on a scholarship in McLean, Virginia, I went to school with like a lot of music possibilities, and I wasn't a choir and in an orchestra and choir was just like so much easier. You don't have to practice on like, nobody expects a singer to train for six hours a day. And that's the normal time you have to spend playing the violin. So I gradually drifted from violent towards singing then I started taking singing lessons and enjoy that very much. And when I came across a Thurman and it came, like across my path several times, watching some YouTube videos, something and in 2010 I decided to just go ahead and buy one and I got the ether wave plus because I thought well has this interesting possibility of also taking out control voltages and using that for something I didn't have any idea what it was about, actually, at that point, but I thought really cute my options open. And the moment I set up the Thurman the moment it had, like warmed up and and was able to do something I realized why it made sense to have studied violin that long and have studied boys because it's like so close, you have to be able to correct quickly when you're like slightly off or more than slightly off. And you have to praise in a way that it's like a vocal ease, like when you're singing. So all of these things helped me but of course, I still came from a background of written music. So you have a sheet of music, and you can read it and you can just play with a violin, you can sing it, whatever. 

Rick Reid  20:39  
Now you've had a really busy year, you did a tour of Portugal and recorded several performances and put that out as an album. You've got a new album out quad, Dre. 

Andrew Levine  20:50  
It's quadruple quad what your questions.

Rick Reid  20:54  
And what is that title mean? 

Andrew Levine  20:57  
Well, we have four people asking all kinds of questions. And we were like set up in kind of like, square shaped arrangement. And stuff was just like bouncing around from one to the other. And I just had this idea that oh, this sounds like a crazy title for the crazy music that is like behind that.

Rick Reid  21:21  
Now was this recorded in a studio? 

Andrew Levine  21:25  
Yeah, I was in Lisbon, the end of April. So I did like some solo concerts. And then I went to Porto, for one I came back to Lisbon. And Ernesto, the alto player picked me up on May 1, which was actually not that easy, because there was a demonstration going on in the middle of town. And he got out of his car and waved at me and I saw Rocky, that must be the guys. So there was two of us AirMesh to go to Vegas, the alto player and Hulu Pena, he plays bass clarinet. And we drove for a while to a small studio outside of Lisbon that is owned by flax, and he's a guitar player who comes from the rock music. But he's grown tired of rock music and is very much interested in trying something new and finding new things and working with the experimental music scene here and he has a small studio, which is quite cramped.

Rick Reid  22:24  
And then you have more than just your Theremin in your corner of the room.

Andrew Levine  22:29  
This was a more reduced set because I was flying. I took the open Thurman, I took small modular rig, because the open Thurman has these beautiful control voltage outputs. So you can do a lot of stuff with that. And I took the stereo field, I took a cracker box. And I took the Zoma pipe microphone. On this trip,

Rick Reid  22:49  
the stereo field, it's got like circles with metal contacts that you touch with your fingers.

Andrew Levine  22:55  
It's actually like a crackerbox, a double crackerbox and steroids. More or less.

Rick Reid  23:01  
We'll have to have listeners look up a cracker box. Yeah. And that's something that Yeah, well defies definition, probably.

Andrew Levine  23:07  
Yeah, it's actually the first circuit bending instrument, which was developed in the 1970s. And you have these six touch plates that you can connect with your fingers. And basically you become part of the circuit. So I really like that disparity between Thurman where you don't touch, and the cracker box and the stereo field where you do touch because if you don't, there is like nothing happening. And you can use the stereo field to make all kinds of crazy noises. But you can also use it to create control voltages. You can also use it to process audio. It's an amazing instrument.

Rick Reid  23:49  
Do you use hand signals? Or is there any other way that you can communicate with the fellow musicians while you're recording and while you're performing?

Andrew Levine  23:57  
Well, mostly you just listen very, very attentively to what's going on. Because that's also an indicator if you like being too loud, I mean, you you're supposed to be able to listen to everything that's happening. So en esto he plays like very, very gentle stuff on his alto. So he's like fiddling along, or like I don't know, we're using the word from his bowl to make like very, very soft sounds. And then there is Bruno. He's making louder or softer sounds with the bass clarinet. And then there's the electronics coming in from flax, and you basically listening to everything and that's actually the best connection because you can listen 360 degrees, you can hear everything that's going on around the view. Whereas if you look someplace, you can only like connect to one or two people that are standing where you're looking, 

Rick Reid  24:52  
and how can people listen to your album or better yet, buy it. 

Andrew Levine  24:55  
It's available now on Bandcamp of course, but also on Apple Music iTunes, Amazon mp3 I mean you can get this album, quadrupled quadrature questions you can find that basically everywhere right now

Rick Reid  25:09  
to wrap up this episode of experimental Theremin music here's an extended excerpt from quadruple quadrature questions this track is called Dream of the Bumblebee you can hear the full length version of this track on Bandcamp.

Thank you so much for joining me once again on Theremin 30 And thanks to this episode's featured artists Eric Ross, Chris Conway, Peter Whitehouse and my special guest Andrew Levine. Be sure to click on their name links and this month's show notes. And as always a special thanks to the listeners who support this podcast with small one time or monthly donations. Until next time, I'm your host Rick Reid. I'll see you again soon somewhere in the ether.

David Brower  29:48  
You've been listening to the theorem 30 podcast visit Theremin 30 on the web at Theremin 30 dot com.
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