Australian, Melbourne-based composer-clarinetist Aviva Endean has developed an impressive capacity for creating work that merges intense sonic control – of breath, of the clarinet, and of composition, and a willingness to allow the music to lead. Moths & Stars is her second solo album (following Cinder: Ember: Ashes, Sofa Music, 2018), and now she attempts to offer sounds that are freed from being confined to one place, one time, or even one perspective. And furthermore, a listening experience that has a right-up-in-your-ear kind of intimacy – so close, that you could hear the beating of a moth’s wing, but I also wanted the listener to experience the expansiveness of the recorded space, like the vast night sky.
In the intuitive and explorative composing process of Moths & Stars, the microphones became extensions of Endean’s instruments, ready to capture the microscopic, creating tones of feedback that captivated her or zooming out to capture multiple acoustic spaces. Endean let her new pieces take her and noticed how new relationships were formed as she folded multiple time-spaces in and over each other. She used sounds from her archives, then reimagined and transformed these sounds, revisited microtonal humming she recorded for a sound design project, and used a Leslie speaker to spin her bass clarinet sound around the microphones, creating bass tones emerging as waves out of the densely layered pitches, or played with e-bows and magnets.
The six pieces of Moths & Stars are quiet and mysterious, intimate and introspective, and, obviously, ethereal soundscapes, carefully layered and with suggestive and elusive, cinematic qualities. Often, you may feel that Endean places the listener inside her clarinet or bass clarinet while she explores her inventive, extended breathing techniques and fragile, resonant, microtonal and feedback sounds, or somewhere in the remote and isolated Australian outbacks, where every sound matters.
An imaginative and beautiful sonic vision of a truly original composer-musician.
Eyal Hareuveni
Aviva Endean (cl, bcl, field rec)
