Katie Porter is an American. Brooklyn-based experimental bass clarinetist-composer, who creates structures for music perception in space and time (over lifetimes or subtle daily increments/abstractions), and the co-founder of the venue Listen/Space in Brooklyn, where she curates the Listen/Space Commissions, responsible for 46 new works for mixed chamber groups.

Conversation No. 1/ Collecting Rocks from the Places We’ve Been is Porter’s debut solo album, featuring her playing bass clarinet with pre-recorded bass clarinet. The album was recorded at the ISSUE Project Room in Brooklyn in February 2024, while she was an Artist-In-Residence.. Porter also took the cover photo in Lava Flows at Snow Canyon State Park in Utah.

The fourteen short, minimalist, intimate, and contemplative pieces of Conversation No. 1/ Collecting Rocks from the Places We’ve Been are frameworks for pitches and relative rhythms. These pieces can be performed in the format of a duo, trio, or, as Porter hopes, «maybe someday with many, many bass clarinets, or in collaboration with other artists».

Porter suggests a cycle of highly ethereal, resonant, and fragile pieces. She thinks of this cycle as «music that collapses and expands on itself, where we are free to choose the phrases, iterations, and lean into the occurrences of overlapping tones, vibrations, multi-phonics, and all those strange, spatial resulting extra harmonies».

These thought-provoking, slow-shifting pieces embrace change and impermanence, in ourselves as individuals, or about global climate change. According to Porter, this cycle addresses «our mundane lives in the weather, and the extremes we can’t always see, can’t always adjust to, can’t quite comprehend, in our current world».

Eyal Hareuveni

Katie Porter (bass clarinet, pre-recorded bass clarinet)