PULSING DOT

DAFNA NAPHTALI AND GORDON BEEFERMAN

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Dafna Naphtali and Gordon Beeferman perform duet pieces for voice and piano with kinetic sound processing, fractal rhythms, and general polyphonic/kaleidophonic disturbances. Beeferman fleshes out protean fragments into strikingly visceral structures and landscapes that take the piano to its limit. Naphtali augments her high-energy live Max/MSP processing of Beeferman’s piano with extended vocal techniques/sounds/multi-modal singing and her custom take on hand and voice-activated electronics. Not just manipulation of live sound, this is a feedback loop of seamless interaction between two remarkable musicians. These pieces are improvised and were created entirely in the moment without overdubs or edits.

Compositions by Dafna Naphtali (voice, live sound-processing and electronics) and Gordon Beeferman (piano)

Recorded November 15, 2014 at the James L. Dolan Recording Studio, New York University, New York City.
Recording Engineer Aybar Aydin

Mix by Gordon Beeferman and Dafna Naphtali
Mastering by Kato Hideki

Cover: View From Jupiter ©2016 Julia Stoops
Graphic design by Leah Beeferman

SONIC SEDUCER
Dafna Naphtali has been working on electronic extensions of her voice and other instruments for some twenty years, often in the context of multi-channel audio installations. New York City’s Gordon Beeferman is a composer and pianist who likes to move between genres and collaborate with choreographers, poets and video artists. For the joint composition “Pulsing Dot” the two bring together their convincing efforts of voice and piano, passing them through various self-created Max/MSP programs. The degree of software intervention ranges from discreet to radical. Classic passages suddenly mutate into pulled and stretched chewing gum, in addition to shrills and whistles from the virtual effect devices. For the purist anything but a real pleasure. (Sascha Bertoncin)

TO PERIODIKO
A truly peculiar duet, Dafna Naphtali and Gordon Beeferman, performing in Pulsing Dot vocal and piano compositions with kinetic sound processing, rhythm fragments, and general polyphonic disturbances. The intense fragmented and improvisational piano play, popped up by Naphtali’s Diamanda Galas vocals, through Max / MSP, creates micro-sounds and rhythms and multimodal singing, supplemented by electro electronics. Without additional processing and overdubs, the pieces are built on the spot with incredible creativity and dare to say, with symmetry!

DOWNTOWN MUSIC GALLERY
Featuring Dafna Naphtali on voice, live processing and electronics and Gordon Beeferman on piano. Experimental vocalist, Dafna Naphtali, has recorded with Chuck Bettis, Kitty Brazelton and Hans Tammen and takes time between each and every project. Jazz pianist and new music composer, Gordon Beeferman, has worked with Jeff Arnal, James Ilgenfritz and Michael Evans. Mr. Beeferman had a great disc on Innova from last year which featured a fine quintet. This duo jus something else entirely! There are several layers of interaction going on here simultaneously. Listening closely reveals another layer or two, minimal piano with hushed electronics at first. The vocals are often kept to minimum and well used for their sonic qualities: shapes, textures, unique sounds. Mr. Beeferman also experiments by playing inside the piano and rubbing, fanning or banging on the strings. It took a while to adjust to this disc, as it creates another world, an alien-sounding environment that is both fascinating and at times disorienting. What works so well is that things evolve slowly, a dreamy yet strange voice, sparse Feldman/Cagian piano and careful electronic fragments combine forces which are consistently mesmerizing. Outside today (October 26, 2017), it is gray, a bit cold rather dismal looking. The music here seems to reflect this vibe. Sipping some chai tea with honey fits perfectly. (Bruce Lee Gallanter)

VITAL WEEKLY
Gordon Beeferman (piano) and Dafna Naphtali (voice, live electro-sound-processing) present their first album. Beeferman is composer, improviser and pianist. He composed work for the New York City opera Orchestra and California EAR Unit. Naphtali is a sound/artist, vocalist, electronic musicians and guitarist. She is a performer of composed new music as well as improvised music. They play ‘duet pieces and improvisations for piano and voice with kinetic sound processing, fractal rhythms, and general polyphonic/kaleidophonic disturbances’. It is not just live manipulation of the piano sounds, but also a feedback system that shapes their interactions. This is an extraordinary and stunning release. Not just by the unique procedures, but also because of the musical interesting and satisfying result. Even more when one realizes that no overdubs or edits were done. Everything was recorded on November 15th, 2014 in a New York studio. Their avant-garde improvisations start from extended vocal techniques by Naphatali and the piano playing by Beeferman. But by the sound processing the music and its sound-spectrum are very much extended and multidimensional. This is almost of orchestral and theatrical proportions to use an inadequate comparison. The music really breathes and is full of energy, not losing itself in meaningless experimentalism and stays focused and very together. (DM)

 

“Dafna and I share many common sensibilities with our backgrounds in and love for jazz (both straight-ahead and avant-garde), new-music, and other traditional and experimental vocal and instrumental traditions. One of the many pleasures of playing with Dafna is her sense of rhythmic intensity and complexity, which she has not simply built into her Max programs, but is able to control brilliantly in real time. This sense of rhythmic play — crazy polyrhythms, abrupt tempo shifts, and the like — takes us far away from standard electronic music into a free-wheeling, challenging realm where anything can (and does) happen. What I experience with Dafna as she live-processes my playing is not simply the sense that the sound-world of my instrument has been magically expanded — but that my ideas come back to haunt me, filtered, looped, fragmented, enlarged, or otherwise transformed in ways that I don’t completely understand, and which I have to reckon with and try to match. It’s a thrilling challenge with, for me, thrilling results.”

—Gordon Beeferman

“Playing with Gordon, I take on two roles — that of an electronic musician and live sound-processor and my second role as a singer. Whenever we play together, I am totally active, creating new things out of his piano sounds on the fly (no recordings!), aiming to get way beyond simple effects or sampling mimicry, and into something truly interactive, and to feel that my electronics are a real and physical instrument that I play.

These are my two roles, my dichotomy — at times complementary and sometimes in friendly contrast, as I process my own voice, or create complex sounds or rhythms out of feedback or piano sounds, and then sing with what I created, adding overtones like some kind of demented singer/songwriter.

But, with Gordon, my fellow musical eclectic and foil, the breakdown of categories and roles are only half the fun; we can go in any musical direction and find communication. Gordon’s responses to my electronic manipulations are always surprising, instantaneous, visceral and speed-chess intellectual reactions so complex as to sound thoroughly composed — giddily keeping me on my toes and keeping me exploring every moment. And yes, very fun.

—Dafna Naphtali


WESTZEIT
Accompanied by piano clusters and severe electronic disturbances, Dafna Naphtali and Gordon Beeferman feature an overwrought, partially manipulated operatic voice on Pulsing Dot. Novel colours and noises in a delicate union. 4/5

CHAIN D.L.K.
Pulsing Dot represents a truly interesting collaboration that takes Gordon Beeferman’s avantgarde and edgy piano playing and feeds it to Dafna Naphtali who uses live processing and electronics to twist and compliment it on the fly. Naphtali also adds sparse and sympathetic vocalised elements.

Five lengthy pieces each evolve with ebbing levels from quiet to cacophony. Opener Transmission is imbued with a very sinister and foreboding tone, the alien bass notes and tensely hammered high piano keys feeling very suspenseful. Surface Disturbances is a more staccato affair, both voice and piano being used in a more spontaneous and percussive manner that’s rather theatrical. That attitude continues through Ozone Tongues which explores the lower registers more resonantly, adding warbling, slightly throat-singing-esque vocal wails as it progresses.

The well-thought-out evolution continues into Elegy For Bones, where the rumbling becomes more bubbly, the piano notes more pure and the vocal more operatic as it slowly unfolds into something more like a sonic daylight. Orbiter loops us back to a more frantic and again quite theatrical environment of short and fast-triggered vocals racing against relentless piano runs, which towards the end feels like it’s slowing, before a U-turn and build to a chaotic climax.

The result overall has the essence and energy of 1960’s experimental classical and electronic music, when this kind of performance would truly have felt like a new frontier, but baked with modern sharp-edged digital production touches that make it modern. It travels quite deep and doesn’t always brim with energy, but nevertheless it’s an interesting ride and a very successful collaboration.

SIGIL OF BRASS
…Dafna Naphtali and Gordon Beeferman’s Pulsing Dot release. And mighty fine it is too.

Recorded in New York, Pulsing Dot has been sent here, close to York, North Yorkshire for a listen – I was enthralled from the outset and inspired to dig deeper in to the respective musicians back catalogues.

Dafna Naphtali is a singer/instrumentalist/electronic-musician. She composes and performs experimental, interactive electro-acoustic music and has done so for 20+ years. She prefers to use her custom Max/MSP programming for live sound processing of voice and other instruments – and Pulsing Dot is a good example of such work. Naphtali has also produced works for multi-channel audio and musical robots and drawing on her wide-ranging musical background in jazz, classical, rock and near-eastern music, performing in the US, Europe, India, Russia and the Middle East. Current projects include “Audio Chandelier”, multi- channel audio work presented in NY and Berlin (Urban Solar Audio Plant), and at IX 2017 Symposium “Embodied Spaces” Montreal with 157 speakers.

Gordon Beeferman is a composer, pianist, and improviser from New York City. An eclectic and omnivorous musician who straddles numerous genres, he has created and performed innovative opera, chamber and orchestra music, avant-jazz, and numerous collaborations with choreographers, writers, and video artists. He has received commissions from the Fromm Foundation, the BMI Foundation, and Concert Artists Guild, three BMI Student Composer Awards, a Tanglewood fellowship, and residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Copland House, and Ucross. He is a 2016 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow.

Naphtali & Beeferman have hit the nail on the head with this release – they perform duet pieces together as a collective whole; it does not sound like two separate entities working alongside each other – it sounds like an organic whole with a focused purpose.

Beeferman fleshes out protean piano sketches – taking the instrument to its limits and the extended vocal techniques of Naphtali are varied, eclectic and always on point. I am unsure whether the piano was process through the electronic set up, it sounds kind of pure as the bones that the body of the work, the high energy contrast of Naphtali’s multi-modal singing, hang on. It works towards a whole…

Less a manipulation of live sound as a feedback loop of seamless interaction between two skilled musicians. These pieces were created as improvisations with no over dubs or re-edits.

 

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