DELICATE PATHS – Music for shô

Sarah Peebles is a Toronto-based American composer, improviser and installation artist whose distinctive approaches to sound-based art include acoustic and amplified improvisation on the sh? – the Japanese mouth-organ used in gagaku – digitally manipulated found sound, composition and performance, and integrated media works involving native bees, wasps and pollination ecology. Sarah Peebles’ recent explorations of the sh? focus on the instrument’s ethno-botanical and ethno-zoological connections to ancient Asia. In her foreword to ‘Delicate Paths’ she delves into the sh?’s history, evolution and present-day connections to people, habitat, animals and culture.

Contemporary compositions and improvisation have become a part of The sh? repertoire since the 1960s, and its arresting pipe-organ sound has drawn fans from around the world. The music of ‘Delicate Paths’ features acoustic sh? solos, group improvisations with Evan Parker, Nilan Perera and Suba Sankaran, and electroacoustic music, and highlights unusual approaches to recording the sh?. The intimate, dry sound reflects the instrument in its most exposed context.

The listening experience is contemplative and sensuous, immersing one in the luminous sound of this traditional instrument, approached in a contemporary way. Each solo is dedicated to a present or historic element of the sh?. Peebles’ foreword includes images of the instrument’s interiour mechanism and its resinous materials alongside historically-related tropical stingless bees and their resinous nests. The release also features “Arborrations”, a short online video set to “In the Canopy” (track 7), created by Toronto film makers John Creson and Adam Rosen.

Performers:
Sarah Peebles
With Evan Parker, Nilan Perera, Suba Sankaran

Track list:

1. Resinous Fold 7 (for Smoke) Peebles

2. Delicate Path (Murasaki) Parker, Peebles, Perera

3. Resinous Fold 6 (for Trigona) Peebles

4. Delicate Path (Lime) Parker, Peebles, Perera

5. Resinous Fold 2 (for Bamboo) Peebles

6. Delicate Path (Sandalwood) Peebles, Sankaran

7. In the Canopy (Part 1) Peebles

8. Resinous Fold 2+4+3 (for Malachite, Bronze & Cerumen) Peebles

Recording Mastered by: Matt Rogalsky / Memory Device
Cover Photo: Robert Cruickshank
Design: Isabelle Vigier

Reviews:

“Sarah Peebles’ new shô-centred disc Delicate Paths demonstrates a thorough, painterly understanding of this instrument’s saturated astringency in solo, small ensemble, and electroacoustic contexts…Delicate Paths is a very eclectic collection, presenting myriad ideas, but also—and more crucially—a unique and acute sense of poise, focus, and patience.” – Nick Storring (MusicWorks #12)

“Repeated listening revealed music of refinement, occasionally graced with a gentle aural sweetness, which in my imagination at least, resonates with a key component of the sho?’s inner workings.” – Andrew Timar (The Whole Note, Vol 20 No. 4; December 2014)