Music for Saxophone & Electronics

[LINER NOTE]

The differences seem stark: the gritty maximalism of Edwin Hillier’s multi-movement Port Dundas: Traced Landscapes a far cry from the cultivated restraint that characterises Hunter Coblentz’s singular Phoenix. And yet, for all this is a disc of contrasts, the works for saxophone and electronics presented here are bound together by a shared fragility and sense of reflection. Hillier delves into the fallibility of memories and our shifting connection to place, while Coblentz contemplates the transience of self and identity. Both have reached a point where they want to
pause, look back, and linger on what has been, resulting in two considered and deeply personal reckonings with time, memory, and transformation. These elusive concepts are given form through a mutual embrace of musical instability: delicate and volatile textures, sounds, and techniques can be found across otherwise divergent musical canvases.

In Port Dundas: Traced Landscapes Hillier seeks to grasp places past. Each movement is named after somewhere of personal significance, with the title pointing to the importance for Hillier of Port Dundas on the Forth Clyde Canal in Glasgow. But it is the reference to ‘traced landscapes’ that is key, as these richly layered vignettes move beyond the evocations of place that have been such a mainstay of musical history; these are landscapes as reimagined ‘through the subjectivities of memory’. Hillier’s preoccupation with texture and timbre sees him make use of a decidedly tactile sonic palette for his fragmentary sketches of once tangible environments. From field and environmental recordings, to a grainy Dictaphone performance of a long-abandoned string quartet, Hillier revels in an abundance of raw material which he manipulates, filters, transforms, heightens, and allows to decay – often with the use of analogue electronic techniques.

There is also the playing of saxophonist David Zucchi. Zucchi is a specialist in extended techniques and alternate intonation, something which makes him the ideal collaborator for Hillier and Coblentz, who both draw on his
knowledge and expertise. But his role in the creation of Port Dundas was more extensive still, as Hillier not only recorded set material, but pushed Zucchi to experiment with recording over himself, asked him to respond to and emulate other instrumental sounds, and captured long improvisations (one of which is used in full on the title track ‘Port Dundas’). He is an active part of the creative process, and the impact is clear: Zucchi’s saxophone emerges as a virtuosic and often vivid presence across the movements, though his technical skill is only one aspect exploited. For Hillier, the physicality of Zucchi’s performance, and the issue of instrumental materiality is also worthy of exploration. We hear the clicks and thuds of fingers on keys, the rush of air as breaths are snatched between phrases, and the pops and clunks of pads pressed and released. The often grimy reality of a body interacting with a mechanical object, and the labour and effort involved, is built into the sonic collage; it is all just so palpably human.

Indeed, Port Dundas is defined by its corporeality. Hillier’s landscapes may be blurred and fragmented, but they are saturated with sensory detail; the at times excessive textural depth of each movement is rooted in something physical and tangible. These are places that have been inhabited and felt, whether personally or as a point of connection. In reaching towards these places – or more specifically, in exploring the shifting residue of these places – Hillier finds himself grappling with where he is now. The past becomes a site of continual renegotiation.

Coblentz also looks back, but in Phoenix he rejects the external world, the world of flesh and material reality, and turns inward. The tactile physical places that so concern Hillier are replaced by an abstract psychological space in which Coblentz reflects on parenthood and self. The title refers to the name of Coblentz’s second child, to whom it is dedicated, with it written at a time when, in Coblentz’s words, he was ‘thinking about that part of our identities that we lose when we have children, and the additional vulnerabilities we accept’. The result is a work of almost
crystalline purity: an extended meditation built on the carefully calibrated interplay between Zucchi’s alto saxophone and sine tones. It unfurls slowly, and often quietly, over 19 minutes, with the saxophone tracing a finely wrought line across the piece – sometimes alone, sometimes supported, enveloped, or in dialogue with sine tones.

Issues of tuning and timbre emerge as a focus, with Coblentz employing septimal just intonation and exploring the sonorous implications of bringing together saxophone and electronics. As he writes, the saxophone and electronics should ‘blend into one another’, a statement underscoring a pursuit of a seamlessly integrated soundscape. This forms part of the wider ongoing exploration of timbral nuance that permeates Coblentz’s practice. In fact, Phoenix shares much aesthetically with an earlier piece, Lattice (2018), for four performers and 27 glasses. That, too, is a sustained single movement using novel tuning, with the listener bathed in the effect – strange and luminous, due to the glasses – produced by the gradual shifting of closely stacked intervals. Despite decidedly different resources,
Phoenix has a similar textural translucency and impact. Through a creative yet tightly controlled handling of acoustic and electronic materials, each seemingly simple note change reveals new harmonic tensions and resonances.

More broadly, there is a desire to distil and refine. Coblentz’s musical vocabulary suggests a search for an ideal, perhaps even aspiring to what is musically pure; certainly, notions of purity are linked to just intonation (with its whole-number interval ratios), and to sine tones, which present pure sound (single frequencies without harmonics). Yet the result is not sanitised: Phoenix is too fragile and brittle, too demanding of thoughtful consideration. Its language is spare and at times haunting, with Coblentz’s economical, and often restrictive, deployment of his materials enhancing its interiority. Through its quiet intimacy, it invites reflection, creating space – or distance – from the world outside.

Sophie Redfern

[TRACK LISTING]

Edwin Hillier
Port Dundas: Traced Landscapes (24/25)

1. Church Rise
2. Red Hackle
3. Ella’s Wynd
4. Monkwearmouth
5. Port Dundas

Hunter Coblentz
Phoenix

6. Phoenix (2024)

[40’51]

[ALBUM CREDITS]

Saxophone: David Zucchi
www.davidzucchi.com

Mixing & Mastering: Edwin Hillier & Hunter Coblentz

Booklet Design/Photography: David Lee

Recorded 10 & 19 September 2024 in Gipsy Hill, London

Copyright © 2025 Edwin Hillier & Hunter Coblentz
All rights reserved.