The visually gorgeous, sonically rich and artistically inventive performances on Sculpting Sound feature a dozen of music’s most forward-looking artists playing with, and on, sound sculptures by Harry Bertoia. Presented by Pyroclastic Records and premiering on the Winter Solstice, December 21, 2023 at 10:27 p.m. ET, SculptingSound.org offers free and complete access to a series of revelatory performances recorded at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. The musicians were given unprecedented access Bertoia’s sculptures. The results blur the lines between music and visual art and provide an opportunity to hear strikingly fresh and innovative work from some of the most vital improvisers of our time and to explore Bertoia’s work, not just visually, but as he fully intended: sonically. At the heart of the website is the collection of six high-definition concert films. Each hour-plus long concert places two musicians famed for their distinctive voices in dialogue with Bertoia’s Sonambient sculptures: guitarists Nels Cline & Ben Monder, trumpeters Ambrose Akinmusire & Nate Wooley, saxophonists Ingrid Laubrock & JD Allen, acoustic string players Jen Shyu & Brandon Seabrook, drummers Marcus Gilmore & Dan Weiss, and pianists (friend of the proGram, Kris Davis & Craig Taborn. All 12 musicians are known for their genre-crossing & expansive outlooks, and here they push their art even further by engaging in a complex interplay with each other, their instruments, and the sculptures—which ring with bell-like tones, vibrate & shimmer, boom & whisper, echo & reverberate, chime & crash, sing out & sing on. The music that emerges is unique—a new collaborative form at the juncture of improvisation, ambient & experimental music, art, & chance.Although Harry Bertoia (1915-1978) was best known during his lifetime as one of the greatest furniture designers of the 20thcentury, he has since become revered as a visionary visual artist. Following the commercial success of his iconic wire chairs, Bertoia dedicated himself to sculpture. Central to his practice were a series of sound sculptures, his Sonambients, whose evocative, encompassing tones could be called forth by a passing wind, ambient vibration, or the touch of a hand. Bertoia himself captured their sounds on eleven LPs released during the last years of his life. Until now, however, musicians have had precious few chances to interact with these works. In 2022, the Nasher Sculpture Center included many sound sculptures among the more than 100 pieces in their exhibition Harry Bertoia: Sculpting Mid-Century Modern Life. Writer, poet and record producer David Breskin seized on this opportunity to create and curate a week-long festival called SCULPTING SOUND: Twelve Musicians Encounter Bertoia, during which the expressive possibilities of the Sonambient pieces could be fully explored. Breskin’s long career has often straddled the worlds of contemporary music & art. In 2002, he brought Bill Frisell to the work of German painter Gerhard Richter, which resulted in the creation of Frisell’s 858 Quartet and the multimedia book Richter 858; and then, in 2010, married Nels Cline’s music to Ed Ruscha’s paintings, producing the poetry/music/art mashup DIRTY BABY. More recently, Breskin has produced an eclectic array of albums for artists including Mary Halvorson, Patricia Brennan, Kris Davis, Ingrid Laubrock, Cory Smythe, Craig Taborn, Brandon Seabrook, Dan Weiss & Ches Smith.
