In the fourth movement of Drive to the Edge, the suite of radio transmission pieces’s goals are continued and expanded.
Through its entirety, listeners use radio reception as a feature of acoustic identity to make interactive connections with geographic locations. It guides listeners as they manipulate the broadcast they are receiving on their radios, moving to the edge of reception and examining the sounds and sights where the invisible signals and visible world meet. As the suite examines this, boundaries and binaries become questioned, troublesome convergences.
Out of this, the fourth movement emerges. In a mixture of speech drawn from a diverse group of speakers from around the United States, acoustic instruments, and electroacoustic sound, the binarism of boundaries is considered, questioned and upended, ideally as the driving listeners are doing just that on the road they are on.
critical band-aid (flute, clarinet, trombone, violin, bass) embraces, teases, and sometimes upends James Tenney’s fascination with the sonic and psychoacoustic qualities of a tight frequency band. critical band-aid focuses on emerging sounds, the sweetness and mutability of friction, and how they advance through time to the inevitable point where all bandages must be removed.
Ralph Lewis: Composer 