LIQUID MUSIC @ BIG EARS & NATIONAL SAWDUST:
Daniel Pioro & Valgeir Sigurðsson | DUST
Presented by Big Ears Music Festival, Knoxville, TN on Friday, March 27, 2020 (CANCELLED)
Presented by National Sawdust, Brooklyn, NY on Sunday, March 29, 2020 (CANCELLED)
Produced by Kate Nordstrum, Liquid Music
Late in 2019, Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood announced the launch of his personal classical label, Octatonic Records, with the release of two albums—one, Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor; and two, a split between his own Water and Michael Gordon’s Industry. The link between those introductory volumes is English violinist Daniel Pioro, who plays the Bach solo and joins a small ensemble to perform the Greenwood piece. With his penetrating instrumental tone and stylistic adaptability, Pioro has successfully navigated adjacent worlds during the last decade, not only performing as a soloist with orchestras such as the BBC Philharmonic and the London Contemporary Orchestra, but also joining improvisational coteries alongside Okkyung Lee and exploring cross-arts collaborations, most recently with artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. In September, when Greenwood premiered his violin concerto Horror Vacui at the BBC Prom, Pioro was front and center, surrounded by the massed strings of the BBC National Orchestral of Wales.
Just ahead of the Octatonic Records news, Pioro made his solo recording debut with Dust, an astounding album that keys on a three-part suite of the same name. Composed by Bedroom Community founder and Icelandic auteur Valgeir Sigurðsson for Pioro, Dust ponders the ways that electronics and violin can interact and disappear into one another, the way flecks of dust drift across a beam of light like a phantom. The rapturous work suggests the digital din of Ben Frost and the colorful arrays of Terry Riley, poised in lockstep. A mix of mirth and menace, natural sound and artificial interference, Dust finds Pioro and Sigurðsson locked in a surreal symbiosis, human and electronic circuits crosshatched into one chimerical unit. At Big Ears 2020, they perform this magnetic piece.