Detritus of Mating

Music by Dennis Báthory-Kitsz




Those addicted to the new-music radio show
and Web site Bathory-Kitsz cohosts will 
find interest in his sound sculpture, a 
sample of which is caught here. Glistening 
tones ring in the air, bits of deconstructed 
voices float by, a dark bass pulse starts up 
that's more felt than heard, in large-scale 
periodic cycles that would replicate the 
opening if allowed to continue for some 27 
years. You don't get a distinct idea of his 
creative personality from this first disc, 
but it's enjoyable how the exquisite rings
continually modulate even when nothing
seems to be happening...
    - Kyle Gann
      The Village Voice
            d e t r i t u s   o f   m a t i n g
As heard in...
  • 806 Installation, Washington Street, New York City
  • Amsterdam: A New Stage VI
  • Chicago: Contemporary Classical Music, WNUR
  • Chicago: Something Else, WLUW
  • Dallas/Denton: ...and seldom is heard, KNTU
  • Florida, South Africa: Radio Horizon, 93.9 FM
  • Helsinki, Finland: Charmed Sounds, YLE Radio 1
  • London, Ontario: Wired for Sound, CHRW
  • Madison, Wisconsin: RTQE, WORT
  • Marijampole, Lithuania: The Ways & Mistaken Pathways, Kapsai 100.2 FM
  • New York: Afternoon Arts Magazine, WBAI
  • Novosibirsk, Russia: Serge Tikhanoff's Show, Radio Penguin
  • Oberlin, Ohio: Foldover, WOBC
  • Pacific Grove, California: Vast Field (not to scale), KAZU
  • Perth, Australia: Difficult Listening, RTR
  • Piracicaba, São Paulo: Radio Municipal
  • Plainfield, Vermont: Kalvos & Damian, WGDR,
  • Portland, Maine: Residual Mange, WMPG
  • Provincetown, Massachusetts: The Latest Score, WOMR
  • San Francisco: Ears Wide Open, KPFA
  • Seattle: The Sonar Map, KSER
  • Shanghai: Radio Shanghai International
  • Storrs, Connecticut: Pushing the Envelope, WHUS
  • Zagreb, Croatia: Inner Space, Radio 100.5 


[Detritus of Mating] repays 
repeated listenings, which 
reveal more and more layers. 
I especially like the way 
it uses voices in varying 
degrees of deconstructedness. 
Piercing high frequencies add 
an unsettling aspect, which 
prevents this work from being 
the least bit ambient. It 
commands attention.
    - Bryce Moore, RTR Perth
      Difficult Listening
Detritus of Mating

 Available from...
d e t r i t u s   o f   m a t i n g             

This ever-changing excursion 
is symphonic in proportion, 
with a real sense of form. 
Báthory-Kitsz has created 
a work of a seemingly 
endless evolution of sounds 
and colors of sounds, 
all in a cohesive direction, 
all with real imagination.
    - Jim Lowe, The Times-Argus
     Montpelier, Vermont




At the deepest level this music 
lulls and intrigues, irritates 
and begs your answers. Ambiant 
for sure......further than that, 
always. Growing and moving, 
wiggling in your ears, this 
sound creates a basket of safety 
and insecurity. Knowledge of gods 
and goddesses way back coming 
through present life.
 - Canary Burton, Alternate Music Press
 

Ce CD fait partie d'un cycle d'une 
installation électroacoustique
qui en comporte six. La musique est 
très difficile d'abord et sans
concessions. Elle est noire et très 
intense sans pour autant être 
véritablement agressive. Elle 
est une sorte de symphonie métallique 
contemporaine et avant-gardiste. Pour
oreilles averties uniquement.
 - Robert Lenoir, Crystal Lake Records

To order from the composer...

Production CD and two special editions from the composer...





Review by William Harris:

Dennis Bathory-Kitsz's just-released CD "Detritus of Mating" is a 62.5 minute electro-acoustic piece designed to accompany a display of a sculpture by Pavel Kraus. I did not see the gallery exposition, so will discuss the music as music rather than as spatial ambiance.

Heraclitus, the ancient philosopher noted, "Nature loves to hide itself". We have seen that hiding-characteristic again and again in the world of atomic and subatomic particles, gravitational theory, and genetic coding. There clearly is a pattern of a basic sort in the data which we read, but we cannot see the pattern the way we read a novel or a symphony. The reason I mention this is because when we face a new piece of artwork like Dennis' piece, we are not going to find the old, simple patterning of a sonata or a concerto. Pattern runs right through, it is everywhere from beginning to end, and we are only going to intuit it after re-hearing and re-thinking. This is a harder road indeed.

I made a few notes on the piece this afternoon. It starts off with a high, thin treble thread which soon moves into low, drawn sounds with their stretched envelopes, a primary EAM device. At 5' (set the CD display to time) enters a light, lyrical vein operating against a growing bass mass. At 7', a tightly bracketed chunk of mixed voices appears and is gone, a little later a sprechstimme appears weakly in the background before dissolving. Something like garbled radio-talk enters at about 8'30'' with strong voices, again gone in ten seconds, never overdone. At 10' the bass drone becomes shorter, spaces appear, mid-range tenuto notes with a slow pulse. A few bits of bracketed speech-voice remind us of the world we hear every day, in contrast to the sinuous world of pure sounds stretching in pulses. At 23' a very high pitch sounds (beyond this hearer's range), descendingly gently to a packet of speech at 26'.

Just before 30' the score opens up with louder, overlapped sounds adding new channels with crescendo and discords, as spaces disappear and a solid block of multi-level dense sound settles in like fog, underlaid with rhythmic pulses. Here the sense becomes stronger, firm and dominating, but by 35' is softens into a world of echoing reminiscences. At 37' we have a sense of resignation with slowed pulses, at 39' a lyrical line perhaps from Lulu for ten seconds.

For the rest you have to make your own observations which will be different from mine, just as this music different is from anything else. Remember that this was designed as a full hour of hovering sounds floating around an exhibition of sculpture. But it is also an independent textured canvas, of the sort which EAM has developed only in the past few decades. This is a new kind of music, a new experience to many, and it is not automatically assimilable.

Here is no predrawn canvas which you fill in with the designated oils to make a Corot copy for your mantle. This is no piece of traditional European music with repeats, transpositions, diminutions and augmentations designed to make the new bourgeois audience feel quite at home, like a Howard Johnson restaurant. This new venture in musical composition is more like life as we know it, full of complex associations which are hard to grasp, with patterning as complex and inexplicable as what we are now finding in our world of physics or astronomy. Which is why I quoted at the top of this paper the words of the Greek: Nature loves to hide itself. And art which is consonant with Nature will always hide its Protean shape, and be hard to encompass.

A word about the technique. Most of the sounds are surprisingly harmonic, the stretching of the ASR (attack, sustain and release of digital editing) is quiite regular, perhaps a few daring ASR's with cracking-starts would be good in such a long piece. I was surprised at the musical purity of the sounds, which are speech-derived and resynthesized. There is a palette of EAM sounds which Dennis rightly rejects as too-soon trite and imitative. I find his smooth technique similar to the restrained composition of George Todd and Jon Appleton, who have always avoided flash effects for continued textures. Dennis is on this side of the fence.

It should be noted that Dennis did this work on very basic equipment in his studio, I have a list here and compare its cost with that of any University EAM graduate music department with amazement. The growth of new equipment and techniques obsoletes everythng one might own annually, partly by electronic development and partly by sales hype. It is refreshing to see how much can be done with genuine musical feeling by a person working independently in his studio alone. The stamp of individuality comes through!

This piece of work is music to ears which will listen. It is organized sound, one definition of music. But beyond that it is a web of carefully outlined sub-structures which work together to provide an hour's venture into a sound-world which we have never entered, never even suspected. Someone said that art is created as the pathway into areas which otherwise we could never imagine. This is true of a grand poem like Dylan Thomas' "Over Sir John's Hill", it is true of Berg's ground-breaking Wozzeck, and in a modest and oft unnoticed way, it is true of the writers of that new style of art which we somewhat cumbersomely call Electro-Acoustic Music.


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