Dubh
Ergodos is delighted to announce the release of Dubh, the debut album from Amsterdam’s Trio Scordatura. This is the first release under the Ergodos Records imprint. A work of dark, gothic beauty, Dubh presents seven tracks by seven Irish composers: Linda Buckley, Judith Ring, Enda Bates, Peter Moran, Scott McLaughlin, and ourselves: Garrett Sholdice and Benedict Schlepper-Connolly.
Dubh captures Trio Scordatura at their variegated best. Alfrun Schmid (vocals), Elisabeth Smalt (violas) and Bob Gilmore (keyboard/electronics), create spaces both of astonishing intimacy and subtlety, and almost terrifying, textured expansiveness.
Dubh is about a certain generation of Irish composers, a generation that is finding its place between tradition and the modern world. A consistent atmosphere of slow-burning introspection prevails – an introspection arising out of a common preoccupation with the luxuriance of sound itself. Excursions beyond the Western equal-tempered scale are frequent, notably via the Adapted Viola, a viola designed by American maverick Harry Partch. These moments lend the overall work a rare harmonic depth and richness.
Recorded at Amplus Studios, Flanders, in sweltering summer 2009 and mixed/mastered in the snow-blizzard winter that followed, Dubh tells that there is always something other at work beneath the whitest landscape. In this, it celebrates difference, and the beauty in darkness.
Garrett Sholdice
Benedict Schlepper-Connolly
Ergodos
