Sow Your Gold In The White Foliated Earth

• Track Listing

Sow Your Gold in the White Foliated Earth exists first as a curator's fancy - in this case

from Oslo's Ultima Festival for contemporary music in 2014. The idea was to give revered

Norwegian experimental electronic musician Helge Sten, aka Deathprod, access to

seminal avant-garde composer Harry Partch's self-designed, custom-made, specialized,

invented instruments - an orchestra tuned to just intonation, using up to 43 intervals

instead of the standard 12 for the most commonly used Western equal temperament.

An artist with a 30+ year career and an uncompromising reputation that reflects the

emotional specificity of his uneasy, yet compelling sound, maintained throughout his

expansive discography, Sten was an intriguing choice for such a project. Although he

attended art school, training in electronic music and sound art, he had little experience

with acoustic instruments and can neither read nor write music notation. Yet he's been

engaged with Partch's music, and outsider art more generally, since he was a teenager.

His resulting piece/composition for the project was originally intended only for

performance by Cologne-based Ensemble Musikfabrik, for a series of concerts in five

European cities between 2015 and 2018. It's Musikfabrik that undertook the painstaking,

expensive process of building an entire set of the composer's creations - the second only

to the originals built by Partch himself. They are the professional musicians and virtuosic

instrumentalists that had to re-train and re-educate on these unknown and experimental

sound sculptures in non-standard tunings. And they house this large, gorgeous physical

instrumentarium and deal with the enormous logistics of working with it, sometimes

shipping the fragile pieces to other locales via semi-trucks or ships.

Because of such monumental efforts, Musikfabrik are notoriously guarded with

recordings of the instruments. And rightly so. They're the only ones allowed to perform

on them, too. But Sow Your Gold isn't Musikfabrik playing. Instead, Sten spent days and

nights alone with the instrumentarium in Cologne. He played the instruments himself

while recording, layering the recordings and editing without effects to compose an 'audio

score' for Musikfabrik to work from in order for the ensemble to perform the piece.

(Partch also regularly worked this way, although he would transcribe afterwards.

Likewise, Sten worked with a professional arranger to create a detailed score, too.) So,

that makes Sow Your Gold an even less likely rarity - partly why it's release comes seven

years after it's creation.