Oct 16: Chris P. Thompson releases new album - True Stories & Rational Numbers - electronic music for acoustic pianos

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Press Contact: Christina Jensen | Jensen Artists

646.536.7864 x1 | christina@jensenartists.com

Chris P. Thompson Releases True Stories & Rational Numbers

An album of electronic music for acoustic pianos composed and programmed in modern piano roll notation

Release Date: October 16, 2020

(Grin Agog Music)

Available Digitally, and on Vinyl, CD, Cassette Tape

Chris P. Thompson: www.chrispthompson.com 

Available to Pre-Order Now Exclusively on Bandcamp: www.chrispthompson.bandcamp.com 

Watch the Video for the Album’s First Track, “Professor H:” http://bit.ly/WatchProfessorH 

Stream the Album (press only, not for publication): http://bit.ly/StreamTSRN (password: comma)

Press downloads and promo copies available upon request.

New York, NY – New York-based composer and percussionist Chris P. Thompson releases his next album True Stories & Rational Numbers worldwide on October 16, 2020. A new nine-movement work, True Stories & Rational Numbers features music composed, performed, and produced by Thompson. It represents Thompson’s investigation of just intonation – the tuning system based on the natural harmonic series that uses simple whole number ratios of frequencies – an experience which Thompson likened to having his eyes re-opened to music and seeing it in color for the first time. The album will be available digitally, as well as on vinyl, CD, and cassette tape, and is mastered by Heba Kadry with album art and design by Timo Andres. The piece will also be published as a fully notated score for live performance.

Thompson’s True Stories & Rational Numbers explores the beauty, oddity, and emotional poignancy of simple whole-number rhythmic and harmonic relationships. It is composed and meticulously programmed entirely in modern piano roll notation, in an extension of the tradition of the piano rolls of 20^th century American composer Conlon Nancarrow, who frequently composed for player piano. Thompson explains, “this recording represents an idealized realization of the score from a near future where four grand pianos can dynamically re-tune themselves to an infinite lattice of pitches, and dance to the rhythmic relationships of simple mathematical ratios.” To Thompson’s knowledge, this is the first large scale work for piano in just intonation that moves fluidly through Western harmonies and keys, since previous works have been constrained by the practical limitations of fixed-pitch instruments.

The album is not programmatic but is inspired by the life story of German scientist and philosopher Hermann von Helmholtz; the music theory Thompson employed for the piece is a direct result of Helmholtz’s book On the Sensations of Tone. The nine movements each represent a different aspect of time affecting a life – or as Thompson puts it, they, “illustrate a timeline of physical sensations, scientific discoveries, and emotional struggles – the life of an individual floating through layers of passing time, chronicling subtle sensations of ‘before’ and ‘after.’”

Other influences include the prepared-piano tracks of Aphex Twin, the precision spectacle of modern drum and bugle corps, and the theoretically adventurous chamber music of Ben Johnston and Harry Partch.

Thompson’s goal with this album, as well as with his previous LP Everything Imaginable Comes True (2019) and EP Lot Hero (2017), is to marry the machine with the warmth of human emotion. In this most recent work, just intonation became a vehicle for that. He says, “As a percussionist, the world of rhythm had been the primary aspect of music for me. All of a sudden, I was able to see the world of pitch and harmony as rhythm, through the lens of just intonation.”

Chris P. Thompson is well-known in new music circles as a longtime percussionist in Alarm Will Sound and the American Contemporary Music Ensemble. He recently toured internationally as a performer with Tyondai Braxton’s HIVE. He has participated in the world premieres of over a hundred new works and can be heard on 30 studio albums. He has collaborated and appeared with artists including Björk, Dirty Projectors, James McVinnie, Medeski Martin & Wood, Nico Muhly, Brian Reitzell, They Might Be Giants, and Valgeir Siggurðsson, among many others.

Although Thompson has made his compositions public more recently than his work as a performing percussionist, he has been writing music for most of his life, since his days as one of the youngest-ever members of the Santa Clara Vanguard drumline, at age 15. His music blends the high-energy sound world of modern drum and bugle corps with the experimentalism of contemporary classical and electronic music, but always with an ear toward telling stories and painting pictures of potent emotional states. He says, “Even when I'm using algorithmic or computer-aided techniques to generate material, there is always a human hand manipulating that material and molding it into a human story.”

Track List:

True Stories & Rational Numbers | Chris P. Thompson

Written & produced by Chris P. Thompson

Mastered by Heba Kadry

Published by Grin Agog Music (ASCAP)

Cover art and album design by Timo Andres 

Side A

1. Professor H

2. Sirens

3. Five 'Til

4. Splitting

Side B

5. Anna

6. Fractionally-Souled Beasts

7. Nine Past

8. Professor H at Twilight

9. Anna (reprise)

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