S-2010
Immersion
Sound & Vision:
"Not only a fascinating array of musical innovation but a persuasive
exploration of the possibilities of surround sound... The care that went
into this disc is carried through to the stylish onscreen graphics [and]
the excellent printed program notes."
Music 
Recording 
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Sound & Vision review.
Billboard:
"A number of 'firsts' in an exceptionally enjoyable program."
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Fanfare:
"A highly enjoyable group of pieces in a new medium with loads of
potential."
Pro Sound News:
"Starkland's Immersion was the first DVD-A project released featuring
works composed specifically for the new surround medium. The disc features
13 new music pieces from some of the world's most ambitious electroacoustic
composers."
Kyle Gann:
"Thirteen of the hippest composers around... It's an exciting body
of work...In this disc, a new genre of music is born."
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from Stereophile.
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review from Hi-Fi News.
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review from AudioRevolution.com.
Immersion is now recognized as a groundbreaking recording that let listeners experience new music in high-resolution surround sound for the first time in history. All the music was commissioned by Starkland exclusively for this surround sound release.
Immersion plays on regular DVD players, as well as audiophile DVD-Audio units.
"I think surround sound offers a wonderful medium for new music. Commissioning a wide variety of today's composers to create music specifically for high-resolution surround sound seemed a terrific way to help launch the surround sound era," says Thomas Steenland, Starkland's President.
All the composers were excited about high-resolution surround sound. Meredith
Monk comments that "in many of my pieces, I have worked with making
a space ring or resound by placing singers in a 'surround sound' spatial
relationship to the audience. Now I really appreciate that there is a playback
medium which allows that visceral, rich perceptual experience to happen
at home."
Tomlinson Holman, one of the world's leading surround sound authorities, states that "this fascinating disc" is among the first "to show composers stretching the boundaries of recorded sound by exploring the new possibilities inherent in DVD-Audio."
All the music on the Immersion DVD
involves you in ways never before possible. In the opening piece Live/Work,
Pamela Z gives you a virtual surround tour of her studio with a precision
that you have never previously heard. Z is an audio artist who works primarily
with voice, live electronic processing, and sampling technology. In performance,
she creates layered works that combine operatic bel canto and experimental
vocal techniques with a battery of digital delays, found percussion objects,
spoken word, and sampled concrete sounds.
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comments.
Bruce Odland's Tank places
you in a huge underground water tank, where you hear Ron Miles' trumpet
reverberating for 7 seconds, with an authentic reality simply not possible
in conventional stereo. Odland is known for his psychoacoustic sound designs
for theatre and for his cutting-edge, large-scale multimedia installations
in public spaces, and has collaborated with many of America's leading theatre
directors, including Peter Sellars, JoAnne Akalaitis, and Andre Gregory.
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comments.
Maggi Payne's White Turbulence 2000 begins
by putting you in the center of a dramatic circling pan of a convolved
thunderous airplane, and then adds highly processed water-based sounds.
Having created quadraphonic pieces during 1973-1985, she now comments about
returning to surround sound: "To be able to once again have more spatial
control of the sound environment is exciting. To enter this more complete
world allows one to more fully sculpt the space/experience dynamically
over time."
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comments.
"One of the best composers working in the country today" (Village
Voice), Carl Stone shifts hyper-speed hallucinatory
barrages from speaker to speaker in Luong Hai Ky Mi Gia. "The
opportunity to make a piece using the medium of surround sound for Starkland's
DVD has allowed me to expand on some of the quadraphonic techniques that
I often use in live performance," says Stone.
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comments.
Phil Kline's haunting piece, The Housatonic
at Henry Street, is a "vision of enfolded time flowing
through a place on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where successive waves
of migrant humanity have overlapped for centuries. Background and foreground
are blurred as street sounds are recorded, then mixed with 'musical' material
from computer and tape." The result situates you in "an imaginary
surrounding landscape in which past and present hang out together in asynchronous
multitonal harmony." Early in his music career, Kline, with former
classmates Jim Jarmusch and Luc Sante, founded the rock band the Del-Byzanteens,
and in 1988 he joined the Glenn Branca Ensemble. In 1990 he began producing
a body of work using large numbers of boombox cassette machines to create
complex phase patterns and sound masses. "A real original" (New
York Times), Kline notes that "By nature all of my works are
surround sound pieces."
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comments.
Ellen Fullman's work places you in real world/virtual
spaces only possible with surround sound. Margaret Tuned the
Radio In Between Two Stations is one of two pieces on Immersion that
employs composer-created instruments using unusually long strings. Since
1981 she has composed for her Long String Instrument, which uses strings
nearly 100 feet long, filling her warehouse studio. Fullman comments that "In
creating the surround sound mix, it was thrilling to hear a recording,
for the first time, that envelops the listener, mirroring the live experience
of my instrument."
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comments.
Paul Dresher also wrote his postminimalist work, Steel,
for a unique instrument, the Quadrachord, which he co-invented and constructed.
It has four 14-foot long steel strings, with electric bass pick-ups at
both ends. He writes that "both ends of the strings are acoustically
'active,' making the Quadrachord's sound inherently spatial. Because
of their length, the strings often vibrate sympathetically, imparting
a remarkable reverberant quality. This aspect in particular inspired
its use in this surround sound composition for Starkland." Dresher, "one
of the best post-minimalist composers" (Stereo Review),
writes for a wide variety of forms (from experimental music theater to
orchestral pieces), tours with his Electro-Acoustic Band, and has had
his works performed at the New York Philharmonic, BAM's Next Wave Festival,
Minnesota Opera, and five New Music America Festivals.
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comments.
Lukas Ligeti co-founded the group Beta Foly, perhaps
Africa's only experimental music ensemble combining traditional and electronic
instruments. PropellerIsland takes
advantage of widely spaced playback speakers to explore his interest in
polymetrics. He surrounds you with steel drums, West African balafons,
and other percussion in multiple tempos. Every time you listen, the beat
elusively shifts and new rhythmic vantage points emerge and recede.
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comments.
In her Immersion work, Sayonara Sirenade:
20/21, Pauline Oliveros draws on materials
from a 1966 spatially-presented improvisation. "Extracting sounds from
the old piece, I used today's software to create new tracks, adding placement
and movement. The new piece reveals the depth of field that was missing since
that first studio performance. The flatness of stereo became fullness in
surround sound. Spatiality becomes the clarifying parameter in composition." Oliveros
and her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth, and
ritual have been an important influence on American Music for four decades;
in 1991 she was awarded a letter of distinction from the American Music Center
at New York's Lincoln Center. John Rockwell has written: "On some
level, music, sound consciousness and religion are all one, and she would
seem to be very close to that level."
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comments.
Ingram Marshall's piece for Starkland, Sighs
and Murmurs: A SeaSong, is based on his memories of
an isolated, "austerely beautiful white farm house which sat
like a shining beacon on this rough and tremulous coast" of
Nova Scotia. "One's feeling of solitude was tempered by an underlying
sense of souls, long departed, who had once dwelt there." You
hear murmuring voices, a poignant piano melody, and sea sounds that
evoke strangely familiar memories. Marshall's music has been performed
by ensembles such as the Kronos Quartet, Los Angeles Philharmonic,
San Francisco Symphony, and St. Louis Symphony. His music often uses
real-time digital processing, and he has widely performed his live
electronic music works in Europe and the USA.
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composer comments.
The Immersion DVD
ends with an ethereal vocal work from Meredith Monk,
a pioneer in what is now called "extended
vocal technique" and "interdisciplinary performance." A
composer, singer, creator of new opera and music-theatre works, films,
and installations, she has created more than 150 works since 1964, and
has made twelve recordings (mostly on ECM New Series). Regarding her
Starkland piece, Monk writes: "In Eclipse Variations I
was interested in the idea of a new sound being revealed when another
one disappears - a sonic equivalent of the light or glow coming from
behind the shadow of the moon in an eclipse," noting that "the
entrances and exits of the singers leave an aural residue which modifies
the texture. In surround sound, the piece becomes a suspended ring of
sound, with the voices moving across the space, colliding, leaning, and
creating beats in the air." With DVD-Audio, you hear Monk's shimmering,
seamless vocal layers in a floating, enveloping space never before heard
in home sound systems.
Read further composer
comments.
Each piece on the Immersion DVD is accompanied
by 5-10 slides shown during playback.
In addition to bios and notes from all the composers, the comprehensive 32-page booklet presents three Introductions from leading new-music critic Kyle Gann, Tomlinson Holman (likely the world's foremost surround sound authority), and the CD's producer, Thomas Steenland, President of Starkland.
The DVD-Audio/Video recording was mastered at Gateway Mastering by Bob Ludwig, a leader in surround sound. Records mastered by Ludwig, one of the world's finest mastering engineers, have been nominated for hundreds of Grammies. In addition to 5.1 surround mixes in both DVD-Audio and DVD-Video formats, the release also provides composer-supervised stereo mixes.
The standard DVD format had the most successful introduction of any consumer electronics product in history. DVD-Audio added high-resolution surround sound. Whereas conventional CDs have been limited to a resolution of 16 bits and a 44.1 kHz sampling rate, DVD-Audio channels can be recorded up to 24 bits and 192 kHz. While regular DVDs also offer surround sound, they use an encoding process that discards most of the sound data. DVD-Audio keeps 100% of the high-resolution material.
With all music commissioned exclusively for high-resolution surround sound, Starkland's Immersion DVD became the first such recording in history. If you're interested in new music, you need to experience Immersion. If you're interested in surround sound, you need to hear Immersion.
Pamela Z
Live/Work
Bruce Odland
Tank
Maggi Payne
White Turbulence 2000
Carl Stone
Luong Hai Ky Mi Gia
Phil Kline
The Housatonic at
Henry Street
Ellen Fullman
Margaret Tuned the Radio
In Between Two Stations
Lukas Ligeti
Propeller Island
Paul Dresher
Steel
Pauline Oliveros
Sayonara Sirenade 20/21
Paul Dolden
Twilight's Dance
Merzbow
2000
Ingram Marshall
Sighs and Murmurs:
A SeaSong
Meredith Monk
Eclipse Variations
All pieces were commissioned by Starkland for surround
sound and for premiere on this
DVD release.
Introductions: Kyle Gann, Tomlinson Holman,
and Thomas Steenland
Total Time 65:46
This DVD has been authored for playback on all DVD-Video
and DVD-Audio players.
DVD-Video playback is Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound.
DVD-Audio playback is high resolution 5.1 surround
sound.
Composer-supervised
stereo mixes are also included.
All versions play with over 90 images.
There are no Region restrictions.
NTSC.