Payne, Maggi – “Arctic Winds” – [Innova/American Composers]

Maggi Payne is Co-Director of the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in Oakland where she teaches recording engineering, composition, and electronic music.

Her sources include leaky faucets, running toilets, light bulb filaments, floor furnaces, boiling tea water, dry ice, ball bearings, and static-y space transmissions, just to name a few. In this CD, she takes these very commonplace sounds and processes them to make extraordinarily beautiful electro-acoustic art. I hear that they are presented with video art in performance, but the audio stands well on its own.

Liner notes detail each of the seven tracks. Lots of interesting info, including an extensive biography, is at her website http://www.maggipayne.com/

PGM: Some volume levels are quite low, minimal sounds that might not be audible on a car radio.