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MONTY ADKINS

Empire

Making a film score for Andy Warhol’s ‘Empire’ is a unique challenge. At over eight hours long and with so little happening on screen, how does one create a soundtrack that can engage the audience in witnessing ‘the passing of time’ as Warhol wrote about ‘Empire’, whilst not drawing overt attention to the score itself and away from the film? In the film the Empire State Building stands like a bell tower, a beacon in the skyline.

To structure the work Adkins used a bell-ringing pattern—NY Littleport Caters, first rung on 23rd October 2016 in New York. This nine-bell sequence is an example of change-ringing technique—in which the nine bells are permuted continuously for several hours. From this Adkins created a nine-chord harmonic sequence each with nine layers of sonic material including old instruments and other ambient sounds recorded in large architectural structures. Nine permutations occur every 48 minutes—the length of one of ten reels of film for ‘Empire’. The bell-pattern cycles through nine iterations, the combination of layers being unique in each occurrence.

The final reel, of the Empire State Building in almost total darkness, is accompanied by extended filtered materials from previous sections. The current recording presents the prime sequence of materials with the nine harmonic sections in their original order (1 to 9) and concluding with a section of the sound for the tenth reel. The overall affect is one of a steady state of cyclical sonic and harmonic movement that never repeats.

Empire was commissioned by the Yorkshire Silent Film Festival 2018.

For listeners of gauzy melodic loops of William Basinski, France Jobin, and Stephan Mathieu.

Bandcamp Apple Music TIDAL Reviews
Catalog:
LINE_099
Format:
digital
Edition:
open edition
Release:
November 2018
Tracklist:
  1. Empire (50:49)

All materials performed and recorded by Monty Adkins. Mastered by Taylor Deupree.

Monty Adkins is an English composer, performer, and Professor of Experimental Electronic Music at the University of Huddersfield, UK. He primarily creates digital audio works and installations. Since 2008, his sound works has become increasingly minimal and introspective, characterised by slow shifting organic instrumental and concrete soundscapes, focusing on encouraging a deeper immersive listening experience. Using a reduced sonic palette, he draws together elements from ambient, minimal electronica, acousmatic and experimental electronic music. His works have been performed at and commissioned by leading international festivals and institutions (including INA-GRM, IRCAM, BBC Radio 3, SpACE-Net, ZKM Karlsruhe, Sonic Arts Network, Visionas Sonoras, Bourges Festival, Akousma, IOU Theatre, and the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation) and released on labels worldwide including Audiobulb (UK), empreintes DIGITALes (Québec), Crónica (Portugal), Signature (France), Eilean (France), and LINE (USA). monty-adkins.com

REVIEWS OF
Empire

  • Precedenti recensioni (n. 161, 169, 204, 220 e 232), anche di altre penne (Bustim Bettinello, Dal Masuna garanzia, dunque), hanno sempre attestato l’alto livello qualitativo di una ricerca sonora che miscela elettroacustica, soundscaping ed ambient. Ora un’ennesima conferma. Il lavoro è, in effetti, solo una porzione del progetto — colonna sonora (expressione impropria) per l’omonimo film sperimentale di Andy Warhol. Nella sua completezza è, quindi, di otto ore e passa. Elaborando un pattern di “bell ringing”, sviluppato in nove sequenze, ed utilizzando altri suoni d’ambiente, Adkins construisce un complesso sistema, caldo e tridimensionale, dalle cangianti tonalità, punteggiato da rintocchi mutati in macchie luminenscenti. Riflessi sinestetici delle finestre dell’Empire State Building, che restituiscono il senso dinamico profondo di un’apparente staticità. Provare per credere. (7/8)
    (blowup.it)

  • Accoppiata di uscite autunnali per il professor Monty  Adkins. Del doppio CD Still Juniper Snow ne parliamo qui di seguito. In senso temporale quel lavoro è stato preceduto di poche settimane dalla pubblicazione di Empire sulla elegantissima LINE di Richard Chartier. L’opera è il tentativo di musicare l’omonimo film del 1964 diretto da Andy Warhol. Un’unica lunga traccia di cinquantadue minuti di estatica musica ambient. Per rendere la staticità del tempo Adkins ha scelto di utilizzare nove campane le cui permutazioni coincidessero con la lunghezza di ognuna delle dieci bobine del film di Warhol. I suoni si inseguono senza ripetere mai la stesso percorso. IMMERSIVO.
    (rockerilla.com)

  • A pair of lengthy recordings land this month that illustrate two extremes of long-form composition. Listening to them side by side (or mixed together if you’re feeling adventurous) reminds us that beauty isn’t just in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is expressed. And everyone gets to decide what theirs looks and sounds like. Monty Adkins’ 51-minute Music For Empire was written to accompany Andy Warhol’s infamous eight-plus-hour film by the same name. Designed to capture the passing of time, Warhol’s film features a single shot of the Empire State Building, in slow motion, no less. Given the structure’s propensity to, you know, stand still, it can fairly be described as a minimalist statement. (Particularly so after sunset.) This new Adkins recording is well suited to Warhol’s vision. It features a nine-bell recording captured at NY Littleport Caters. The bell sequence demonstrates what’s called a change-ringing technique. The bells chime continuously, providing Adkins a delicately beautiful nine-chord harmonic sequence. “Nine permutations occur every 48 minutes – the length of one of 10 reels of film for Empire,” according to the album’s notes. “The bell-pattern cycles through nine iterations, the combination of layers being unique in each occurrence.” At the other end of the spectrum, there is nothing remotely delicate about Merzbow’s MONOAkuma. Also clocking in at 51 minutes, Masami Akita has delivered another of his difficult masterworks…. (baddpress.blog)

  • Empire, released on Richard Chartier’s LINE imprint, attempts to create a soundtrack to Andy Warhol’s famous black and white silent film of the same name. Warhol’s film is an epic, slow-motion, eight-hour vision of the Empire State Building. This new work was commissioned by the Yorkshire Silent Film Festival, and I can only imagine what it was like to hear this while the original was projected. Adkins has conjured up a beautifully still, contemplative piece that perfectly complements Warhol’s unchanging frames of the famous tower. Bell tones ring in a mathematical process, cycling through nine iterations of swaying bliss, full of similarity but never completely the same. The original film is known for its glacial pace, shown with less frames as it was recorded, and Adkins is respectful of this, his work taking time to unfold and progress. There is a more than a hint of melancholy throughout, like the last moments of sunlight decaying into dusk over the Manhattan skyline. For the LINE label, which usually documents the audio components of sound art and audio/visual exhibitions, this piece by Adkins feels more musical than the label’s normal output. Less gallery-bound and existing as a deep listening experience in its own right, Empire will please fans of subtly shifting long form ambience. (toneshift.net)

  • Andy Warhol’s 1985 “Empire” is an eight hour forerunner of slow TV, filming the Empire State Building from dusk to the following dawn, and any attempt to create a new soundtrack to the film must also enter that slow mindspace and wallow in it. And that’s what Adkins does here- though the recorded product available to buy is only 50 minutes long, so we get selected highlights (if ‘highlights’ is an appropriate word) from across the reels, rather than the full-length experience. Taking the idea of the building as a bell tower, and leading that into the idea of a nine-bell ringing sequence in which the pattern constantly changes and never repeats, has led Adkins into creating a nine-chord harmonic sequence built from piano- and Rhodes-style melodic notes and pads blended with ambient sounds recorded in other large spaces, with the latter elements fading away as it progresses as though to reflect the stillness descending (theoretically) on the city. The result is beautifully mellow, calm and soporific and has gone straight onto my sleep playlist. It’s relaxing, and wallpaper-like if you want it to be, but with just enough detail and variation to keep it interesting. There’s a lush warm quality to it that can only be liked as an experience, far more perhaps than New York City itself. (chaindlk.com)

  • It is easy to listen to this piece of music without considering its background: just sit back, relax and enjoy. Empire may remind you of some of the best of Brian Eno’s generative music works. And that’s quite enough for a recommendation in itself, isn’t it? But then – consider the cover. If you see a black square, zoom in – notice the subtle shading at the sides. It seems to tell us that there’s more to this than you may initially think. And indeed there is. In fact, this composition is everything BUT generative. It is carefully structured, using a bell ringing pattern from NY Littleport Caters. The bell ringing sequence (and I’ll simply quote the liner notes here) ‘is an example of change-ringing technique – in which the nine bells are permuted continuously for several hours. From this Adkins created a nine-chord harmonic sequence each with nine layers of sonic material including old instruments and other ambient sounds recorded in large architectural structures.” It’s even getting more complex knowing that this piece is created as an alternate soundtrack for Andy Warhol’s movie ‘Empire‘ (1964) – an 8 hour long seemingly static (and originally silent) movie of the Empire State Building, showing the building during sunset into the night – the last part of this movie showing only complete darkness. Being from 1964, this film is stored on 10 film-reels of 48 minutes each. In Adkin’s piece, nine permutations of the bell-patterns occur every 48 minutes, ‘the combination of layers being unique in each occurence. The final reel, of the Empire State Building in almost total darkness, is accompanied by extended filtered materials from previous sections.’ However, this album is not the full 8 hour alternative  soundtrack. The 51 minute version ‘presents the prime sequence of materials with the nine harmonic sections in their original order (1 to 9) and concluding with a section of the sound for the tenth reel.” It is near this dark end sequence where the sounds start to drift off somewhat and some layers of distortion are added to the bright sounds – emphasizing the increasing sense of being lost in total darkness. It’s fascinating to realise that there’s such a complex, thought-out pattern behind music that sounds so ‘natural’. I never really realised that there could be a deliberately chosen complex sequence in the ringing of bells. Things can obviously more complex than they seem to be. But when this underlying concept seems a bit too hard to grasp, you can of course still simply sit back, relax and intensely enjoy the beautiful, mindful, immersive sounds of Empire. (ambientblog.net)

  • Der Komponist Monty Adkins hatte bislang auf meiner Festplatte noch keinen Ordner. Skandalös eigentlich, wobei es herauszufinden gilt, ob es mehr Perlen wie „Empire“ in seinem Backcatalogue gibt. Ich bin da optimistisch. Und sollte ich tatsächlich auf einer falschen Fährte sein, höre ich diese 50 Minuten hier einfach bis zum Ende der Welt. „Empire“ ist Adkins Soundtrack zum gleichnamigen Film von Andy Warhol, der 1964 das ikonische Empire State Building in New York acht Stunden lang verstummfilmte. Anders als Warhol, der das Gebäude nur aus einer Einstellung in den Blick nahm, entwickelt sich Adkins’ Musik stetig weiter, wenn auch nur in kleinen Schritten auf umso leiseren Sohlen. Das Grundmotiv zieht sich durch das gesamte Album: eine Glockenmelodie, bestehend aus neun Tönen, die sich in ihrem loopigen Character immer wieder dreht und wendet. Adkins arbeitet intensiv an der Veränderung des ambienten Hintergrunds und zieht so eine ordnende Struktur in den mitreißenden Rausch der figurativen Stille. Anfangs könnte man denken, Adkins würde ähnlich Eno generativ arbeiten und sich somit selbst aus dem eigentlichen Geschehen ausblenden. Doch es stellt sich schnell heraus, dass dem nicht so ist – im Gegenteil. Hier wirkt eine große Seele und kein Algorithmus, alles ist genauestens geplant und arrangiert. So wird das Album zur erleuchtenden Herausforderung. Lässt man sich wirklich darauf ein und entfernt sich von der alten Gebrauchsanweisung für Ambient, steigt man hier so tief hinab wie das Empire State Building hoch ist. Und fühlt sich auf jeder Treppenstufe auf abstrakte Weise beschützer. (dasfilter.com)