This past April the ~Nois Saxophone Quartet premiered PhD student Rodrigo Bussad‘s TESSERACT Continuum at the Hairpin Arts Center in Logan Square. Rodrigo created the multi-channel tape part that accompanies the saxophone quartet in the CHIME Studio.
TESSERACT Continuum – for saxophone quartet and tape, is the first written out of four movements that will compose a large and unified work dedicated to the Nois~ quartet. Each of the movements deals with a characteristic of a Hypercube, a visual representation, or rather, a shadow cast in our 3-dimensional plane of what we understand to be the fourth dimension. It happens that this movement entitled Continuum deals with the lines that form such Cube. To convey such visuals, the sounds were crafted and organized in such fashion, where those lines will be drawn over time, and in the span of four octaves by the saxophones. These octaves lines will have their sound projection modified and integrated by the supporting tape, bringing a meta-quality to acoustically sourced sounds. Again this work has no beginning either end, for it is a piece of a larger structure.
TESSERACT will be in the future an album-long piece, some sort of sonic journey that will involve musicians, sound artists, and visual artists.