Steve Peters - Filtered Light (Chamber Music 4) (Dragon's Eye Recordings, 2008)

1 Filtered Light (Chamber Music 4) 60:00

Chamber Music is a series of site-specific sound installations derived from recordings of the empty rooms in which the work is exhibited. No people are present, so the only sounds recorded are those that are incidental to the building itself, or those that leak in from outside. These recordings of ambient room tone are processed to isolate subtle resonant frequencies that become the only materials of the piece. Aside from equalization and gating, no other electronic treatments or instruments of any kind are used. Every version of the piece is different, due to the acoustic and architectural characteristics of each venue.

Filtered Light was made in 2008 for the University of New Mexico Art Museum, in conjunction with the annual UNM Composers’ Symposium. Fourteen frequencies between 70 Hz and 3 kHz were extracted from an unedited hour-long recording made in the empty gallery. That hour was divided into thirty-two segments of varying length that recombined randomly in the continuous four-channel installation. The mix heard here represents one set of possible combinations. A low playback volume is recommended.
Steve Peters

The poise and concentrated quietude of Steve Peters on these pieces elevates tiny, random sounds into a hushed symphony of chance. Resonant frequencies between 70hz and 3khz rise out of rooms as though from nothingness and are recombined in the kind of disordered and associative manner that often accompanies intense grief.

The rooms are first seen careening in a crepuscalar atmosphere flecked with feint glottals and lulling cadences whose echoes lift them into surprisingly experssive, multiphonic pieces. In this sense, Peter's starts one off at the climax of a slow motion ceremony and afterwards leaves the listener to dwell in the aeons between. The listener is henceforth brought into high-pitched, flickering tones flirting around a full-bodied drone of considerable harmonic subtlety or intricately sliding microtonal inflections and almost hymnic cadences suggestive of the il y a.

It's none to hard to form a sympathetic relation with this work: it not only quite ingeniously demonstrates how one is always already in communication with the world owing to one's sense organs, but also how objects in the sensory field already harbor the opacity of a primary past.
Earlabs

Explorer of acoustic phenomena, Steve Peters, has conceived a new take on chamber music. It's not Music for Chambers but by chambers - the empty rooms in which his installations are exhibited being miked and milked for liminal ambient resonances. Sounds from empty rooms are minimally manipulated and then recycled. Peters' pieces are presented under the banner of being "primarily engaged with issues of place, presence, perception, attention, and duration." The sceptic might dismiss this as art-bollocks, and, sure, there ain't nothing like a smarty-pants artistic mission statement to provide a smokescreen behind which the artist-onanist can legitimate indulgence of a solipsistic habit. This is not intended as criticism of Peters in particular, but fair warning should be given that just as the presence of academic-art music is announced by its textual accompaniment, so within the first few minutes of Filtered Light all but the most intrepid of listening explorers will likely find themselves "engaged with issues" of their own in the face of such musically challenging - and challenged - work.

So let academic material be given sympathetic academic treatment. Materials: University of New Mexico Art Museum. Spartan slivers of ambient airwave-forms, drawn only from the life of the room itself or leakage from outside. Method: fourteen filtered frequencies are turned to thirty-two and rearranged randomly. Results: simple placid flows of pitched sonorities of relatively unassuming texturality emerge, spend time just being there individually, sometimes rubbing up against each other. Discussion: The rooms' inarticulate speech seems to struggle towards theme and rheme in the in-between of two frequencies, as long thin prosaic sustains are punctuated by essays at poetic detail - virtual marimba-esque water drops, sonar spectra, and some dot-dash dot-dash dot-dash. The low-event nature of the provisions demands that the listener make more of a meal of it, actively constructing his/her own Music of the Walls. Conclusion: each will then make of this what they will - the connections and disjunctions of Peters' material may be served up into an individual meaty micro-feast or, equally, may induce fast. It is interesting to note that both were experienced here, and in successive plays.
Igloo Magazine

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