"Prime-grade modern creative music, a genre-spanning effort that might find itself in the classical bin yet goes far beyond that staid moniker."
- Avant Music News

"Monolithic drones marbled by infinite detail with sonic markings that striate, collide, and levitate... hypnotic ambient excursions marked by unexpected pulses and timbres."
- Peter Margasak, Bandcamp Daily

The inaugural music release from multidisciplinary label Zyla is founder Alex Roth's original score for a dance performance by choreographer Kasia Witek.

Co-created with Alice Purton—a member of contemporary music groups Distractfold and Plus Minus Ensemble, who has recorded for composers such as Mica Levi and Bobby Krlic (The Haxan Cloak)—the four tracks on Inpouring layer multiple cello parts encompassing a wide sonic terrain, from spectral drones and whispered harmonics to rhapsodic passages of cinematic, almost orchestral scope.

The EP's soundworld is further expanded with Purton's wordless vocals and a range of processing techniques. The result is an intimate yet expansive record that negates conventional boundaries between composition, improvisation, production and post-production.

The collaboration between Roth and Purton was far from typical of a composer-performer relationship. The two musicians worked together over many months to develop a musical vocabulary for each piece, workshopping gestures and textures through improvisations that crystallised into memorised scores. These explorations took place in the studio with the dancers, facilitating an organic symbiosis between movement and sound. In fact, Roth's role was as much that of a "sonic choreographer" as a composer in the traditional sense.

An important influence on the dance performance was the somatic choreographic practice developed by Deborah Hay, a one-time mentor of Witek's. The EP's title is a word used by fellow choreographer Susan Leigh Foster to describe Hay's practice of directing dancers to "turn your fucking head.” Foster writes:

"Turning one’s head literally affords an opportunity to look at the world anew. It invites a rich inpouring of information, an energizing of one’s physicality, and the possibility to remake one’s world."

Another reference for the choreography was Ted Hughes's poem "Wodwo", in which a mythical, proto-human being investigates its own nature and its place within an ecosystem.

Other than the EP's title track, the names of the individual pieces are entirely comprised of words from Hughes's poem, either excerpted intact ("still how everything stops") or recombined to suggest new meanings ("leaves centre root" and "be seen free"), in the spirit of Hay's practice of "turning one’s head to look at the world anew".

The cover image is a drawing by London-based artist Jacqueline Nicholls, whose practice explores writing and language as human embodied acts of engaging with the world. Her glyph drawings play with sticks and shadows that evoke potential letter forms.

The cross-disciplinary flow of inspiration from poetry to dance to music to drawing comes full circle with a specially commissioned poem by Miriam Gamble, included alongside Nicholls's artwork in a PDF.

Inpouring is presented as both a digital-only EP and a collection of audiovisual NFTs featuring specially commissioned videography by Rūta Pužaitė, drawing/animation by Jacqueline Nicholls and poetry by Miriam Gamble.


Biographies:

Born in Detroit, raised in London and now based in Kraków, Alex Roth is a composer, guitarist, producer and interdisciplinary collaborator who over the last decade has earned a reputation as “one of contemporary music’s most innovative and impressive talents” (musicOMH). His diverse body of work encompasses improvised solo performances; orchestral compositions; scores for dance, theatre and film; and leading numerous bands. He has collaborated with some of Europe’s leading experimental musicians, such as John Butcher, Arve Henriksen, Savina Yannatou, Kit Downes, Mikolaj Trzaska and Olga Szwajgier.

Alice Purton is a London-based cellist and vocalist equally at home with experimental contemporary music, improvisation, classical chamber music and folk music. As a member of Distractfold, Plus Minus Ensemble, Ensemble Kopernikus and Trio Atem, she has performed at such festivals as Maerzmusik (Berlin); Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival; Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt; Spectrum (New York); ESS (Chicago); Warsaw Autumn; and No Hay Banda (Montreal). Alice has collaborated with singers such as Jamie Cullum, Alice Zawadzki and Ana Silvera; and recorded for composers including Mica Levi, Bobby Krlic (The Haxan Cloak) and Jon Opstad.