Hello golden hawks, here is a recap of this weeks episode of the CIA Radio Show The Sound, brought to you by Radio Laurier.

This weeks show featured two Laurier composers, Drew Hewitt and a recent grad, Michael Paolucci.  We listened to three of Drew’s pieces, titled Chestnut Irises, The Nest I Used to Know, and Industrial Obama.  Drew is a fourth year composition student who plays the guitar and writes beautiful music.  Each of Drew’s pieces are inspired by different events that have taken place in his life, as you can hear them throughout his works.  Drew writes a large variety of genres, including electronic, piano and vocal pieces, as well as music for chamber ensembles.

Our second composer that was featured on the show was Michael Paolucci.  Michael is a recent graduate of WLU, and enjoys composing for film.  Michael has composed for a number of student films, and has studied with composers across North America.  He is a composer from Innisfil, Ontario, Canada, and enjoys making music because of all of the emotion that’s involved, both in writing, and listening. Whenever he writes a piece or a song, his goal is to make the listener feel something or take something away from the experience.  Today we listened to Michael’s grad piece that he wrote for wind orchestra titled “Eulogy for a Cloud”.  Eulogy for a Cloud is written in four continuous movements for full wind orchestra. The piece outlines the various cycles that clouds experience before evanescing and returning to another form and begin the cycle again. Each movement embodies a particular type of cloud. The first movement, Cirrus, focuses on the detached and wispy clouds. It is reflected in the piece by its ever shifting and pulsating nature. The second movement, Altocumulus, focuses on the layer of diffuse clouds that act as a sheet over the sky. This is represented by the omnipresent, climbing pulse throughout the movement, and the restriction of only two alternating chords. The third movement, Cumulonimbus, focuses on the creation of an imminent storm cloud. The slowly rising theme is augmented each time it is repeated through the orchestration in the brass, which reflects the growing power of an approaching storm cloud. The fourth and final movement of the piece, Cumulus, focuses on the dense white clouds that are interpreted as different shapes, animals, and objects. This is represented by moments of temporal fluidity and by the familiarity of themes returning. While listening to the piece, imagine watching clouds slowly pass in front of the sun as they become illuminated the by red glow for a brief moment before another cloud takes its place. Even though each passing cloud is only highlighted for a moment, it is within that moment that an experience is created. The brevity of an experience should never dictate its importance.  This piece was performed by the Wilfrid Laurier University Wind Orchestra in 2016 and was conducted by Jessica Kun.

UPCOMING CONCERTS:

WLU Symphony Orchestra

Friday, January 27th at 7pm

Theatre Auditorium

NUMUS Presents the MIX Series: Linsey Wellman
January 27, 2017– 8:00pm
The Walper Hotel – Oak Room
20 Queen St. S. Kitchener, ON
$15/$10/$5

Young Composers Showcased
February 2, 2017– 8:00pm
KW Chamber Music Society (The Music Room)
57 Young St. W, Waterloo (near Bridgeport / Albert)
$15/$10

USEFUL LINKS:

www.facebook.com/laurier.cia

soundcloud.com/wlu-cia

soundcloud.com/michael-j-paolucci

That’s all for now folks, tune in next week to hear some awesome new music!

This week, the CIA radio show covered music that the hosts composed themselves, as we dove deep into different composition techniques, as well as discussing some history of mixing and mastering within electronic music.  One of the James’ wasn’t able to make it yesterday, so we had our back up host, Dirty Hil join us in the studio for a bit.  The show featured three of her eleven piece album titled Influences.  We talked about the tracks titled Hotline Miami, A Certain Romance, and 13.  Hilary is an electronic composer who wrote an album based off of her inspirations.  Hotline Miami is influenced by, well, Hotline Miami; a video game that takes place in the 80s, and is awesome.  Here we discuss how the 80s is making a comeback in many different ways; fashion, music, and movies are all going through an 80s faze.  The other two tracks are inspired by tracks from the Arctic Monkeys, which I’m sure most of you have heard of already.  At this point we discuss the use of “sidechaining”, an effect that is used quite often in music nowadays.  We talk about how it was originally used for mixing/mastering purposes, and now it is used an effect in nearly every edm song.

The second half of the show featured three pieces by one of the James’, under his alias of Danger Dave.  These three tracks were from his 80’s styled EP that he released over the summer that was sold for charity.  These tracks are all 80’s inspired, and fall under the genre of Retrowave.  James and Hilary discuss mixing/mastering, and how so much has changed over the decades.  The average loudness of tracks has gone up a significant amount lately, and there is loss of musical detail in doing so.  The question is, are modern day hits being mastered poorly?  Or is the definition of mastering changing over time?  I guess we’ll find out in the next upcoming years.

Stay tuned for next week’s show that’ll take place at Sunday at 3pm.  In the meantime, check out these useful links:

Hilary’s Soundcloud:     https://soundcloud.com/hilary-whiskin

James aka Danger Dave’s Soundcloud:     https://soundcloud.com/danger_dave

Like the CIA on Facebook:     https://www.facebook.com/laurier.cia