I first encountered the music of Steve Moshier (d.2016) over ten years ago, when tracks from an obscure album by the Cartesian Reunion Memorial Orchestra appeared online.
(The CRMO was a group of southern California composers and performers, who had mostly all studied at university together in the 1970s, then banded together in the 1980s to create an ensemble to play and promote their own music in venues around Los Angeles. As part of that group, Steve both composed a number of their pieces, and performed on mallet percussion.)
I shared the link to this rather unusual and historic music in a post at the music website Sequenza21, and shortly after attracted a comment from a couple of the original CRMO members -- one of which was Steve Moshier. So, contact made...
Around the same time, another musician friend had created a small social website (NetNewMusic) for new-music composers, performers, and fans, to get together and share thoughts, ideas, and works. Before too long, Steve showed up there and became very engaged with the site and people. One of the things that was born on the NNM website, around 2009, was a weekly event first known as ImprovFriday. During the space of two days each week, musicians from around the USA and even other countries would create and share improvisations, sound art -- any freshly made music, really. Steve participated in this from the first, usually making very evocative, short, electronic pieces using software like Propellerheads Reason. He continued as a regular contributor right up until the day this June, when he was found unconscious at home and died a couple days later in the hospital.
Steve was an extremely energetic, prolific, and giving musician, with our own ImprovFriday (now Sound-In) group, and with his many students at Rio Hondo College in California, and his sudden death was a blow to all of us in his circle of friends. As musicians, a number of us have paid tribute to Steve with music, simply because that's what we think in. As part of that tribute in the week after his death, I had the idea to take many of the short electronic tracks that Steve had contributed over the years to ImprovFriday/Sound-In, and stitch them together into larger forms.
The four tracks here use some 30+ tracks made by Steve, laid end-to-end and on top of each other, to create longer journeys and stories. Steve's electronic tracks were always very visual, cinematic even (thus my use of the word "Kino" [cinema] in the album title). I'd like to think that these mash-up tracks retain all of that, while allowing the listener to more fully sample Steve's restless creativity. I made a point in these mash-ups, of not using any extra audio processing; everything heard was conceived, performed and recorded by Steve himself.
credits
released June 26, 2016
All music conceived, recorded, performed by Steve Moshier.
Mash-up/remixing by Steve Layton.
Composer, performer, recordist, connector, facilitator. Editor of Sequenza21.com, a long-running website reporting on
contemporary classical music.
Collaborator at ImprovFriday/Sound-In, a weekly web gathering of musicians from around the globe. NiwoSound is an umbrella for innovative art music / art sound....more
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