released October 1, 2014

Format: Limited edition of 100 red CD-R’s in plastic jacket stuffed with nesting booklets and sticker
Duration: 70 minutes
Label: Agxivatein (#13)
Country: Greece
Artwork: Coppice
Including: Acoustic Filters, Accordions, Free Reed Boxes
Date: 2010-2012 (composed and rearranged), December 2014 (released)

Composed and arranged by Noé Cuéllar & Joseph Kramer.

Vinculum (Coincidence) is the latest installment from Coppice’s archive of sonic artifacts. The original piece was conceived as a site-specific performance and was presented at Without You I Am Nothing: Interactions, a performance series curated by Tricia Van Eck for the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The composition revolved around the intersections between two accordions, four speakers with aleatoric pre-recorded material, spatial / temporal intervals and audience flow. It was performed for a total of 14 hours between February 8-13, 2011.

Vinculum (Coincidence) includes the recordings S-1 02.01 004:44, S-1 03.01 005:36, and T-M 01.01 003:50 from Vinculum, Coppice’s archive of sonic artifacts. The studio arrangement for CD was developed between May 2011 and November 2012. The accordion duo score recordings were engineered by Todd A. Carter in June 2011 at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago.

Thank you to Maritza Bautista, Chelsea Culp & Ben Foch, Rodion Galperin, Guillermo Gregorio, Emily Green & Nick Wylie, Meg Kramer, Marinos Koutsomichalis & Akis Sinos, Julia A. Miller, Jenny Vallier, Tricia Van Eck, and to the audiences that varied and constellated the composition.

Liner notes by Coppice

Vinculum (Coincidence) is a composition originally conceived as part of a curated performance series that focused on interactivity between artworks and their audience. Upon approaching the subject of interactivity, a performance structure was delineated in which physical and musical movements through space guided and followed the audience around the museum setting, creating constellations of intersecting sound events.

The flexibility of the score generates opportunities for the audience to experience sonic connections, whether real or imagined. The moments of “coincidence” suggested in the title emerge from the becoming of events from four channels of aleatoric playback, combined with the performance of scored procedures for two accordions, and the movements and engagement of individuals in the audience.

The four channels were arranged in a decentralized manner to diffuse performance/audience boundaries. Each speaker played back slight variations on a palette comprising simple and complex tones, breathing rhythms and instrumental artifacts (like crackle, hissing, rattles, etc.)–sourced from bellowed and reeded instruments, and periodic silences. The recordings excite a wide sonic spectrum fluctuating between dispersed identity and momentary fusion.

The two live accordions were kept in motion by three kinds of procedures. Performances of these procedures were motivated by sonic activity as well as particular physical proximities both between the two performers, and also between the duo and their audience.  The three categories of procedures are as follows:

Phasing procedures: individual and duo accordion parts based on long notes, hocketed breaths and melodies, intervalic relationships and simple musical phrases repeated over a long period of time;
Imitative procedures: particularly mirroring the sounds in the playback, but also the audience’s rhythms of steps, speech melodies, and other on-site incidental sounds;
Silence procedures: in an attempt to shift the performers between roles of performer and listener, we wrote in several permutations of the silence procedure that can be generalized as: “don’t play while standing or sitting silently with the accordion still on; don’t play while standing or sitting silently with the accordion off; don’t play while talking to whomever would like to talk; don’t play and exit the performance area.”
The duration of each performance was long enough to allow the seemingly automatic unraveling of some events while offering myriad opportunities for shared experiences with and between audience individuals.  This was both music to listen to and music to ignore – and in turn, it both listened to and ignored the audience.

Having experienced countless particulars with streaming audiences throughout the eighteen hours of performance over the course of three iterations, a new arrangement for home listening was parceled – Vinculum (Coincidence): Indexed Conjectures of Coincidence Imprints Once Happened. Since the dimensions are being flattened from four channels and two performers down to a stereo field, a shortened version was arranged (the original duration being 120 minutes in a live setting) to roughly the length of a CD, the best duration in which to explore the multidimensional aspects and peaks that were present in many of the performances.

Since there is no “live” element or spatial acoustics in the recording, the confusion of performance versus playback that was implicitly sought in live settings is no longer an active agent.  Spatial disorientation may derive from the flattening of both sonic dimensions of all the recordable aspects. In correspondence with this, the CD arrangement of Vinculum (Coincidence) is liable to equate shifting circumstances and effectual experiences.Liner notes by Tricia Van Eck (“A Tenuous Attraction”)

What is public space within a museum? We know how it looks, but how does it act, sound, and feel? How do we experience art in public? This question was at the heart of Interactions, a four-month long series of artist and audience activations that occurred within the exhibition Without You I Am Nothing: Art and Its Audience, which considered the experiential relationship between artwork and audience. As curator, I invited Coppice to create a work for Interactions to explore the distinct, visceral relationship that occurs when artists create work in the presence of the viewer.

Vinculum (Coincidence) consisted of four speakers placed in the gallery amidst large works by Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Dan Peterman, Adrian Piper, and Andrea Zittel. The speakers – reverberating through the normally quiet space – played pre-recorded sounds that initially seemed like breaths or wind blowing but then altered or transformed as if mechanical parts hissing and whooshing across and through the space. Once these speakers were on, Noé Cuéllar and Joseph Kramer stoically entered, each with an accordion. For two hours each day, for six days they played, slowly moving around the space and each other.

People walking by the galleries – where sound is not normally present – upon hearing the hypnotic yet enigmatic sounds from within, would often stop and try to locate what it was and where it was coming from. Seeing one or both of the performers and their accordions would not necessarily answer their confusion. Some would walk away perplexed, while others would be drawn in. Once inside, the effects of the performance were individualized and subjective. Some, perhaps realizing that their movements intersected the score, chose to remain motionless, while others moved around the gallery seemingly looking and testing how the different sculptures absorbed or reverberated the sounds. Some, perhaps musicians, appeared to be acutely listening as if discerning patterns and phrasing of melodies and breaths. Still others were interested solely in the performers – imitating their stances or interrupting their silences by talking with them. Most intriguing to me, was how sculptural the performers, the sounds, and by extension, the audience became. It was as if Vinculum (Coincidence), with its continuous droning of tones, breaths, and modulations, froze or at least slowed the viewers as they walked among the objects in the gallery, as if coalescing into a spatio-temporal synchronous whole. It was if by listening, the audience could tenuously hold the experience, the shifting sounds, and themselves together, in space with each other.

Side effects:

“I suppose I’m most drawn to the structural qualities of music (including the structures that are composed of emotional responses to sound), structures to ingest and measure inside against outside reality: new ways of contextualizing experiences. I’m excited by the referential opacity of sound—referencing intent and context and subjectivity, but not clearly establishing which is represented by what. Listening deeply, I remain myself while I experience that which is not myself within myself. In the context of its ‘least successful’ execution, Coppice’s work was most successful because it celebrated this indistinction—not just in the compositional intent and execution, but by embracing that which had not been its intent, as its intent. With good humor.” –Peter Weathers, Dissecting Adam (2011)

“Amplify and extinct, again and again. A detailed study in soundwaves as they travel through space. The guys from Chicago’s Coppice are revisiting their heartland, a biomechanical world. An abandoned world, that has been lacking some maintenance as things falter from time to time. The ongoing series that is Vinculum (archival works here with the term Coincidence added, maybe to stress the chance meetings occurring during the live performance presented here) here gets expanded into a new territory. Live alterations that interfere with hallucinatic abstractions, variations that are eventful yet atavistic in a sense that they fit perfect with earlier incarnations of Vinculum. The music itself, stripped to its essence, are stretched accordion drones and something that sounds like recurring lashes of a giant pneumatic whip. The music is layered, building on air deformation, pulling, pushing and there’s hiss, cracks, accordion melancholy build on lots of air, all compressed and released in simple monochromatic patterns. Originally there were 14 hours of performance, here brought back to 24 snapshots of enigmatic vibrations. […]

Vinculum, which in Latin means bond or chain but also a term used in mathematics mainly, where it represents a graphical symbol, the fraction bar, a means to express parts of a whole, dividing numbers into chunks in order to make analysis possible with more detail, and indeed also the track titles have a scientific feel, they do almost sound like tests of some kind of experimental design, here summarized and reported as some unexpected findings. A freedom exercise based on, and co-existing with highly detailed and prescriptive procedures.” –Pim van der Graf, Progress Report (2014)

“The Chicago duo of Noé Cuéllar and Joseph Kramer initially conceived of “Vinculum (Coincidence)” as a live performance for four speakers and two accordionists, to be performed as part of the exhibition Without You I Am Nothing: Art and Its Audience at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The four speakers, placed in a gallery space among other artworks, played back selections from the duo’s archive of sounds generated by bellows and reed instruments, the ordering and timing of the playback determined by chance. The two accordionists roamed the gallery following a loose score that incorporated responses to both the speaker outputs and the actions of visitors to the gallery, for example mimicking their footsteps. Writing after the event, exhibition curator Tricia Van Eck noted that “it was if by listening, the audience could tenuously hold the experience, the shifting sounds, and themselves together, in space with each other.”

“Vinculum (Coincidence): Indexed Conjectures of Coincidence Imprints Once Happened” is the rather unwieldy title for a two-channel distillation of “Vinculum (Coincidence)” for home listening. Without the real-time interactive element that characterises the live version, the piece changes shape considerably. Across 24 tracks of varying length, from just a few seconds to nearly 15 minutes, games of chance and semi-improvisation play out, but in a home setting the interplay between accordionists and speakers is mostly hidden, and the tenuous comings together of situations described by Van Eck lose something of their contingency and spontaneity.

What is audible on record is a rawer, more cleanly ‘acoustic’ sound from the two accordions compared with the multiple layers of tape manipulations that Coppice is known for. The simplicity and directness of the first track, for example, in which pumping sounds flick from left to right over a quiet background murmur, earns its place amongst the duo’s finest work to date. At other times, the lack of refinement and variety perhaps suits intermittent attention better than full-on sustained engagement (the liner notes’ suggestion is that the album should be listened to on ‘shuffle’). I would love to see a live realisation of “Vinculum (Coincidence)” and explore the numerous coincidences of space, installation, performer, and audience opened up by the work. In lieu of that possibility, this recorded version offers a fresh and stripped-down take on the music of Coppice.” –Nathan Thomas, Fluid Audio (2014)

“Вновь шикарный саунд, проработанный до мелочей. Не уверен, что уже сейчас можно говорить о классическом звучании дуэта, но если таковой термин употребить можно, то это про сей альбом. Это акустические дроновые полотна из аккордеоновых длинных нот и ленточных артефактов с изменяющимся питчем вкупе с такой же неспешностью развития композиций. Как только одна фактура начинает изживать себя, начинается переход к следующей, а после к третьей. Всё это сделано настолько филигранно, но вместе с тем непринуждённо и легко, что остаётся только лишь слушать, куда заведут Кюэллар и Крамер. Отличная работа!” –Ilia Belorukov, CMMag (2015)