Bellingham for David Ireland, one of Greenlief’s forty or so map-works, is made from cut-up and color-copied maps of Bellingham, the small, bayside city in northwestern Washington where the titular artist grew up. Each section references a part of Bellingham or Ireland’s life, and includes a cluster of themes and suggestions for performers: the bay, for resting and listening; the lavender street grid, for considering impositions on open space; the beige topography, for responding to nearby objects; the scale of the town’s hills, for emphasizing dynamics. Another section, with imagery related to Bellingham’s coalmine, suggests players conjure sounds that they imagine boring deep into the earth.

This recording, inventively engineered by Phil Perkins, doesn’t convey attendees’ experience of the performance; it’s not a self-guided tour through an ephemeral sound installation. It collapses two stories and several rooms, renders them level and balanced. But it’s kinetic and lively, and, for this attendee, augments a tangled memory of the sounds. Greenlief’s instructions to the players to dispatch sounds downward into the soil (inspired by Ireland’s obsession with excavation), in particular, manifest in the trilling, resonant pulses; hear the spiraling discord around the 12-minute mark. Its sleight of hand, with the false sense of players’ actual proximity that night, suits Ireland’s oblique streak, his taste for misdirection. — Sam LeFevbre
credits
releases July 21, 2020

DOWNSTAIRS
Wobbly - electronics
Karen Stackpole - gongs, percussion
Phillip Greenlief - tenor saxophone

UPSTAIRS
Kip Kipperman contrabass
Aurora Josephson - voice
Gabby Fluke-Mogul - violin
Zachary James Watkins - electronics
Carl Ludwig Hubsch - tuba