This CD re-issues five early and fundamental pieces from the 1970s, by this most original composer. Hunt was a brilliant pianist, electronics designer, and, as a composer, created a unique musical terminology and sound vocabulary that enabled him to realize subtle musical and spiritual goals. In Lattice (1979), for piano, the goal was the reinforcement and accumulation of the non-harmonic resonances into drones, while the pianist simultaneously plays deviations (repeated tone clusters, quick chromatics) away from those drones. A percussive clapper plays in quick, telegraphic rhythmic unison. Transform (stream) (1977), for voices and small hand-held percussion, is built of allophonic sequences of speech fricatives, or slow variations on the building-blocks of human speech. Many small percussive instruments are used: hand drums, shakers, ratchets, bell trees, etc. The effective result is one of great mystery and incantation. Cantegral Segment 18 (1977) electronically emulates a collection of speech fragments with their "allophonic bundles" and Cantegral Segment 17 (1977) is used to produce changes in these electronic emulations like secondary echoes in the mind. Transphalba (1978), for lip-vibrated aerophone (e.g. Jew's harp, split-reed instruments) and feedback instruments (e.g. echoing strings), is like encountering divinely possessed performers in an ancient marketplace playing in a style that varies from the surreal and mournful all the way to the humorous. Volta (Kernal) (1977), for voices and percussion, is built from the gradual transformation of repeated sounds, a kind of real-time signal analysis that in concert took on the appearance of mysterious ceremonies of evocation and conjuring. The specific "cantegral segments" here are Cantegral Segment 16 which is translingual, using language structures of remote cultures, and formulates a context for the individual performer's vocal mechanism, and Cantegral Segment 7 which defines "extreme limits of phrase parts."
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