Tachitipo

NEW FOCUS RECORDINGS (2019)

Released November 15, 2019

Available on BANDCAMP, NEW FOCUS RECORDINGS, ARKIV MUSIC, AMAZON (PHYSICAL), AMAZON DIGITAL

Composer Zosha Di Castri’s debut album “Tachitipo” features several of her eclectic chamber and solo works, both acoustic and electro-acoustic, written between 2010 to the present, and in performances by top-notch ensembles and artists (mostly New York-based) who have long-standing collaborative relationships with the composer.

Di Castri’s music reflects her restless intellect, and her compositional process is often expressed in terms of working through an abstract extra-musical idea through sound. These sound-thought experiments extend to her compositional methods themselves, often birthing and developing her music in close collaboration with her performer colleagues, as is the case with many of the works on this recording. “Tachitipo” also features a unique collaboration with one of the top recording engineer-producers for classical music, Martha de Francisco, and the internationally recognized conductor, Lorraine Vaillancourt, founder and musical director of the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne in Montreal.

The title piece, for the two-pianist, two-percussionist quartet Yarn/Wire, is a “reflection on writing and the machines we use to execute our ideas.” Di Castri turns to the vintage manual typewriter as her inspiration for building a vocabulary of sounds. Tachitipo alternates between quasi-improvisatory textures featuring microtonal washes of pitch to tightly controlled, rhythmic ensemble mechanisms. At twenty four minutes, it is a monumental piece spun out of a meditation on work that progresses incrementally, one key stroke at a time. -Album notes by D. Lippel 

Producer: Martha de Francisco

Tracks 1, 2, 4–6 recorded at Oktaven Audio, Mt. Vernon, NY, May 2018 

Track 3 produced and recorded using the facilities of Program Production at Banff Centre, Banff, Alberta, July 2018 

Recording engineers: Ryan Streber (tracks 2, 6); Charles Mueller (tracks 1, 4, 5); James Clemens-Seely (track 3) 
Assistant engineers: Kseniya Degtyareva, Lilita Dunska (track 3) 
Bonus video track recorded at The Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Reid Hall, Paris, February 2019 
Videography and recording engineer: David Adamcyk; camera operator: Antonia Fritche 

Editing and mixing: at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University and CIRMMT 
Editing and Mixing Engineers: David Adamcyk (Tracks 6,7), John Castillo (Tracks 1, 2, 4, 5), Kseniya Degtyareva (Track 3, 4), Zosha Di Castri (Track 6), and Haruka Nagata (Tracks 2, 4, 5) 

All tracks mastered by James Clemens-Seely, July 2019 
Album Artwork Design, Layout and Printing by Kiva Stimac, Popolo Press (Montreal, Canada)Tracks 1, 2, 4–6 recorded at Oktaven Audio, Mt. Vernon, NY, May 2018