At the end of May this year Calum Storrie started to produce a graphic score with no idea of how it might translate into sound. The score, drawn and collaged onto manuscript paper, used a limited number of elements: a red circle, black lines, a film still, a rubber stamp, a stencil, zigzag lines, a fragment of musical notation and found and ‘Letraset’ text.
Storrie made a page a day over the next nine days. He sent the finished score to Steve Beresford, wondering if he might be able to take this visual exercise and turn it into a piece of music – coherent or otherwise. Beresford worked on the score at the piano over the following weeks, recording the responses to individual pages on his iPhone. The result is this suite of nine reflective studies.
The release is accompanied by a 20 page PDF manuscript of the score.
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Written by Calum Storrie
Performed & recorded on piano by Steve Beresford
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Cover design by Oliver Barrett
Steve Beresford has been a central figure in the British and international spontaneous music scenes for over forty years, freely improvising on the piano, electronics, and other things with people like Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Han Bennink, John Zorn, and Alterations (with David Toop, Terry Day and Peter Cusack).
He has written songs, written for large and small ensembles, and scored short films, feature films, TV shows, and commercials. He was part of the editorial teams of Musics and Collusion magazines, writes about music in various contexts, and was a senior lecturer in music at the University of Westminster. With Blanca Regina, he is part of Unpredictable Series, which produces events and sound and video recordings of experimental music and art.
Steve has worked with Christian Marclay on numerous Marclay mixed media pieces. He has also worked with The Slits, Najma Akhtar, Stewart Lee, Ivor Cutler, Prince Far-I, Alan Hacker, Tania Chen, Ray Davies, Mandhira De Saram, The Flying Lizards, Zeena Parkins, The Portsmouth Sinfonia, Ilan Volkov, Rachel Musson, Vic Reeves, Lore Lixenberg and many others.
Beresford has an extensive discography as performer, arranger, free-improviser, composer and producer, and was awarded a Paul Hamlyn award for composers in 2012. In 2021, Bloomsbury published a book by Andy Hamilton: ‘Pianos, Toys, Music and Noise: Conversations with Steve Beresford’.
http://www.efi.group.shef.ac.uk/mberes.html
Calum Storrie is an artist, writer and designer. His art practice takes a number of forms from drawings of imaginary architecture to collage and spontaneous drawings of live performances. He has also created graphic scores for Steve Beresford, Douglas Benford and the Ligeti Quartet. He has designed exhibitions for, among others, the Royal Academy, the Museum of London and Wellcome Collection. His collaboration with Steve Beresford, ‘Nine Day Score’, is released on Cafe Oto’s Takuroku label.
