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Step​(​pe​)​s

by Mihailo Trandafilovski

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1.
Orbit 12:45
2.
Wave 09:37
3.
Shore 11:30

about

Mihailo Trandafilovski knows his way around a violin. As an intrepid explorer of unknown musical territories it took the Covid lockdown to turn his wide-ranging career into something he could do at home. Digging deep into his voluminous repertoire of string techniques, he had time to stay put and piece together a vision that transcends his London digs. In fact, it goes much farther out than that.

Step(pe)s started as an ‘audio catalogue’ of things string teachers generally don’t tell you about, things that go beyond the limits of conventional tone production: bow pressure, speed, scratches, slides, microtones – ways to coax new colors, tones, and spectra from the historical instrument. A gamut more often associated with electronic music. Recording these sounds live into a portable recorder then suggested a world of compositional potential; that’s when Step(pe)s opened up its vista, and the gift of time, made possible by governmental edict, allowed Mihailo to proceed to the next phase. The piece became an exercise in studio art as much as performance; space, timbre, layers, reverb, location all became mutable parts of the mix. The production is as virtuosic as the fingering.

The overall sense of the listening experience is one of both stillness and motion, a dynamic stasis that is never the same but unfolds in its own terms once you surrender your expectations. An ambience that is both narrow-band drone and grand-scale gesture, depending on how you scale your attention.

The cyclical quality in Orbit is perhaps obvious, but while this implies tension and release, the cycles are not uniform — the level of intensity increases with each ‘wave’, contributing to a dynamic development. In Wave, the momentum and overall ‘sweep’ can be seen as movement in time, or one of the two aspects contained in Orbit; this is complemented by an ‘arrival’ in Shore, which unifies a number of the elements introduced earlier. Being in this piece is more like spending time outdoors than being confined inside a classical architectural building.

As Mihailo reflects, “Now, with some distance behind, and life (more or less) returning back to normal, I look at the project as very personal, and as a creative experience specific to the lockdown — it would not have emerged if my musical life was more normal. But perhaps there are parallels between the process as described, and a psychological aspect: the very limited, closed space imposed by the lockdown was in many ways restrictive for me, but I believe resulted with the opening of new creative possibilities (certainly not imagined beforehand) — looking ‘out’ by having to look ‘in’.”

Macedonian-born, London-based composer, violinist and educator Mihailo Trandafilovski is a violinist in the Kreutzer Quartet, with whom he has performed and recorded extensively. He has an avid interest in the application of new music to pedagogy and has led a number of shared projects among the arts promoting contemporary artistic creativity to a wider audience.

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released July 2, 2021

Mastered by Erdem Helvacioglu
Cover image: Waves by Katharine Beaugie

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Mihailo Trandafilovski London, UK

Macedonian-born, London-based composer, violinist and educator Mihailo Trandafilovski is a violinist in the Kreutzer Quartet, with whom he has performed and recorded extensively. He has an avid interest in the application of new music to pedagogy and has led a number of shared projects among the arts promoting contemporary artistic creativity to a wider audience. ... more

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