ghostly.ridiculous by Mat Muntz

short version:

An electronic "concerto" for primorski meh (a traditional bagpipe from the northwest coast and islands of Croatia), ghostly.ridiculous presents the meh's unique pitch and timbral properties alongside electronic elements that explore 24 and 31-tone equal temperament, procedurally generated percussion, and noise.

long version:

This piece began with a series of strange nightmares and restless nights in June 2020. I was in my childhood home in Seattle, WA, and my cat had disappeared, most likely abducted by one of the neighborhood's resident bald eagles. At the same time, I was reading Vincent Bevins' excellent book 'The Jakarta Method', which chronicles the development of CIA-backed political murder and "disappearance" campaigns, first employed in Indonesia and then throughout Latin America. These concurrent forces, stitched together by the vulgar symbolism of the bald eagle put me in the paranoid, sleepless, and sufficiently haunted state necessary to create this music.

The use of primorski meh as the foundation of this piece is part of a larger creative project to unify my interests in traditional and experimental music into a cohesive musical vocabulary, one which explores new combinations and formations of sound while retaining the mythic and ritualistic elements central to human music-making for millennia.

If you purchase the album, you get the entire piece as a single track as a bonus, which is the best way to listen to the record (no interruptions to load the next track). However you wanna listen, I appreciate your interest, support, attention, etc.

composer/bassist/bagpiper

co-leader of The Vex Collection

matmuntz.com
Instagram
linktr.ee
The Vex Collection