The final album released by the composer-performer Jerry Hunt before his death, Ground: Five MechanicConvention Streams is a rare and foundational audio document of Hunt's compositional process. The recordcollects five pieces from the artist's "Ground" series, translating his characteristically variable and spatialscores into "recorded fixtures of activity using mechanic musical instrument arrays," to eerie and mesmerizingresults. Originally released by experimental label OODiscs in 1992, it is now available on vinyl for the firsttime from Blank Forms Editions. It's tracks are dense and unpredictable, a miscellany of arrhythmic bursts,fragments of spoken and whispered words, soft then fevered rattles and shaking, and a rare return topianoforte for the virtuoso player. On "Talk (slice): double" a nervous, warped dialogue unfolds betweenHunt and composer Rod Stasick, their voices alternately measured and monstrous. In "Transform (stream):monopole," breathy whistles build against a shimmering stream of bells, rattles, and shakers in a fantasticalcascade of percussion. Hunt revisits the piano in "Lattice (stream): ordinal" and "Bitom (stream): link,"oscillating between gentle, almost classical phrases and frantic, seemingly random play. His collaboration withviolinist Jane Henry, "Chimanazzi (Olun): core," extends similarly unorthodox playing techniques to theviolin, involving the scraping, plucking, and playing of it's strings. The unstable quality of these tracks beliesthe rigor of Hunt's procedures; each ofGround's five pieces, their "common ground core," is derived from theangelic tables of sixteenth century English philosopher and occultist John Dee, adapted by Hunt asframeworks to layer, adapt, and renew in his compositions. With a complex arrangement of sensors andequipment, which the artist called "interrelated electronic, mechanic, and social sound-sight interactivetransactional systems," Hunt realized these derivative systems in the techno-shamanic performances for whichhe is best known. Ground distills these procedures into fixed songs, producing a vital and critical record ofHunt's singular approach to composition.
