Ensemble Nikel, Noa Frenkel

Program Notes

Christopher Trapani
Sunk 45s (2025)

A: Low Point
B: Hi Cool

A: Drift & Dredge (take 1)
B: Drift & Dredge (take 2)

A: La Poussière
B: Low Point (alternate take, varispeed)

Sunk 45s is a dispatch from the bottom: the below-sea-level vantage point of South Louisiana, a drainage ditch looking back up towards the rest of North America in 2025—a continent in disarray in a time out of joint. Draw a curve from San Francisco to New York City that dips as low as possible without veering into the Gulf and you’ll hit New Orleans, where you’ll find a 45-year-old composer in a slump that matches that nadir.

Think of these vignettes as sides on vinyl 45 rpm records that could have been dug out of bayou silt. The vintage vocabulary of the swamp blues is intact: overdriven harmonica, breathy tenor sax, tremolo and slapback guitar, a spinning organ, and a rusty drum kit. Daniel Lanois may have covered a few of these tunes in the 1980s, throwing in an omnichord and some pristine echoes. In Ensemble Nikel’s present-day version, instruments are retuned into a microtonal haze, digital effects are run through a laptop into both amps and makeshift coffee-tin speakers, and subtly stretching loops create a maze of temporal shifts.

Bekah Simms
Spectra (2025)

Spectra is fundamentally constructed around one of the most omnipresent sounds from the period immediately after my son’s birth: the Spectra breast-milk pump. After an early arrival and an unplanned Caesarean section, breast-milk production proved an intense challenge. It was an exhausting physical and psychological experience. However, I managed to appreciate the surprisingly heavy sonic character of the pump itself: mechanical, rhythmic, and subtly changing in pitch and articulation with its different settings. It sounded as strong as I wanted to be in that moment.

I sent a rough recording of the pump to Ensemble Nikel, soliciting a vocabulary of sounds from them which are in dialogue with the pump. These pump-adjacent sounds make up much of the acoustic material as well as the electronic material, accompanying a boosted ‘mega-pump’: a small machine transformed into something all-encompassing, muscular, sputtering, and decaying, and coming into focus again. Of particular note are the sounds offered up by Nikel keyboardist Antoine, who had also recently become a parent and was familiar with the Spectra. Evidently, we were both musing on the dual nature of the machine—its rough and intense physical nature coupled with its symbolic character as a gentle act of love. Amongst his sounds were variations on a lullaby, which my tender parental heart could not help but use to end the piece.

Rebecca Saunders
Us Dead Talk Love (2021)

My mouth,
I want to
nurse, nurse the word
n—i—a
in my mouth
On my, on my lips, my my lips.
With my throat
I want to
map my mouth
map my mouth with the word
‘smoke’, with the word ‘smoke’.
Breathe it.
I, carefully, careful.
My mouth releases the word. . . .

The shed of skin has
drifted up to form a lens over over your eyes.
Your eyes are clogged ambient sound is translated, filtered,
compressed, chorused, distorted, bit-crushed, reverbed, etc. – The euphoric
acoustics.
Cathedral of the future! ev’rything too sharp, too
crisp, too juicy, too close, too vivid. A lucidity to the visual world, world!
Pressed on your eye, lunging straight to the brain, groping and
pummelling its surface with unmeditated bluntness
Eh! Ev’rything is gratuitously PRESENT! Excessively thesaural
Superabundance. Oh, oscillating wildly.
Gut-wrenching sub-bass and piercing treble. . . .

Excerpt from text of Us Dead Talk Love