Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, her second book of poetry, published posthumously in 1965, contains some of the most chillingly evocative and memorable language one can imagine. Seattle saxophonist and woodwind player Greg Sinibaldi, drawn to Plath’s verse in a way that ultimately translated to music, has responded with the beautiful, experimental Ariel. “

Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, her second book of poetry, published posthumously in 1965, contains some of the most chillingly evocative and memorable language one can imagine. Seattle saxophonist and woodwind player Greg Sinibaldi, drawn to Plath’s verse in a way that ultimately translated to music, has responded with the beautiful, experimental Ariel. “The pieces aren’t necessarily narratives of the poems, but more about the thoughts and feelings I had while encountering the work,” Sinibaldi explains.

To realize this unique project Sinibaldi formed a trio with his fellow artists-in-residence at the University of Washington, guitarist Ryan Ferreira and drummer Ted Poor. Throughout the album he plays EWI (electronic wind instrument), a Nyle Steiner invention of the ’70s that has had a number jazz adapters over the years but remains fairly rare. “It’s a wind-driven synthesizer with a breath sensor that knows air velocity and pressure,” Sinibaldi explains. “The model I play has onboard sounds and also the ability to control MIDI instruments. I run it through some hardware effects and then through a software environment I made via the SuperCollider language. Most of the harmonic content comes from a mix of the EWI sounds and the pitch-shifters I made in SuperCollider utilizing varying parallel intervals. I like that you can tell it’s a synthesizer but it doesn't sound keyboard-based.”

In the opaque and otherworldly harmony of the EWI, the more tangible rub and growl of Ferreira’s guitar and the rhythmic and textural fluidity of Poor’s drumming, one hears aural parallels to Plath’s haunting and often startling stanzas in Ariel. “Arrival of the Bee Box,” for instance, finds Plath in awe upon receiving just that, a box of bees. She listens to the sound inside the box, and her descriptions, one could argue, are musical:

It is the noise that appalls me most of all,
The unintelligible syllables.
It is like a Roman mob,
Small, taken one by one, by my god, together!

I lay my ear to furious Latin.

“I wanted a complex sound to represent the din,” says Sinibaldi. “But ultimately the poem was a metaphor for my own thoughts and the unsettling nature of what they may be. It’s about wanting to be free of troubling thoughts, and the last line is so perfect: ‘The box is only temporary.’ The din is only temporary. It’s hopeful!”

In the two-part “Lady Lazarus” Sinibaldi contends with a poem that includes the lines:
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
“I think it’s just as hopeful,” he maintains. “It’s often interpreted as being about suicide, but I'm more interested in the imagery of the Phoenix, particularly in the last stanzas. I love the rising from the ashes/rebirth story and for me that’s what ‘Lady Lazarus’ is all about. It’s ultimately about vindication, about the hope and desire to rise above after extreme hurt. There’s something inevitable about that hope in this poem.”

Though the pieces are named for Plath’s individual Ariel poems or lines drawn from them, Sinibaldi’s purpose was less to represent them literally than to dwell on the bits and pieces that spoke to him most. “Separating some of the lines from the poems themselves had a kind of surreal effect for me,” he says. So “Black Sweet Blood Mouthfuls,” a reference to berries that occurs in the poem “Ariel,” finds Ferreira unspooling slow and majestic guitar chords, finally building to a huge mountainous distorted roar. “The Atrocity of Sunsets,” named for a line from the poem “Elm,” zeroes in on this passage:

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The intense, rhythmically ambiguous “Cut” (Plath’s poetic response to severely cutting her finger); the hypnotic pulse of “Wintering in the Dark”; the drumless rubato expanses of the concluding “Elm”: each piece feeds into a larger accumulating whole, sonically fresh and wildly unpredictable, a platform for creative interplay at its most searching and egoless.


More information at www.gregsinibaldi.com

Voices is the music and sounds of the voices inside my head. They are voices of thoughts and things I would say but often don't, things I carry with me but don't express. They are voices I hear while waking down the street, teaching, sitting in a bar, going to concerts... They are my reactions to the world around me.

While editing and mixing the

Voices is the music and sounds of the voices inside my head. They are voices of thoughts and things I would say but often don't, things I carry with me but don't express. They are voices I hear while waking down the street, teaching, sitting in a bar, going to concerts... They are my reactions to the world around me.

While editing and mixing the music I began thinking of what this music might look like. I started to explore video "collaboration" with each piece. As I worked with video, it became more apparent that the visuals inspired by the music were an absolute necessity. The music started to take a different shape and became enhanced by having a visual focus. Rather than simply making a "music video" I think of the videos as an integral part of the whole. The music needs the visuals and the visuals need the music.

The visual component of Voices are scenes I've shot of artwork I've made, mostly collage pieces and some paintings. I really wasn't concerned with a particular narrative for each piece, rather I wanted to add another dimension to the music. I want the listener to have a visual focus for listening to the music, but not in an attempt to push a particular experience.

A bit about each piece.

Sonarchy X - https://vimeo.com/343330803
I felt there was a certain cinematic quality to this piece and love the name Sonarchy. I didn't coin the term, rather, its was a very important radio show high-lighting experimental music of the Seattle scene. It was recorded as part of one of those shows. The piece has an introductory quality to me, something that says "welcome, please enjoy the journey".

he's Calling - https://vimeo.com/343773703
This tune is about the knowledge of a familiar voice coming to say hello. Sometimes it's not a welcome voice. More a reservation that you'll need to be dealing with it soon. The piece also has a sub context about a "shadow" headache. I occasionally suffer from cluster headaches and before one comes on I get a "shadow" headache. Something that lets me know that the real deal is coming.

Selves are like Shamans - https://vimeo.com/343773757
This piece is about the idea that we can be multiple things, multiple selves each with their own shamanic abilities. In some ways it's about choosing to be who we want. However choosing one "self" doesn't mean we cant be another. It's about all the facets of our personalities.

The Painted Faces - https://vimeo.com/343773808
I sometimes draw Tarot cards to name pieces when I'm at a loss for a title. For this piece each card I drew had a painted face on it. As I contemplated their meaning I began to feel that each were trying to say something to me, but I was unable to understand what they were saying. Like Charlie Brown's teacher on Peanuts! The music felt as if I couldn't quite make out the details, but feel an energy and insistence that something is trying to be communicated.

Wraiths - https://vimeo.com/343773847
Wraiths is about visions of spirits moving around me as I walk through the world. I have a recurring dream where spirits of people and animals dance around their dead bodies. Some are familiar to me, others are not, but I feel like they are all connected to me in some way. I like to believe they are spirits from past lives coming to visit.

On Prefecture Music’s 2013 release Ascendant, reedmen Greg Sinibaldi and Jesse Canterbury craft music of exquisite beauty in a truly unique sonic environment. An album of solos and duos mostly on bass clarinets is transformed into an other-worldly symphony thanks to the contributions of the space: the Dan Harpole Cistern, a two-million gallon

On Prefecture Music’s 2013 release Ascendant, reedmen Greg Sinibaldi and Jesse Canterbury craft music of exquisite beauty in a truly unique sonic environment. An album of solos and duos mostly on bass clarinets is transformed into an other-worldly symphony thanks to the contributions of the space: the Dan Harpole Cistern, a two-million gallon cylindrical concrete tank, originally constructed as an emergency water supply for fire control for nearby Fort Worden.