New and recent work for guitar by Giacomo Fiore, Michael Pisaro-Liu, and Matt Sargent.
Matt Sargent (b. 1984) is a composer, guitarist, recording engineer, and music technology specialist based in upstate New York, where he is an assistant professor of music at Bard College. His music grows from resonance, memory, the making/breaking of patterns, and computer models of musical thought. Working between the concert stage, the recording studio, and the code box, Sargent’s audio technology has been called “a veritable fountain of intensifying, kaleidoscopic spumes” (Peter Margasak, Bandcamp). Over the last decade, his work has focused extensively on musical algorithms and real-time notation systems, which can be heard in his compositions and technical collaborations with other artists.\ \ His albums include Illuminations (Sawyer Editions, 2024), Bend (Waveform Alphabet, 2023), Between Time and After (Chen Li Music, 2023), Tide (A Wave Press, 2020), Separation Songs (Cold Blue Music, 2019), Tide (for ten basses) (Marginal Frequency, 2019), and Ghost Music (Weighter Recordings, 2018).As a performer, he can recently be heard on James Romig's The Fragility of Time(A Wave Press, 2024) and Robert Carl's Infinity Avenue(Neuma Records, 2023).\ \ His compositions have been described as “remarkable from all angles” (Colin Clarke, Fanfare Magazine) and “bringing a sharpened sense of the transcendental into the 21st century.” (Paul Muller, Sequenza21) On Ghost Music, Bill Meyer writes, “this music isn’t about following in anyone’s footsteps; it uses bare resources to establish a bounded and essential place.” (The Wire Magazine) His guitar work on Bend, a duo album with synthesist Dani Dobkin, was described as “a guitar record retrieved from far in the future.” (Antonio Poscic, Research Music)
Italian-born guitarist and musicologist Giacomo Fiore has premiered more than three dozen new works for justly-tuned, electric, and classical guitars, and released several recordings for Other Minds, Populist, Cold Blue, Pinna, Spectropol, Paper Garden Records, and his own impressum. As a scholar his research focuses on U.S. experimental music, intonation, and performance; he has published articles in Music Theory Spectrum, the Journal of the Society for the American Music, and TEMPO, and teaches a wide range of historical and practical music courses at the University of San Francisco and UC Santa Cruz.