Peter Orins

Peter Orins’ website

Acoustic solo

After experimenting with randomness and electronic transformation (see Empty Orchestras – 2014), Peter Orins returns this time with his only drum set, and some objects, bowls, wood, shells…
As an improviser, he is interested in sound textures, the ambiguity of timbres and their production, the saturation of sounds or the harmonics specific to each instrument: make it possible to hear both the “microscopic” noises of skins or metals rubbed, struck, prepared, at very low power, and the acoustic pressures felt at high volume.
His approach focuses on chance, on the uncontrolled via small accidents, acoustic interactions between objects, percussions, resonances and sympathies due to certain frequencies or vibrations. This results in a certain form of fragility, clumsiness or imprecision, not only integrated but also desired, which transcends errors into necessarily unexpected effects, into an unintentional discovery, which in turn establishes another relationship with time.
His practice, influenced in particular by his encounter with minimal music and composers such as Michael Pisaro, James Saunders or Anthony Pateras, led him to approach James Tenney’s piece “Having Never Written A Note For Percussion” (from the Postal Pieces, written in 1971), a piece that combines the musician’s various concerns with time, progression, dynamics and the richness of the timbres…

Peter Orins (drums)

Electronic solo

Peter Orins project could be called an accompanied solo. The drummer has designed an electronic device autonomous enough to influence him in his play in an almost unpredictable way. Therefore a kind of dialogue is established between the musician and the electronics where the usual roles are reversed: the drummer offers an insistent and repetitive form, transformations and random treatments performed live cause the disorder conducive to improvisation. Magnified timbres or on the contrary disturbed rhythmic progressions cause welcome accidents or extend the resonances of the instrument. In this game between natural timbres of cymbals and skins and amplified deformations of the electronics, Peter Orins seeks vibration and saturation to produce a music made of extreme and powerful rhythms and sound textures.

Peter Orins (drums, electronics)