Ralph Blauvelt - piano, acoustic and prepared; trumpet; drumpet

Brad Graves (http://www.bradfordgraves.com) - saxophones, alto and sopranino; bass clarinet; VORTEX red piano

The drumpet sound is produced by placing the bell of a trumpet flush against the head of a drum (in this case a tombak from Iran). Air escaping from the bell excites the drum head and maksd a growling sound. The red piano is an old baby grand stripped of its keyboard and clothed in a bright red coat of paint. It has been prepared to produce a variety of sounds.

Other instruments include whistles, a toy saxophone, duck calls, percussion accessories, a DMX drum machine, a music box (Black Sea), and a microphone/instrument called the "spidr mike" designed by Richard Lerman (Isar).

VORTEX was founded in 1980 as a collaboration in improvised music. Incorporating dance and the visual arts. VORTEX gradually developed a kinetic, almost tactile, approach to music. The image of the vortex as a dynamic form born of movement became a visual model for the group's creative efforts, encouraging different combinations of musicians, dancers, and visual artists throughout its history.

"As soon as different media, even different qualities within the same medium, flow together, the one is taken into the other so that a hollow space, like a vessel..." is formed. "The hollowing out of inner-spaces is a fundamental process - am archetypal form-gesture in all organic creation, human and animal, where in the wrinkling, folding, imvaginating processes of gastrulation, organs for the development of consciousness are prepared. A similar process...must have taken place in the great stages of development of the planet earth, when it was still in a fluid state, processes which are today so to speak petrified and ar rest in the crust of the earth."

"This is the archetypal phenomenon of vortex formation. Wherever any qualitative differences in a flowing mediuim come together, certain isolated formations occur. Such differences may be slow; slow/fast, solid/liquid/gaseous, warm/cold, heavy/light, vicsous/fluid, alkaline/acid...At the surface if contact there is always a tendency for one layer to roll in upon the other...and then, in a rhythmical process, to even out and to merge."

"SENSITIVE CHAOS, The Creation of Flowing Forms in Water and Air" by Theodor Schwenk

The Danube river winds its way through the heartland of Central and Eastern Europe. The Isar, Leitha, Morava, Tisza, Sava, Beli, Lom and Ialomita are unique, individual rivers, all tributaries of the Danube. Similarly, the selections on this album are like tributaries to the ongoing evolution of VORTEX.

The VORTEX Danube ALBUM is a selection of works from the digital recording of a performance (Isar, track 2, is a studio mix of two selextions).

Recorded at Soundscape, 500 West 52nd Street, 5th floor, NYC on December 6, 1986. Recording Engineer: John Driscoll
Mixed and mastered at Studio Pass in New York by:
Carol Parkinson and John Driscoll
Graphics by VORTEX

This recording was made possible in part, with support from The New York State Council on the Arts and Meet the Composer, Inc.