Search - Paul Dolden, __ :: Paul Dolden: Who Has the Biggest Sound?

This CD presents the premiere recordings of 2 electroacoustic works by Paul Dolden: Who Has the Biggest Sound? (2005-2008) and The Un-Tempered Orchestra (2010). This is Dolden's first new recording in 9 years. Dolden spent about 7800 hours in the studio creating this music, using his painstaking, time-intensive approach of layering hundreds of studio tracks of live, acoustic recordings.

In Who Has the Biggest Sound?, a narrator asks: Who Can Play the Fastest? Who Has the Biggest Noise? Who Has the Nicest Melodies? Beyond these humorous questions, Dolden develops some richly dense, imaginative cultural-geographic intersections, linking howling dogs with country music, crickets with Spains flamenco, more. In juxtaposition to Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier that explored the new equal-temperament tuning system, The Un-Tempered Orchestra uses non-tempered tuning systems to create a fresh multicultural space wherein Western and non-Western musical practices can co-exist.

Dolden was recognized as a composer of note when, at age 29, he won the first of over 20 international awards he has received, in a career now spanning over 30 years. Dolden has written over 30 commissioned works, including those for: orchestra (Esprit Orchestra, Canada; Phoenix, Switzerland); chamber ensemble (Stockholm Saxophone Quartet, Sweden; Bang on A Can All-Stars, New York); virtuoso soloists (Rivka Golani, Stefan Osterjo, Nancy Ruffer, David Brutti, Francois Houle); and pure electroacoustic music (Groupe de musique électroacoustique de Bourges, France; Réseau & Association de creation et recherché électroacoustique du Québec, Canada; and Starkland, USA).

Dolden's L'Ivresse de la Vitesse, widely regarded as a landmark recording, was selected by The Wire as one of the top 100 recordings of the 20th century.