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James Díaz Releases UNO on Bandcamp

James Díaz has long worked within the interstices between scoring, live performance, and recording—exploring the sonic possibilities that emerge when the fluidity of sound is exploited in every available medium and dimension. His latest album, UNO, documents compositions that Díaz has crafted between 2016–2019, performed by the collaborators with whom he wrote many of these works, and recorded at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music. Keeping with Díaz's practice of using both recorded and live sound to construct his work, some of the compositions on this album were also further refined by Díaz in his studio, resulting in a meticulously produced album of hybrid works. 

For example, Díaz crafted I [am] not, a work for bass clarinet and electronics, in collaboration with the clarinetist Tyler Neidermayer. While this work is completely scored, it does contain options for the performer to choose in the moment of performance; it also calls for the performer to experiment with a large set of extended techniques, which Díaz later expanded using studio techniques such as pitch-shifting, vocoding, harmonizing, compression, and other processes to achieve his desired sounds. The movements' titles hint at the play of instrumental identity; the bass clarinet is brought into relation with a didgeridoo, a snare drum, a guitar, and the human voice. 

Other works on this recording include Díaz's string quartet INFRASTRUCTURES, composed in collaboration with and performed by Quartet121a song for, performed by Julia Suh; and in times of passive voice [en tiempos de voz pasiva], here performed by cellist Carolina Diazgranados.