Daniel Corral
Diamond Pulses
"On the surface of the single, 32-minute track, everything seems perfectly transparent, maybe even grid-like. Insistent, hopped-up Plinko polyrhythms braid together in a dense patchwork of minimalist activity, while oceanic noise waxes and wanes. Or it’s pop electronica, but more desperate, more worldly, shamelessly reverbed. Minimalist motivic transitions speed the texture through harmonic and registral shifts, while rhythm remains constant. Corral knows exactly what he wants us to hear, at what pace, and moody swells of noise give us enough respite to fool us into thinking we’ve made our own choices. Robert Ashley said that music either comes from speech, or it comes from dance. Diamond Pulses is unconditionally from the dance. There are no words here at all."
—Alicia Byer, New Classic LA
Daniel Corral - Electronics
"Sound is all our dreams of music. Noise is music's dreams of us"
—Morton Feldman
Diamond Pulses started as a mockup for a microtonal Plinko game/sound-installation. I was looking through James Tenney’s musical sketches, and he worked a lot of ideas out on graph paper. I decided to get a pad of the stuff. Of course, what I immediately scrawled out on the first page was a combination of The Price is Right and an 11-limit tuning system. I pictured people dropping a quarter in at the top, and listening as it bounced down an obstacle course of just-tuned piano wire. It would still make a fun sound installation someday, and maybe I’d get rich one quarter at a time.
But, that seed of Diamond Pulses instead grew into this album, which I am excited to share with you. Somewhere between the structural rigidity and spaced out washes of sound, there is a memory of standing by the ocean at 2am, listening to the hypnotic sets of waves and hearing the roaring swells of the city - a relentless parade of numbers and words ringing silent bells, making it impossible to focus on the endless business of trying to square an imperfect circle.
—Daniel Corral
Recorded and Produced by Daniel Corral
© 2015 by Daniel Corral (ASCAP)
Published by Spinal Frog Music (ASCAP)
www.spinalfrog.com
Mastered by Daniel Rosenboom
Design & Photography by Eron Rauch
ORENDA RECORDS 0020