PATTI CUDD, Cyanotypes

Here’s a so called “fun fact” about veteran world class percussionist, distinguished educator and musical visionary Patti Cudd. In addition to her commitment to avant-garde 21st Century music and revolutionary integration of percussion with real time electronic processing, she’s trained in the martial arts for nearly three decades and holds a 3rd degree black sash in Chuan Lu Kung Fu. Always pushing herself and the proverbial envelope in so many ways, she often eschews traditional striking for extended techniques like rubbing, scraping and scratching surfaces to reveal obscure sonic “worlds” within traditional and makeshift instruments. Her performances often include rare or unusual instruments like the Cajón (Peruvian box drum) or Bendir (frame drum with snares), often used in tandem with sophisticated digital synthesis.

Over the years, the highly prolific Cudd has premiered 200+ new works and collaborated with many of the world’s most innovative contemporary composers, including Brian Ferneyhough, Morton Feldman, and Pauline Oliveros. On her latest work Cyanotypes, she embraces a full throttle sense of joyful creative schizophrenia, dashing from one surreal sonic landscape to the next throughout an expansive, wildly adventurous and creatively transcendent set of five expansive, sonic boundary busting works all composed by women – Elainie Lillios, Kerry Hagan, Tiffany Skidmore, Heather Dea Jennings and Margaret Schedel.

If the term “cyanotype” is new on your radar, here’s a nutshell description: It’s a historic, camera-less photographic process that creates distinctive cyan-blue prints, famously used for blueprints and botanical art, by applying a light sensitive iron salt solution to a surface, placing objects or negatives on it, exposing it to UV light (sunlight, for instance), then washing it with water to reveal a white image on a deep blue background. In the album’s illuminating liner notes, Lillios – who wrote the vibraphone dominated title track – relates that she was thrilled when Cudd invited to her contribute, until she asked for a piece that treats the vibes like a snare drum.

What originally seemed like an impossible compositional task somehow became a viable and continuously fascinating piece full of rapid transitions and sudden modulations when she stumbled across some cyanotype prints. These allowed her to view the challenge from a different perspective, focusing on the idea of imprints and opening her up to approach Cyanotype’s five studies (Prussian, Midnight, Sapphire, Cobalt, Cetacean as a rendering of the snare drum’s “rhythmic and articulate characteristics.” Over the course of ten minutes, “Cyanotypes” energies vault from jumpy to quiet/meditative (with gentle vocal whispers) to shuffling, moody, etc.

The opening title piece is like an offroading musical adventure setting the stage for the cool divine madness that follows. While the liners note that Hagan’s boisterous seven minute romp “This bottle has notions” is rooted in a sense of “cheeky metamorphosis,” listeners will experience it as several minutes of rattling and scraping and haunting atmospheres on a journey to unexpected retro pleasures via a snippet of the classic, tipsy pub song “Show Me the Way to Go Home” (“had a little drink about an hour ago”), followed by an even edgier “scrapescape” and what feels like an 80’s pop music radio dial honing in on brief segments of classics by Michael Jackson, Prince and Survivor with some hip tribal grooving. For those who can’t quite grasp the mesmerizing avant-garde coolness of this project, these moments provide an irresistible hook amidst the wildness. 

Premiered by Cudd in the Cube at Virginia Tech as part of the Virginia Tech New Music + Technology Festival in May 2023, the aptly named “Chime” (composed by Skidmore) is a masterful showcase for her integration of two snare drums, six crotales and fixed media. Crotales (aka antique cymbals) are small, tuned bronze discs that produce bright bell-like tones, often played in orchestras with mallets or bows for melodies and shimmering effects. She plays them here as cheerful hypnotic chimes amidst an intensifying texturing of snare drums – which evolve from subtle hitting to a military march aesthetic complete with triumphant “bells and whistles.”

Then comes the most exotic piece on Cyanotypes, Jennings’ “The Meeting Place” which begins with exotic chanting over subtle tribal rhythms that open up to an immersive world music experience incorporating Brazilian alfaia drum traditions, Cudd’s trademark mind-bending live electronics and spoken and sometimes filtered voicings of Yoruba proverbs in Yoruba, English and Portuguese. Premiered by Cudd in Natal, Brazil, the piece was composed in memory of experimental composer and sound artist Alvin Lucier, whose work explored psychoacoustic phenomena and the physical properties of sound.

Presented in nine distinctive yet intertwining movements, the epic final piece “Tattoo of a Gesture” – composed by Schedel with Christopher Howard – is another fantastic sensory brain teaser displaying Cudd’s “kitchen sink” wizardry fusing her centerpiece, a twenty inch bendir (a traditional North African drum), with a myriad of strikers, a bongo, a metallic choir if bells, bowls and cymbals and cups, sandpaper, three wooden slats treated with moleskin and drilled holes. Just try to visualize all that as she journeys us through a series of delectably infectious if radical and subtly idiosyncratic sojourn through the variety of sonic locales, venturing from “Accumulated Gestures” and “Underhues” to “Always Becoming Too Late” and “To Red to Music to Chaos.” The liners sum this up eloquently and with some intriguing food for musical thought: “The percussion instruments and interactive processing are reimagined to foreground the body’s agency, converging touch, sound and technology.”