Composer/Performer: Jack Campbell, violin (alumni, BMus ’24) and Hank Bull, piano
Recording details: Engineer: Kris Fearon; Recorded At: Hipposonic Studios, Vancouver, CA
Notes: Jack and Hank’s philosophy as a musical duo can be summed up in a comment by Hank: “we never perform, we only rehearse.” Jack is a classically trained violinist, but it is only through his training that he knows just how to break the rules. Jack’s passion for avant-garde art and music led him to Hank, a practicing multimedia artist and pianist active since the 1970s. I met up with both Jack and Hank to see them play pieces from Inventions at Western Front, the Vancouver artist-run centre that Bull has been associated with since the beginning of his career, in the hallowed performance space of the Grand Luxe Hall.
When the two of them rehearse, there is never such a thing as a mistake. Each piece starts out with an event score, a sentence setting out the conditions and parameters of the composition (i.e. using pot-lids to play the piano as in “Pots and Plunks,” etc.), and the pair takes it from there. Hank says he tries to play the piano like a violin and Jack says he tries to play the violin like a piano. Each man thinks about his respective “texture” before playing and improvises—practicing a form of “heavy listening” in which one artist responds to the other, in real time, in an open flow between them. The emphasis on a sound’s texture often makes their music visceral and tactile—dislodging a listener’s preconceived notions of the senses. While Jack and Hank may perform these compositions again, they will be never performed the same way twice. The music you will hear on this album is endlessly surprising, tactile and visceral—a result of the pair’s deep artistic and personal rapport.
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