American prolific, minimalist composer Michael Pisaro-Liu is known for integrating silence in his music, notably within the group of Wandelweiser composers. Pisaro-Liu composed a cycle of songs titled Tombstones between 2006 and 2010 that is “experimental or indeterminate but still a song”. These intriguing, “stolen songs” (Pisaro-Liu’s term) comprise fragments from pop music, country, and blues. Pisaro-Liu isolated an idea, cut up the melody, slowed it down or removed it all, placed it in different instrumental contexts, and allowed the musicians to make their own decisions about the instrumentation, the interpretation, or the duration of these songs, but asked to play these songs “softly”.
The French, Lille-based Muzzix musicians’ collective, under the artistic direction of the pianist Barbara Dang (known for her interpretations of the experimental works of John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Morton Feldman, Alvin Lucier, Jürg Frey, and Pisaro-Liu), recorded the first collection of
