A collection of interviews, reviews, awards, and photographs from print and digital publications.  

Liz Meredith’s long-awaited follow up to her self-released debut solo LP presents four new minimalist pieces for viola, electronics, and tape loops. Wielding a rich palette of densely laden string textures, tape squelches, and searing tones, Liz shows her mastery of the slow burn.  Cover art is screen printed with magenta, yellow, and silver spectrographic renderings of the tape loop sources from these compositions. 

© 2019 s P L e e N C o F F i N

On Spleencoffin:
www.spleencoffin.com/portfolio/liz-meredith-repro

Press:
“Meredith’s gestures are simple and seemingly impulsive. Recurring drones that whirr and cough. Harmonics snagged on the sharp edge of the looper return. Yet endurance renders them profound, just how even the most everyday objects accrue a quiet wisdom as their colours start to fade and mud smatters their surfaces.”
- Jack Chuter, ATTN Magazine

“Meredith is a true electroacoustic adventurer, utilizing viola, electronics, and tape loops to unfurl drones behind her as she progresses, as if she were alone on a slowly drifting boat and the sounds were the memories of her passing.”
– Ryan Masteller, Tiny Mix Tapes

“Four pieces, all dealing with loops, so I would think, and in each of them this is worked out in quite a different way, and yet Meredith keeps it all close together by using a very minimal approach every time. That is the thread that runs through these pieces. This is all quite a surprise! It is a very great and consistent record. It begs the question: why act so obscure? This is a great record; something to be proud of.”
– Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly

Limited edition 12" records (5 LP set). High quality lathe-cut "Geraldine pressings" (NZ). Records pressed to clear translucent polycarbonate, with multi-color center label artwork by Cara Levy.

© 2013 Liz Meredith & John Somers

On Bandcamp:
www.thedispositionofvibrantforms.bandcamp.com

Press:
"This month, Meredith and Somers self-released The Disposition of Vibrant Forms, a five-LP box set of ambient textures and droning soundscapes. [...] Yes, that's right: five LPs, a single piece of music per side, total running time 181 minutes and 28 seconds. [..] The Disposition of Vibrant Forms is an epic release in every sense of the word. It’s also quite frequently breathtakingly gorgeous, a recording that rewards spending the time it takes to drink it in. […] Each piece is an example of extreme subtlety, music that works in different ways at low or intense volumes and becomes borderline hallucinogenic through headphones. What can initially sound like a snail’s plodding journey also carries these little dancing tones in clusters, and the ear begins to seek them out patiently. Such minute alterations, like a window’s lights coming on in Warhol’s Empire, occur over such elongated time periods that they accrue a dramatic impact. […] ‘Montebello Lake’ parts I and II suggest late-afternoon sunlight slowly drifting into dusk. Meredith’s viola lines trace long drones that capture that levitating twilight when the sun sets yet the sky remains bathed in light. Somers’ guitar textures get smeared into long shadows, and the piece concludes in a ringing tone of night’s arrival, that reminder that dark has imperceptibly swallowed the sky and it’s time to head home.”
- Bret McCabe, Baltimore City Paper (2013)

Limited edition 12" record (LP).  Record pressed to dark turquoise blue marble colored vinyl.   Album packaged in original artwork by Liz Meredith. 

On Bandcamp:
www.lizmeredith.bandcamp.com

© 2012 Liz Meredith 

Press:
"Last month, local violinist and composer Liz Meredith released a self-titled LP featuring two luxuriant, sidelong immersions into subtly shifting moods. Surprisingly, it's her first proper solo outing and it features two pieces she's been working over the past decade. This debut is surprising only because it feels like Meredith has become a versatile presence in local avant music, plying her string brio in High Zero/Red Room lineups and delivering hypnotic solo sets-surely she's set sound to wax sometime before? Turns out she hasn't, instead spending the last decade impressively honing her skills and ideas: She studied viola with the Kronos Quartet's Hank Dutt and composition with Fred Frith, the British guitarist who put the wiggy beauty and gnarled thrusts into Henry Cow, the Art Bears, and Naked City. Well, her patience has paid off. Liz Meredith is a gorgeous plunge into a plaintive mood, a place where rising and falling electronic textures and drawn-out viola lines cast soothing shadow plays on the brain. The glistening Side B clings to the ears the longest, the sound of a slow, cinematic fade-out that takes nearly 20 minutes to move from a tight close-up to a widescreen vista, every increment recalibrating the emotional kick of the image being branded on the mind's eye".
- Bret McCabe, Baltimore City Paper (2012)

I was commissioned to write a piece for The Walters Art Museum's Art/Sound/Now series in 2018, and again in 2019 for the series’ 5-year celebration. Inspired by the beautiful paintings in the Walters’ Landscape Gallery, I created Light/Dark, an immersive electroacoustic piece composed specifically for the space.  The score for Light/Dark integrated both composed and improvisational passages for the viola with field recordings I captured in Patterson Park (Baltimore, MD) and North Point State Park (Edgemere, MD).  

Free improvisation is at the heart of much of my practice as an instrumentalist and also as a composer.  I have been a featured improviser at Baltimore's own High Zero Festival in 2010 and 2021,  Experimental Sound Studio's "The Quarentine Concerts Series" for Spleencoffin Record Label Showcase, the Impermenant Society of Philadelphia's Philadelphia Free Form Festival in 2016, and most recently, as a part of Baltimore's Ratscape Festival in 2019; in collaboration with NYC-based master Botoh choreohrapher Azumi OE.

About the Film:
I made this film in a summer school animation class when I was about 10 (that would be around 1980). I remember feeling slightly embarassed that my partner and I had chosen a fairy tale theme for our project, feeling like I was too old for princesses and knights and dragons. But I remember having a lot of fun making the fire and it makes me laugh now to see all the other attempts at details like the horse getting bigger as it gallops down the hill and rearing up with fishing line. It was great fun showing this at Home Movie Day at Northwest Film Forum in 2013, especially that the children in the audience kept asking to see it replayed backwards!
– Carol Shenk

About the Music:
In keeping with the inspired youthful DIY aesthetic of the film, its fantasy/renaissance theme, and the era of its creation (the era of our early childhood, the 1980s) we decided to record the score using instrumentation evocative of low bit fantasy video games (Casio keyboard, drum machine, electrified violin) onto an old four track cassette recorder—an homage to the analog consumer media of the 1980s. A spring drum over a microphone with copious amounts of reverb provided the fake dragon fire/thunder sounds. The jumpy continuity of the film led us naturally to a collage-based approach to the composition—visible splices marking clear breaks between “reality” (stationary establishing scenes) and “fantasy” (stop motion animated sequences) provided an ideal visual turnabout, allowing us to jump comfortably between composed themes and more frenetic improvised cues in such a short score.
– Liz Meredith & Timothy Wisniewski

Performance Notes:  
These pieces are to be interpreted freely.  Musicial decisions such as dynamics, rhythm, pitch, and timbre are to be made on an individual basis by the performer(s).  The instrumentation and number of players is open, with a suggested number ranging between 1-4 performers.  The sequence, duration, and number of scores performed are to be chosen by the performer(s).