Jerry Hunt: Ground: Five Mechanic Convention Streams
The final album released by the composer-performer Jerry Hunt before his death, Ground: Five Mechanic
Convention Streams is a rare and foundational audio document of Hunt’s compositional process. The record
collects five pieces from the artist’s “Ground” series, translating his characteristically variable and spatial
scores into “recorded fixtures of activity using mechanic musical instrument arrays,” to eerie and mesmerizing
results. Originally released by experimental label OODiscs in 1992, it is now available on vinyl for the first
time from Blank Forms Editions. It’s tracks are dense and unpredictable, a miscellany of arrhythmic bursts,
fragments of spoken and whispered words, soft then fevered rattles and shaking, and a rare return to
pianoforte for the virtuoso player. On “Talk (slice): double” a nervous, warped dialogue unfolds between
Hunt and composer Rod Stasick, their voices alternately measured and monstrous. In “Transform (stream):
monopole,” breathy whistles build against a shimmering stream of bells, rattles, and shakers in a fantastical
cascade of percussion. Hunt revisits the piano in “Lattice (stream): ordinal” and “Bitom (stream): link,”
oscillating between gentle, almost classical phrases and frantic, seemingly random play. His collaboration with
violinist Jane Henry, “Chimanazzi (Olun): core,” extends similarly unorthodox playing techniques to the
violin, involving the scraping, plucking, and playing of it’s strings. The unstable quality of these tracks belies
the rigor of Hunt’s procedures; each ofGround’s five pieces, their “common ground core,” is derived from the
angelic tables of sixteenth century English philosopher and occultist John Dee, adapted by Hunt as
frameworks to layer, adapt, and renew in his compositions. With a complex arrangement of sensors and
equipment, which the artist called “interrelated electronic, mechanic, and social sound-sight interactive
transactional systems,” Hunt realized these derivative systems in the techno-shamanic performances for which
he is best known. Ground distills these procedures into fixed songs, producing a vital and critical record of
Hunt’s singular approach to composition.
