Blake Leyh - Shadow Economy - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Shadow Economy is a CD of heavily string-based instrumental music, and features violinist Andre Burke on six of the eight tracks. Acoustic instruments are mixed with electronics, improvisation is interweaved with complex composition, and music from the past is re-interpreted in the context of an ultra-modern soundscape. Opening with a New-New Orleans funeral march and ending with a deconstructed Mahler adagietto, the journey in between covers hypnotic violin minimalism, rich washes of extended-technique strings, a duet for fog horn and double bass, and dense landscapes of looped electric guitar, violin, cello, and fretless bass. ****************** Blake Leyh is a Composer, Sound Designer, and Music Supervisor who lives in New York City. Born in New York but raised in England until age fifteen, Leyh began his musical explorations at the age of ten, playing accordion and guitar and composing songs with a street theater troupe in London. He had a solo operatic role at the age of 13, and sang with the Buckinghamshire Youth Choir, where he learned to sight-read music and began voice training. After moving to California in 1978, Leyh studied at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where renowned electronic music composer Gordon Mumma was his advisor and teacher. He also played in several punk bands, as well as the Avant Garde Pop band Bande à Part. Leyh spent four years splicing tape, programming Moog and Buchla synthesizers, mastering the recording studio, and making 16mm films, in an independent major program of Electronic Music and The Cinema. In 1983 Leyh moved to Los Angeles, and was surprised to discover his skills were in high demand in Hollywood, which was just beginning a massive wave of technological change. Leyh was one of the first people to routinely use a digital sampler in film post-production. After working on various low budget and independent films