Indexical is pleased to present a selection from John McCowen's book of compositions, Mundanas I-XI.

John McCowen’s musical life has become an obsession with discovering a polyphonic language on a historically monophonic instrument - the clarinet. This has led him to a unique acoustic vocabulary that is akin to a shifting soundscape of electronic feedback. John's multiphonic approach is based in drones, difference tones, and beating harmonics as a means to showcase the compositional potential within a single, acoustic sound source. His work has been described by The New Yorker as “the sonic equivalent of microscopic life viewed on a slide” and “an astonishing demonstration of pure sound and human will” by The Wire. He began playing in the American DIY circuit in a number of groups. These years led to international rock tours as a saxophone & flute player in his early 20’s. After burning out, he decided to pursue classical clarinet performance with contemporary clarinet pioneer, Eric P. Mandat. His first record of solo contrabass clarinet music, SOLO CONTRA, was released by International Anthem Recording Co. in 2017.

Madison Greenstone is a New York based clarinetist whose ‘beautiful and haunting’ playing ‘creeps noisily away from the void’ (Foxy Digitalis). They perform across a wide range of experimental music contexts as a soloist, improvisor, and chamber musician. Madison’s solo performance practice, exstatic resonances, pushes the limits of innate instrumental expressivities by treating the meeting of instrument and embodied technique as creative of a site of indeterminacy and generative instability. Their approach to the clarinet embraces and instigates chaotic timbral actions, difficult-to-reign sonorities, and the harmonically rich and noisy resonances that have a vivid inner life and movement. Their practice embraces responsive listening as a mediator between embodied technique and latent instrumental agency.