Releases
Tonewood (2021). Electronic/field recording. Digital download on SNVariations.
Notes from the forest floor | Line of Parts (2020). Electronic/field recording. Split release with Chris Watson on SNVariations.
A to B | Late lines (2019). Serge Vuille and Severine Ballon on All That Dust.
In the Theatre of Air (2018). Marsyas Trio on NMC Recordings. Featuring York Minster
Next Wave (2015). Various on NMC Recordings. Featuring Partial filter performed by Oren Marshall
Reviews
“At first hearing Georgia Rodgers’ Line of Parts seems to be a simple diptych, and one where the two sections are extremely different from each other. Yet what seems to connect them is a concern with the way in which timbrally similar elements can interact to create new sonic forms and shapes. The first part focuses on impacts of raindrops falling onto metal, a simple, familiar sound but one where, over time, the timbral and dynamic differences become more and more significant, revealing an impressive sense of distance. […] The latter half juxtaposes not impacts but sustained tones, Rodgers arranging them in a kind of slow ballet that often suggests certain intervals or even progressions that turn out to be illusory.” Jan 2021, 5:4 Best albums of 2020 #16
“My listening is rerouted from the imagined moorside firmly back into my body as shifting beating patterns articulate the distance between my ears.” 06/03/2020 Alex De Little on Line of Parts, Tempo 74 (292) p86
“This next unwavering piece by Georgia Rodgers…called Masking Set. Masking, in the sense of covering up. The idea that how we perceive a sound can be shifted by another sound that happens very close to it in time or in pitch.” 29/02/2020 Kate Molleson
“I got to hear another piece by Georgia Rodgers: Masking Set placed alto Sara Rodrigues alongside a small string ensemble in a way that seemed more beguiling than usual, but then took an unexpected turn. What seemed at first to be sentiment was revealed as phenomenology; so I liked it.” 03/02/20 Ben Harper
“The two pieces by Georgia Rodgers riff most explicitly off the sonic ripples set in motion by Stockhausen 60 years ago. Granular synthesis is Rodgers’s jam, and both her works investigate the interior life of instrumental texture: A to B (2010), based around snare drum and cymbal sounds, and Late Lines (2014) around Séverine Ballon’s cello. Rodgers has discerning ears and keen antennae for musical architecture, and she never disappears down a rabbit-hole of forgetting that granular synthesis is only the means, not the ends. The simple massaging of skins and cymbals into life in A to B – kneading, scraping, tapping, tickling, slapping – is elevated to another level by the electronics, which colour in fleeting harmonic patterns and shift the natural percussive grain into the realm of acoustically impossible sustains and attacks.” Philip Clark, The Wire, December 2019
“The cellist’s bowing is manipulated through digital granular synthesis, but the layering and transformation is directed much like Scelsi’s manipulation of musical notes, always focusing ever inward, drawing closer to the source to open up new realms of perception. There are no Scelsi-like spiritual claims made for this music, leaving the listener free to explore a heightened awareness of the sensory aspects of sound. All That Dust has made binaural recordings of Late lines and a similar work, A to B for solo percussionist with electronics as a download release. In A to B, Rodgers works with Serge Vuille on snare drums and cymbals, turning steady rhythms into pulses of complex sound verging on white noise, yet constantly taking on new colourations. The effect of both pieces suggests the aural equivalent of monochrome paintings with rigorously worked surfaces of multiple layers, revealing unexpected but elusive colours and shapes. The sleeve notes invoke Robert Irwin, whose work engages space more than surface, but close listening to these recordings on headphones opens up that dimension as well. (Late lines began as an installation.) At the same time, the subject of each piece is the physical aspect of musical performance: contact between surfaces, as though seen on a microscopic level, with even the simplest interaction made up of multiple events.” 13/11/19 Ben Harper
“A much newer work, Georgia Rodgers’ Three Pieces for String Quartet, also built upon the work of others and directed it in a new way, drawing on modern playing techniques and subjecting them to close analysis. As with abstract painting, each piece took a technical effect and made it into the subject. The act of bowing or touching the string was placed under the microscope, starting with whisperings of lightest contact, slowly resolving into stacks of fifths, fourths and denser harmonies, and ending with brittle textures of grinding and popping sounds of extreme pressure. This happened slowly enough to appreciate the sonic ramifications of each type of playing, how the string sound is affected, perceiving it as aural phenomena beyond timbral novelty.” Ben Harper, TEMPO 73 (287) 94-104
“Georgia Rodgers’s York Minster uses pitches derived from the building’s acoustic fingerprint: if that sounds dry and scientific, the result is a haunting processional, giving a sense of the vast space of the building.” Martin Cotton, BBC Music Magazine Nov 18
“York Minster by Georgia Rodgers plays with off-kilter ostinatos, creating a loping groove with incisive punctuations.” Sequenza21, Best of 2018
“Georgia Rodgers’ partial filter stood out as the concentrated, intense exploration of a single idea.” TEMPO April 2015, Andy Hamilton
“An installation in the CCA’s cinema, however, moved the audience firmly into sonic art. Georgia Rodgers’s Late Lines remix put the playing of cellist Séverine Ballon through electronic processing to create sounds whose granular textures were so vivid you wanted to reach out and touch them. Sent spinning around the listener through four loudspeakers in the corners of the room, the music melded machine-like pistons and valves, sandstorms and solar winds into a slowly developing – and strangely gripping – crescendo.” 13/01/14 David Kettle, The Scotsman
Georgia Rodgers 