A Song For Friday: Sugar Vendil
A collaboration with designer 3.1 Phillip Lim leads to a perfect sonic environment
As someone who swings Cageian, I’m always attuned to the music in an environment. A walk in Inwood Hill Park surrounds me with rustling, organic sounds, the occasional bird, a squirrel scrabbling across wood, and, as I close in on the Henry Hudson Bridge, the roar and rush of traffic. But the reverse is also true, in that I often look for the environmental in music, the way sound can define a space and even create one of its own. Perhaps that’s why I fell for Brian Eno so hard back in high school.
Composer, pianist, producer, and interdisciplinary artist Sugar Vendil has created the perfect example of the latter with Live Love Work Play, an 11-minute ambient track created for Intersections, a New York Fashion Week installation at the SoHo store 3.1 Phillip Lim. The results feel sometimes active, like a walk in the city, and at others passive, like a view through plate glass of the world moving serenely past.
“I often draw inspiration from the quotidian.” - Sugar Vendil
Combining samples of them playing the Sarunay, a Phillipine percussion instrument, synths, and various MIDI instruments blended with field recordings of NYC and a sax part written for Aakash Mittal, the texture is mellow but bright, an involving tapestry of sound that simultaneously soothes and enlivens. Vendil’s sure compositional hand also shapes the piece into a narrative, with a tinkling beginning leading to ebbs and flows of drama and quiescence, landing in a stretch of calm that is over too soon.
The seeds of many new directions for Vendil’s work can be discerned in Live Love Work Play and I’m looking forward to hearing (and seeing) them ripen and bear fruit in the coming months. In the meantime, I’ll just keep pushing PLAY on this marvelous track.
Is Sugar Vendil new to you? Tell me what you thought!
From The Archives:
Cage Tudor Rauschenberg MoMA
Brian Eno: Spontaneous Hypnosis
Note: the graphic above is based on a photo by Julia Comita.