The question on everyone’s mind when I describe Ellen Fullman’s 20-meter “Long String Instrument” is “but what does it sound like?” A construction of dozens of bronze strings, the instrument is performed via rosin-covered fingers, the performer pacing up and down to produce sympathetic overtones—much like a sitar. The sound has been compared to “standing inside an enormous grand piano,” although my senses conjure up images of viola choirs. Though lazy reductions of “drone music” plague Fullman’s reviews, her music features much more motion and purpose, a sense of augmentation and release. Sean Meehan’s contribution to these three works is more or less a shadow, his nimble percussive scrapes (“playing the snare drum with cymbals…he produces long, continuous tones from them using a dowel and friction,” says the tear sheet) and supple harmonics generally reach above and below Fullman’s register, adding just the right amount of piquancy.
> Dave Madden, Slug Magazine, 11.2007

This untitled album brings together three often sinister and edgy, but always hypnotic improvised drone/tone shifting pieces by Ellen Fullman; playing his own constructed long string instrument and Sean Meehan playing snare drum with cymbals.
The pieces seem to grow and shift before your ears having quite an organic eerier edge to them giving the feeling somewhere between strange and slightly twisted mediation music, and Haunted /stretched out sea shanties or aquatic drones. The very distinctive string instrument played by Fullman gives much of the sound here, with Meehan snare and cymbal playing adding smaller details. Fullman instrument is apparently Waist high, with parallel wires, strung in two sets spanning 14 meters in all.
The tracks often bring to mind slow moving dead seascapes under white and grey skies that seemly going on forever and every. Or abandoned ships bobbing, rattling and humming with dispear, bodies, limbs and weapons waiting to be discovered in their decayed fish stretched interiors. All the pieces were recording over one weekend in 2006 by the pair. It’s also an fully acoustic work, without any overdubbing or effects, which is surprisingly as at points this almost has an amp/peddle feedback quality with piecing stretched penetrating pitches of sound that really seem to wail through you in grim wonder.
As with all releasers on this excellent Swish label it comes in distinctive/arty & screen printed card sleeve designed by label owner Jason Kahn. An enjoyable, evolving and distinctive excise in drone, tone investigation and morphing.
>Roger Batty, Musique Machine, 9.2007

Mesmerising and intriguing from the outside, tingling optical, haptic and oligofactoric senses alike, the releases on Jason Kahn’s cut label consist of simple, yet robust cardboard at their core. In that regard, this album has a lot in common with its packaging: The music of Ellen Fullman and Sean Meehan may sound astoundingly rich and perplexingly detailed, but really bases on a few pure and simple principles: Resonance, harmony as well as spontaneous interaction between these two musicians. And yet it is not the canvas or the colours that make the painting, but the strokes of the brush in the hand of the artist. What therefore matters with regard to the work at hand is less how it was made than what the creative process resulted in. I am stressing this, as the story of how the album was recorded is certainly interesting enough to warrant an article of its own. On the one hand, we have Ellen Fullmann, whose career in music, as the annecdote has it, was started at the age of one, when a certain Elvis Presley kissed her hand (no further details given). An accidental personal experience brought up the idea of the “long string instrument”, a set of waist high, parallel wires stretching for up to almost 22 metres in total, capable of producing sonorous and penetrating drones through wooden box resonators (exact details on her website or in Kahn’s press release). The instrument is played by quickly running from one end of the apparatus to the other, plucking the right string at the right point as precisely as if it were a violin. For this record, she stayed at home in her studio, with the strings “running through the patio door and terminating in the backyard” with the increased length enabling her to make use of “an additional octave”, as she points out. Sean Meehan, on the other hand, has developed his own style of drumming by playing the snare drum with cymbals or rubbing a dowel over the latter to create sustained, floating tones. His biography reads as though it were scribbled on a way too small napkin: “He plays drums. (...) He likes to go for walks and hang around with his friends.”, etc. Meehan was single-handedly responsible for one of the longest threads ever at the Bagatellen blog/WebZine over a minor controvery regarding the artful (or not) presentation of his “Sectors (For Constant)” double disc set, whose packaging needed to be destroyed to be able to hear the music. So this is what this meeting between “longtime friends who had hoped to play together for some time” reads like on paper and it certainly warrants attention. But it doesn’t really tell us anything about the music. You can envisage what it must have looked like, with Ellen pacing up and down her creation and Sean running the dowel over his cymbals, but what really matters is how they lost themselves completely in the process, the way their individual traits merged into something bigger and more universal. The sounds in fact melt together so smoothly, that what results must be perceived as the emanations of a single new instrument. Its timbre stortorous, glistening yet full of microtonal impurities, with a mysterious calmness on the surface and brimming with activity underneath, its tone coloured in different shades of nostalgia and sorrow. If references must be given, it could be a cross-breeding between a harmonium, a sitar and a tuba played by an asthmatic. But no comparison will ever do to describe these almost static sheets of woeful harmonics. Each of these three pieces captures the same mood from a different angle and explores various aspects of the same phenomenon. The result of this reduced approach, both with regards to its compositional content as well as its timbral facets, is a state of high sensitivity, extreme relaxation and an unusual degree of concentration. Which may give more hints at where these sonic excursions may lead than talking about their creation for all too long. Ellen Fullman and Sean Meehan may not have brought tons of colours or an expensive canvas, but their few brush-strokes are enough to create intense images.
>Tobias Fischer, Tokafi, 7.2007

Phases of open wired strings, like feedback caressing, then sending distress signals, this live duo is immediately bold and distracting. Fullman has developed her own long string instrument, percussionist Sean Meehan helps fill out the sound with the brushed sizzle of his cymbals. In the constant barrage of wavy vibrations grows a fuzzy glow that fills the entire aural capacity of the room, or your head (through earphones). It's a pervasive, building dissonance cyclically regenerating itself like sunflowers in August. And that's just track one of three. The break in the set is dramatic, necessary, before diving back into the elongated pitch and echo created from these untitled pieces. The screech in part two is a bit cumbersome and grating, disconcerting and run-on. But things change some in the final leg of this torso where the high-pitch is traded in for a mutable drone approximating a dead old-fashioned analogue telephone line or the low-hum whir of some assorted motor. At closure, the numbing layers are like a flatline current, slowly softening into air.
>TJ Norris, Igloo, 9.2007

Recorded Easter weekend, 2006, this eponymous disc sees Ellen Fullman back in action with her amazing invention, the long string instrument, in a live duo with long time friend Sean Meehan, playing "snare drum with cymbals". If you're not familiar with Fullman's instrument, you should try and find some photos, as it's quite hard to describe with words - and as unique is the sustained and resonating drone that she gets out of its strings. As for Meehan's equally inventive friction-based playing, I think, but I'm not really sure, that it generates the lower-end frequencies of such an otherwise entangled texture. The duo is extremely successful both in the moments of maximum energy, where all of the sound spectrum is covered (track 1), and in the more minimal and subdued pieces, when the acoustic instruments resonate in lower, almost sinewave-like tones.
>Eugenio Maggi, Chain DLK, 8.2007

Ellen Fullman + Sean Meehan (cut 022) beschert die Be- gegnung mit einer der Größen des Long String-Sounds. ELLEN FULLMAN, 1957 in Memphis, Tennessee geboren und heute in Seattle zuhause, mag zwar als Baby von Elvis geküsst worden sein und am College Janis gemimt haben. Berühmt wurde sie ab 1981, als sie in Brooklyn die Faszi- nation dröhnminimalistischer Vibrationen entdeckte und ihr Long String Instrument erfand. Sie erzeugt mit 14 Meter langen Drähten, die sie mit kolophoniumbestäubten Fin- gern bespielt, Mikrotonschwingungen, die im Klangbild zwischen Glasharfe, Mundharmonika, Akkordeon und Or- gelhaltetönen vexieren. Ihr Partner, SEAN MEEHAN, ist in New York aktiv als ‚abstract drummer‘ und Ultraminimalist. Nur mit Snaredrum und Cymbal macht er Sachen, wie sie auf Sectors (For Constant) (SoSEDITIONS) zu hören sind. Während Meehan ansonsten einem gerne zumutet, auch lange Stille auszuhalten, gibt es hier drei je durchgängige Haltetonbeben. Nur zwischendurch hört man kurz die Au- ßenwelt. Fullman formt wie ein Glasbläser riesige Tonbla- sen, Kugeln und Glocken, wie sie im Garten der Lüste als Lustspender zu sehen sind. Meehan bringt seine Schnarr- trommel zum Beben oder nutzt das Sustain und das Wash- Rauschen eines Beckens (vermutlich, indem er mit einem Geigenbogen über die Kanten streicht). Sagte nicht einer mal: Die Welt ist Klang? Zumindest ist Physik a many-splen- dored thing, so simpel und ungeheuer effektvoll.
>Rigobert Dittman, Bad Alchemy, 6.2007

By the time this recording was made in her studio in Berkeley, California, in 2006, Ellen Fullman had spent 25 years exploring the potential of her Long String Instrument (or LSI). Walking slowly between parallel sets of very long wires, set at waist height and strung between wooden box resonators, Fullman uses rosin-covered fingertips to release the extraordinary vibratory energy of this apparatus. Self-evidently there are dimensions of any LSI performance that a CD can’t capture – the musician’s body moving within the instrument, the sculptural aspect of its appearance and the way the sound interacts directly with the physical space. Nonetheless, even when digitally documented, Fullman’s overtone-saturated drones and gradual melodies have both immediate sensory impact and rewarding sonic richness. Sean Meehan is a New York based percussionist who has collaborated in the past with the electronics of Sachiko M and Toshimaru Nakamura. Using a piece of dowel to generate friction on a snare drum and cymbals, he enters totally into Fullman’s intricate droning soundworld. Despite such modest resources, he blends and interacts remarkably well with the harmonic complexity and subtle articulations of her music. Sometimes the sonorities on the three tracks here appear electronically generated; in other places they bring to mind Pauline Oliveros’s sonic meditations for accordion, though still more enveloping and vibrantly textured. In quieter moments the rumble of passing traffic can be heard; it doesn’t quite match the memorable harmonic synchronicity of a train whistle that found its way onto the final track of Fullman’s 1993 release Body Music, but her approach of careful deliberation plus readiness for the unexpected remains fertile, and Meehan is clearly sympathetic to it.
>Julian Cowley, The Wire, 7.2007

This CD features a live recording of improvisations by Fullman and Meehan, whose "combination tones, sympathetic resonances, beating and even cancellation of each other's sound" are all generated by the sheer juxtaposition of two sources, namely Fullman's long string instrument and Meehan's snare drum with cymbals. The former is an impressive creature, counting on dozens of strings whose length can reach up to 20 metres, played with rosined fingers while walking along the installation; the harsher, frictional timbres deriving from Meehan's atypical use of percussion instruments are almost perfectly complementary to Fullman's invention, the whole often raising a true "overtone symphony" whose results in terms of sonority range from Stephen Scott-like majestic chordal suspensions - only in a more skeletal harmonic environment - to the upper partial-derived hypnotic howl characterizing the final segment, which somehow reminds of Alvin Lucier but with a number of slight variations and peculiar morphologies underneath. To better enjoy the multiplicity of shapes and morphing rebounds elicited by these fine sound artists, listening from the speakers - possibly in a large room - comes once again highly recommended, as corners and walls are the places where these reverberant tones take their energy from, before coming back to the listener with stirring force, even in moments of apparent tranquillity.
>Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes, 7.2007

It's been ages since I last heard music by Ellen Fullman (in fact, there may never have been a review of her work in Vital Weekly), but upon hearing this new work, it feels like common territory. Fullman plays long string instruments, up to 20 metres. Here however they are a bit shorter, 14 metres, which she plays with her fingers. The high and low pitched, long sustaining sounds form a nice floating mass of sounds. Here she plays an all improvised duet with Sean Meehan, who plays the snare drum with cymbals, and on this recording he plays it with a dowel and a friction. The three lengthy pieces here are covered with overtones, slowly humming and reverberating (all in a natural manner of course, as this is an all acoustic recording with no electronics). It's entirely unclear how Meehan gets his instrument to resonate in such a similar beautiful manner, but once floating away, I don't think I really care how. Along the lines of Paul Panhuysen's long string installations of the mid eighties, this is a true beauty. Here too one could argue nothing much changed over the years, but since it's been so long since we last heard from Fullman that we can forgive her. Great CD.
>Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly, 6.2007

Sinds vijfentwintig jaar experimenteert de Amerikaanse componiste Ellen Fullman met de door haar ontworpen Long String Instrument. Een reusachtige installatie, waarbij over een lengte van 14 meter – op taillehoogte - twee clusters snaren zijn gespannen die aan weerszijden uitkomen op houten klankkasten. Tussen de twee clusters is een soort gangpad aangelegd waar Fullman tussendoor kan lopen en zo de mogelijkheid heeft om aan beide kanten de snaren te bedienen. (Deze afbeeldingen geven helder de omvang en constructie weer). Met hars op de vingers wrijft ze over de snaren, wat zeer uiteenlopende klanksoorten oplevert. Qua klankkleur komt het enigszins in de buurt van een glas harmonica, een instrument waarbij schuin aflopende glasplaten met de voet worden bediend. Op deze titelloze CD gaat Fullman de samenwerking aan met de Amerikaanse percussionist Sean Meehan. Hij hanteert wrijving eveneens als toegepaste methodiek. Met een ijzeren pen strijkt hij over het oppervlak van een snare-drum of cimbaal, wat net als Fullmans Long String Instrument schelle en lang aanhoudende klanken genereert. Het levert een boeiende tweestrijd op, in drie min of meer inwisselbare composities, waarbij de twee elkaar volledig de ruimte gunnen. Toch zou je het duo vooral eens met eigen ogen aan het werk moeten zien. Als die kans zich ooit voordoet. De Long String Instrument is een attractie op zich, maar het is ook dankbaar om te zien wie voor welke klanken daadwerkelijk verantwoordelijk is. Want dat is nu soms gissen.
>Dwars, 6.2007

Once again Kahn, the owner of the Swiss based label "cut", created a marvelous cover in his distinctive style for the release of Ellen Fullman and Sean Meehan. Partly melancholic, partly mysterious, it´s an interesting presentation of an outstanding self-developed instrument, the Long String Instrument (LSI)
"Waist high, parallel wires, strung in two sets span 14 meters. Fullman produces rich, microtonal drones by pacing up and down the wires and applying friction with her fingertips. Each of her ten fingers precisely finds the appropriate string and the sound emanates from wooden box resonators bolted into the wall. At her studio where this CD was recorded, the strings run through the patio door and terminate in the backyard: "the extra length affords me an additional lower octave," Fullman explains (cut)".
Sean Meehan focuses on playing the snare drum with cymbals. He produces long, continuous tones from them using a dowel and friction, surprisingly very similar to Fullman´s work.
If you expect some guitar or harp like sounds, you are far away from the sonic spectrum of the LSI. It reminds me more of singing glasses or an accordion with huge amount of air for achieving these endless lasting tones. This "new" warm, organic, sometimes metallic sound quality combined with Fullman´s and Meehan´s skills of composing, makes this release an outstanding one.
It is an acoustic work, recorded in stereo, without overdubbing or effects. So far a live performance of Fullman and Meehan. This fact is remarkable, as the level of composing is quite high and sounds sometimes like a classical notated piece. Maybe this quality of composing is achieved from Fullman´s long experience, knowing exactly what her instrument is capable of. So, if you like to dive into a sea of long, warm, microtonal tones, leading to total complementation, just press the order button at cut´s shopping site.
>Sascha Renner, earlabs.org, 6.2007

Ellen Fullman is a Seattle based sound artist who has been exploring and building her own instruments since 1981like the installation the Long String Instrument which is 21.4 meters long - this time shorter that is to say 14 meters - and is played by rubbing the strings with rosined fingertips while walking along a pathway between banks of strings.
On the other hand, Sean Meehan started in the late 80’s in the experimental music field playing snare drums with cymbals both in closed spaces and unusual places in the city.
The music is an orchestra of drones which expands all over the space. This was a live recording , Easter 2006, Berkeley, California. Music for the ambience, soft percussion, very subtle scrapes over the cymbals, low range dynamics.
I would like to see how these artists playing their instruments. How they manage to produce this environmental sound.
>Guillermo Escudero, loop, 6.2007

There are a couple of problematic aspects in the pairing of Ellen Fullman and Sean Meehan. While the surface affinity is clear—Fullman’s horizontal stroking-while-walking of extended lengths of wire has a reasonable amount in common with Meehan’s vertical caressing of thin, wooden dowels placed perpendicular to a cymbal or gong atop a snare drum—the “doubling up” of the two approaches doesn’t necessarily amount to music that’s twice as intriguing. Second, whatever attractions Fullman’s music has for a given listener, it’s a very physical activity in the sense of materially inhabiting a large space, something that almost automatically suffers when rendered to disc. I’ve only once witnessed a performance of hers, at Columbia University some eight years ago, and while I wasn’t terribly taken with the music per se, the sheer acoustic phenomenon was impressive to be amidst.
That said, the recorded music is what it is and it’s not bad at all. Twining drones, Meehan’s perhaps a bit grittier and tending toward the higher ranges, Fullman’s mellower with more hum, fluctuating from high to low. Different degrees of force are achieved; you get a nice sense of torque in the second track, especially where the two tones really rub up against each other in an apparent struggle to occupy the same acoustic space. The final of the three cuts is calmer, conflicts resolved, the lines forming gentle arabesques as though carried down a slowly flowing stream. Aural shapes form in a very natural, very enjoyable manner.
It might be almost exactly what a listener familiar with the two musicians would expect from such a meeting, plus and minus, but overall I found it to be an endearing and subtly captivating work.
>Brian Olewnick, Bagatellen, 6.2007

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