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Classical string player Rena Jones, puts cello and violin into laptop generated landscapes.
You can hear an audio version of this blog with Rena Jones’ music, here.
If you’re a gamer, you’ve probably heard some of Rena Jone’s music.
Rena Jones: I write music for Dance, Dance Revolution. I write under an alter ego named Jena Rose. So, Rena Jones just swapped the first and last. And I just finished some iPhone games and a game called Genesis.
But it’s her solo music that drives Rena Jones. On her latest album, Indra’s Web she orchestrates a haunting world of electronics and strings. She makes this music in an electronic landscape is not a home to many women laptop composers. Rena Jones is among the few and she’s suffered a bit of digital disdain in her young career. Electronica artist Evan Bluetech.
Evan Bluetech: It seems like that she’s at a disadvantage being a woman in a male dominated scene, that people automatically assume that she’s just playing the strings and that somebody else produced her music and they seem to be shocked when they find out that she does her own production. It’s such a kind of male ego driven, DJ driven, electronic music community that people don’t necessarily give her tons of respect when she comes in.
Rena Jones @ Echoes Concert
Rena not only programs her own electronics, she does something almost no other laptop jockey can do. She plays cello and violin, creating her own brand of glitch-flecked, rhythmically elliptical, ambient chamber music. Her first two Cds, Transmigration and Driftwood were wrapped around philosophical and scientific concepts like the transmigration of the soul and the cycle of life. Indra’s Web mixes Buddhist philosophy and quantum physics.
Rena Jones: Indra’s Web is a Buddhist philosophy that everything’s interconnected…… And, this one is definitely a lot more abstract and kind of is in line with what a lot of people are really talking about and what’s going on with a lot of quantum physics. And, the ideas of the holographic universe. So, I decided it was a very good time to write an album based on these concepts.
You don’t have to understand quantum mechanics or the mind of Buddha to get tangled up in Rena Jones’ Indra’s Web, released on Cartesian Binary Records. I’ll be featuring her in a more extensive interview on Monday’s echoes. This has been an Echo Location, Soundings for New Music.
John Diliberto ((( echoes )))
what a fascinating woman.