Who says this ? – Michael Edwards – Henrique Portovedo

“The saxophone was the first musical instrument I ever wanted to play. As a child I used to stare longingly at the beautiful instruments on display at the local music store in Chester, England, where I grew up. There was no chance of me owning or learning saxophone but I did get access to the clarinet through my school, and after that the oboe.

I began writing for the saxophone as a student but only much later did I start playing it myself. The computer musician/composer/programmer/improvisor/ saxophonist strands of my musical endeavours came together in the half-composed/ half-improvised breathing charlie. I wrote this for myself and my very limited saxophone technique; Henrique revivifies it here with quite a different complexion.

The other pieces on this release are far beyond my technical prowess on the saxophone. They explore both the instrument’s intrinsic sonic character and its outer reaches. They also examine the possibilities of offline and real-time sound transformation and synthesis using bespoke digital signal processing routines. This work continues a tradition of combining acoustic instruments with electronics that goes back more than seventy years.

Thirty-odd years of compositional thought and software development have gone into the music on this release. Sound recordings for the electronics and the final mixes were made at various locations within California, Germany, Scotland, and Portugal. Each piece is unique, with different compositional and algorithmic concerns, some more serious than others, some more tongue-in-cheek; some based on poetry, and others abstract in the extreme.

My sincere thanks to Henrique for suggesting this project; for commissioning HOTPO; for resurrecting, recording, and repeatedly performing the other pieces, always with superlative technique, insights, and a selfless dedication to the aesthetic world which each piece inhabits. Thanks also to the other saxophonists who have been closely involved in the pieces’ genesis: Gianpaolo Antonirolami, Gary Scavone, and Marcus Weiss, in particular.”
(Michael Edwards, October 30th 2025)

“Every project I’ve undertaken has been part of a journey toward becoming a more complete saxophonist. Early on, I realized how deeply the repertoire we choose shapes both our instrumental technique and our personal voice. The pieces we study, perform, and ultimately inhabit become mirrors of our evolving musical identities.

In 2016, I embarked on a project that has since defined much of my artistic path: a recording of the complete works for saxophone and electronics by Michael Edwards. This endeavor represents more than a documentation of repertoire — it stands as both a reflection on the evolving paradigm of complexity in saxophone performance and a treatise on composition for the instrument in the 21st century.

Michael Edwards’s music reached me while I was living in London and developing a deep interest in electronic and computer music composition. Fascinated by the idea of Sonic Art as conceptualized by Trevor Wishart, I began connecting personally with figures such as Rolf Gehlhaar, Simon Emmerson, Dominic Murcott, and Martin Parker. During one of the Sound and Music Computing Conferences, Parker suggested that I get to know Edwards’s music and work. Later that same year, while passing through Edinburgh to participate in the World Saxophone Congress in St. Andrews, I met Michael, and we began to envision a future collaboration. Edwards’s compositions revealed a dialogue between performer and algorithm, gesture and sound synthesis, breath and code. Engaging with his work meant negotiating the mechanical and the digital — the saxophone’s acoustic resistance against the fluidity of electronic transformation.

At the same time, my PhD research on Augmented Musical Performance — and my work with Clarence Barlow, Curtis Roads, Paulo Ferreira Lopes and Marcelo Wanderley— was deepening my understanding of how technology extends not only our instruments but also our perception of performance itself. The recording thus became both an autoethnographic and/or a reflexive phenomenology of my own process — an inquiry into how embodiment, complexity, and collaboration intersect in contemporary music-making.

Through Edwards’s music, I confronted the limits of control and the beauty of unpredictability. Each piece demanded a reconfiguration of my technique, my listening, and ultimately my identity as a performer. To play his music is to exist in a constant state of negotiation: between the composed and the improvised, the acoustic and the electronic, the self and the system.

Looking back, this project represents more than a professional evolution. It maps the contours of an artistic identity shaped through dialogue — with composers, with machines, and with sound itself.”
(Henrique Portovedo, October 31st 2025)

Michael Edwards is a composer, improviser, and software developer, and Professor of Electronic Composition at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen. Educated in Bristol and Stanford, he has worked across academia and technology, including time as a programmer in Silicon Valley and teaching positions in Stanford, Salzburg, and Edinburgh. He is the creator of the slippery chicken algorithmic composition system, and his work focuses on hybrid electro-acoustic music, combining instrumental writing with algorithmic processes and digital sound transformation. michael-edwards.org

Henrique Portovedo is a saxophonist, researcher, and professor at the University of Aveiro, where he also coordinates the Creation, Performance and Artistic Research Group at INET-md. He holds a PhD in Performance and Computer Music and has conducted research internationally, including at UC Santa Barbara, the University of Edinburgh, ZKM Karlsruhe, and McGill University. As a performer, he is active in contemporary music, collaborating with composers such as Heiner Goebbels, Clarence Barlow, Curtis Roads, and Michael Edwards, among others, and performing with ensembles including Ensemble Modern and the Orchestre de la Garde Républicaine. He is currently president of the European Saxophone Committee. www.henriqueportovedo.com

Credits
Henrique Portovedeo – saxophones
Michael Edwards – composition, recording, mix, master
Recorded in Edinburgh, Scotland (in limine; breathing charlie; flung me, foot trod in July 2016, January-February & June 2017), Essen, Germany (their faces on fire; hotpo, April 2018 & February 2020 (Aveiro, Portugal : who says this, saying it’s me? , September 2025)
Art cover by Joana Rita
Published by Elektramusic Berlin – Paul Clouvel
All rights reserved 2026 © Michael Edwards & Henrique Portovedeo
2026 ℗ Elektramusic Berlin – Paul Clouvel