Category: Listen

Sounds Heard: Herbert Deutsch—From Moog to Mac

Posted on March 19, 2013 by - Albums, Listen

I have always found something particularly enriching about career-long retrospective presentations of an artist’s work. I have this concentrated immersive experience more often with visual art than I do with music, but albums such as Herbert Deutsch’s From Moog to Mac remind me that the ears benefit as much from taking such a journey as the eyes do.

Presented in chronological order and spanning a period from 1963 to 2007, the works included on From Moog to Mac demonstrate the process of experimentation and development that Herbert Deutsch went through as he created work for Bob Moog’s iconic synthesizers and then on into computer generated sound.

The disc opens with Deutsch’s A Christmas Carol, a 1963 tape piece made before the development of the Moog synthesizer that’s something of a state-of-his-art setter (as the disc notes report it was for Moog as well) for what is to follow. The piece positions audio news clips from the Birmingham church bombings of that era and monastic chanting alongside snippets of the children’s song “Frère Jacques” intended as a call to then-President JFK, all threaded together using a host of processed instrumental sounds.

What follows that track is a sort of audio letter and instrument demonstration from Robert Moog to “Mr. Deutsch, sir!”, which offers an intimate insider’s view of the early days (and sounds) of his prototype instrument. Having nicknamed it “abominatron,” Moog self-depreciatingly suggests that “it doesn’t sound like much when I play it. But maybe someone with more musicianship and imagination can get some good things out of it.” It’s an utterly charming six-plus minutes of his thinking, excitement, and nervousness at that time.

Jazz Images, A Worksong and Blues (1964) is the first piece ever composed using the sounds of a Moog synthesizer (!) and offers a striking view of Deutsch’s early reaction to and experimentation with the technology. He writes:

In 1964, the sounds and the potential of sound modification had a startling effect upon me. It was as if each new sound produced would almost instantly free my mind and my fingers to move in a new direction. This experience fit perfectly into the way I was hearing, and wished to explore, the new jazz that I loved to hear and play.

While it’s an exciting ten-minute historical audio document, it also remains a great listen on its own terms, mixing the sounds of the synthesizer with Deutsch’s own improvisation on piano and trumpet. The same holds true for A Little Night Music, The Ithaca Journal Aug. 6, 1965, composed to close the Summer 1965 Workshop and Seminar in Electronic Music Composition that Deutsch and Moog held in Trumansburg, New York. This piece also relies on the headlines of the day and provides an interesting developmental mile marker when held next to the disc’s opening track.

Once the disc moves past these groundbreaking early experiments, some of the work wears its age more boldly than the rest. Prologue to King Richard III (1971), showcasing the integration of the Mini-Moog into the score for a “modern” production of Shakespeare’s play, makes for a fun bridge between Renaissance sonic cues and synthesized timbres of the time. Using a Moog MemoryMoog and a Korg M-1 Music Workstation, Slight of Hand (Mr. Magic Man) (1989) holds up less well for me, a piece of cabaret-pop marred by the heavy-handed use of now cheesy-sounding (and era-signaling) synth sounds. Fantasy on “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” (1995) is an often-jazzy conversation between saxophone and a palate of electronic sounds (those mimicking strings and organ particularly) that took me right back to the Casio keyboard I played as a teenager.

Abyss (1994), however, seems to have escaped its time. A luminescent setting of a poem by Sonia Usatch, it features a piccolo player and mezzo-soprano (at opposite sides of the stage in performance) both entangled in a bed of delicately glimmering computer generated sound. The piece explores the relationship between a mother and her schizophrenic son, as represented by the melodic lullaby-like delivery of the vocalist alongside the piccolo’s fluttering exploration of a 12-tone row. The juxtaposition is quietly powerful.

Deutsch closes the album with Two Songs Without Words for Theremin and Piano  (2007). Originally composed for voice, Deutsch rewrote the piece to include theremin after learning Moog was ill and knowing the distinctive instrument was perhaps the inventor’s favorite. The pieces make for a poignant end to an album that traces the interwoven electronic work of the two men.
In addition to the music, the disc also includes historic documents and photographs, two downloadable ringtones (snippets of tracks on the disc), and a 15-minute documentary (also available below). Taken together, it’s a chance to step back through a doorway and listen to an artist’s electronic voice unfold, an opportunity to listen and consider both how much new technology matters and perhaps also how much it does not.

Sounds Heard: Fernando Otero—Romance

Posted on March 12, 2013 by - Albums, Listen

I’ve long been a huge fan of tango music and the various Piazzolla and post-Piazzolla extensions of what tango could be. In 2011, in search of sheet music and recordings that were nearly impossible to find in the United States, I trekked down to South America where I even wound up getting rudimentary tango lessons at Buenos Aires’s legendary Bar Sur. (I’m glad there’s no video evidence of that.)

A few years before that, I was very excited about Pagina de Buenos Aires, a 2008 Nonesuch album featuring latter day Tango Nuevo instrumental music in a variety of formats—solo piano, piano and violin duets, small chamber ensemble, even a full orchestra—showcasing pianist/composer Fernando Otero, whose name was completely new to me at that point. Because of the similarity of our names, I immediately felt a slight tinge of kinship with him, but—the coincidence of that aside—the variety of moods and textures that Otero evoked from this musical tradition is what ultimately attracted me to the disc. Sadly, since all the press materials I was sent about the CD at that time identified Otero as Argentinian, I never considered it potential fodder for NewMusicBox. However, upon receiving his latest recording, Romance, in the mail recently, I learned that Otero actually lives in far less exotic Brooklyn! And for his latest outing he has actually utilized the talents of some of NYC’s finest genre-hopping musicians, among them vocalists Dana Hanchard and Kristin Norderval, violist Lev ‘Ljova’ Zhurbin, and fellow Argentine-American Pablo Aslan, a bassist extraordinaire whose own 2004 album Avantango is a must hear for anyone interested in rhythmically based small ensemble improvised music. So I knew I had to write something about Otero’s Romance on these pages.
Throughout Romance Otero ratchets up the contemporary classical music allusions that were already in evidence on Pagina de Buenos Aires, e.g. chamber music sensibilities, a post-chromatic—and at times post-post-minimalist—approach to harmonic and form. But on the new album he also explores and combines many other musical idioms ranging from jazz to musical theatre and beyond. According to the disc’s program annotator, Miami-based music journalist Fernando González, its 11 tracks are intended to be consumed either individually or in any sequence the listener desires, a format suggested by the famous Argentinian novel Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar in which variable sequences for reading the chapters are part of the book’s design. While Hopscotch is a great read, it’s a far more demanding proposition than listening to Otero’s Romance in whatever order you ultimately choose to do so. Besides, listening to it in your own order is perhaps inevitable given the ubiquity of shuffle mode nowadays. Still, I felt compelled to listen to it, the first few times around at least, in the released sequence which, because of its variety of tempos and styles, is an ideal way to experience this music.

Otero at the piano

Fernando Otero tickles the ivories, photo courtesy of Aleba & Co.

“Ojos Que Se Abren Brillantes” opens sans piano, with melodica, clarinet and strings playing a striking, almost speech-like unison melodic line that is somewhat reminiscent of the vocal melodies in the slower movements of Steve Reich’s Tehillim and The Desert Music, albeit minus those compositions’ procedural underpinnings. The piano enters approximately midway through, but its role is supportive rather than soloistic. In “Arbolitos,” the piano has a more prominent role, sharing more straight-forward sounding melodies in unison with the strings. “Manifestación” starts off as a seemingly meditative piano and violin duet but soon veers off into quirkier, more unpredictable terrain as almost Chick Corea-like solo piano flourishes keep interrupting the flow. Things start really percolating, however, in “Piringundín de Almagro.” It’s brimming with the same kinds of unstable harmonic tensions that help to give Piazzolla’s music its signature earthy, visceral drive. But Otero also shows in his approach that he has a kinship with the music of John Adams. On the other hand, the ensuing “En Contacto Permanente,” with its wordless vocals, is far more ethereal. Gonzalez likens it to Villa-Lobos’s famous Bachianas Brasilieras No. 5, a haunting composition for wordless soprano and an ensemble of eight cellos. I also hear in it echoes of Les Baxter, the one-time king of Space Age Bachelor Pad Music whose 1951 Ritual of the Savage is nevertheless one of the most stunning examples of how to effectively incorporate wordless vocals into an orchestration.


In the original album order, “En Contacto Permanente” is followed by Preludio 4, a whirlwind piano solo that showcases Otero’s formidable keyboard prowess. (The earlier Pagina de Buenos Aires album featured his Preludio 19, so there are undoubtedly enough of these preludes for an intrepid pianist to explore as a standalone project; it would be nice to hear a whole program of them.) But Romance is as much a showcase for Otero’s compositions as his playing, so on the subsequent “Luz Del Primer Dia” the piano disappears entirely and the music, scored just for clarinet and strings, is a tender, almost Copland-esque pastorale. But, of course, the clarinet can also be down and dirty and the next track, “En La Tierra Sagrada,” opens with an impassioned multiphonic skwonk from clarinetist Ivan Barenboim which is particularly unsettling after the relative serenity of the previous piece. According to González, “En La Tierra Sagrada” was created in memory of Otero’s mother, the internationally acclaimed Argentine singer and actress Elsa Marval, who died in 2010. A mournful quality remains throughout the entire composition as the solo role is constantly traded between the members of the ensemble.

Elsa Marval

Elsa Marval (1930-2010), photo courtesy of Aleba & Co.

“Criatures de la Noche” is another piano solo, but this time the music, though still virtuosic, is more harmonically ambiguous and introspective. The frenetic, high octane “Cancha de Bochas” marks a return to more upbeat music. But while it seems on the surface to be another frenetic Piazzolla-esque romp, replete with the legendary Nuevo Tango progenitor’s signature extended string techniques, it contains a few surprises that are entirely its own. The violin was a constant presence in Piazzolla’s ensembles and it is herein as well, but the addition of a viola, which takes the first solo, adds a deeper, more mysterious melodic layer. The closer, “Until The Dawn,” introduces yet another new element—lyrics. It is also the sole appearance on the disc of musical theatre singer Josefina Scaglione. Scaglione is probably best known for her appearance as Maria in the 2009 Broadway revival of West Side Story and Otero has fashioned a song for her here that is very much in the tradition of the sophisticated songs of WSS creators Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim. It makes me eager to hear an entire musical by him one day.

Sounds Heard: Cold Blue Two

Posted on March 5, 2013 by - Albums, Listen

For more than three decades, Cold Blue Music has been highlighting the work of composers working on the outer edges of contemporary music, many of whom are based on the West Coast and “whose personal music visions often blend intuition with process,” according to the label. Sonically, this translates into a very specific kind of aesthetic which can be gleaned from the titles of the works on Cold Blue’s most recent anthology CD Cold Blue Two; Colorless Sky Became Fog and Prelude to Alone, for instance, are telling. Not to say that the music is colorless—it is anything but. This is (to my ears) music that evokes the thick, dark quiet of late nights, and misty rainy days, when a certain level of sleepy, languid melancholy can become soothing and thought-provoking.

Cold Blue Two features 14 short tracks (only Nights in the Garden of Maine by Peter Garland breaks the five-minute mark), many of which were composed specifically for this CD. It offers a panoramic view of Cold Blue’s offerings, which are quite varied and yet make a powerful unified statement. These works could be described as beautiful oddities—some even devastatingly gorgeous, but always with a twist. Even if unapologetic beauty is not your cup of tea, worry not—upon close listen each one of these works sports frayed edges, chipped corners, or other subtle disturbances that turn it into a highly personal proclamation; this is far more than lovely fluff. Daniel Lentz’s smooth, mournful solo cello-with-overdubs piece Celli, Phillip Schroeder’s shimmering Another Shore for celesta with digital delay, and John Luther Adams’s Sky With Four Suns (originally a choral piece but presented here in an arrangement for string quartet) are examples of flat-out pretty music bearing plenty of harmonic and thoughtfully structured substance. But stand by, because things get weirder, and quickly. Son of Soe-Pa for solo guitar with electronics by Ingram Marshall is performed by his son, and also includes a recording of his son singing as an eight-year-old child. This description sounds warm and fuzzy until you actually hear the digital delay pitch-bends dragging down the guitar in a mildly sea-sickly, disturbing fashion. Here, childhood memories are taken to a surreal place.

The disc also contains a healthy dose of just intonation; the 16th note tremolo that opens James Tenney’s Mallets in the Sky, scored for the Harry Partch diamond marimba with string quartet, ushers in an upswing of mood and activity level after a series of somewhat lethargically paced tracks. It is followed by the disarmingly lovely, glowing Eskimo Lullaby, written by Larry Polansky for Lou Harrison’s just-intonation National guitar and the diaphanous, untrained voice of guitarist John Schneider.
All of the pieces have an intimate, small-space chamber music sound, whether it is accordion, clarinets, and piano, and/or electronics. Many are haunting, but not at all cold or alienating; this is music for friendly ghosts. Each work contains treasures to be discovered within, and the heart-on-sleeve honesty of the works is not something one hears often. Cold Blue Two can make you look forward to a rainy day.

Sounds Heard: Mary Ellen Childs—Wreck

Posted on February 26, 2013 by - Albums, Listen

Would I have been able to smell the sea salt in the air quite so powerfully while listening to a recording of Mary Ellen Childs’s Wreck if I hadn’t already seen the image of a man face down in the water that graces its cover? Possibly not, but knowing that at the outset, I swear I could feel the waves crashing against the boat and a brisk ocean breeze hitting my face as the small ensemble of clarinet, violin, cellos, and percussion cut a sonic path forward through the piece’s opening measures.

That’s not to say that the work, originally commissioned to accompany an evening-length piece by Carl Flink’s Black Label Movement dance company, paints a strictly narrative portrait. While a recording of waves and instrumental lines that mimic gull cries quite evocatively accents the nearly hour-long score, its overall character extends well beyond these nautical touches.

Set inside the last watertight compartment of a recently sunk ore boat resting at the bottom of Lake Superior, Wreck explores the depths of physical and psychological endurance and human fortitude in the face of impending and inevitable loss. Wreck expresses cooperation and violence, compassion and obsession, and the ultimate question of how we face death. —Wreck liner notes

Based on the photos and teaser video alone, I wish I had had the opportunity to see the full production. With the music now available as a stand-alone recording, I can at least appreciate Childs’s contribution: an original score for which she was recognized with a 2008 Minnesota SAGE Dance Award.

Childs is no stranger to the integration of movement and images within the frame of her music. The percussion ensemble she founded—CRASH—is a poster child for this approach (further examples here) and the work she wrote for the string quartet ETHEL incorporates the drama of a visual element—video projections in this case, rather than the more directly physical player interaction that CRASH involves. As a glance down her projects page confirms, what the eye consumes plays a significant roll in her artistic outlook.

When all that is taken away, however, I found it fascinating to hear how much of that sense of movement and visual character is carried strictly within the notes and rhythms of her musical language. Divorced from the dancers on the stage, the music captured on the recording still knits its own gripping connections though its movement-conjuring phrases—from moments of graceful swaying to heart-pounding drive and shrieking terror. According to information provided by Innova, Childs wrote the score after much of the choreography was complete, fitting her work to the movement like a film score. On the disc, it is presented as 18 aural “scenes” featuring excellent performances by Pat O’Keefe (clarinets), Laura Harada (violin), Michelle Kinney (cello), Jacqueline Ultan (cello), and Peter O’Gorman (percussion). I would be hard-pressed to point out any one portion that stands above the rest, as the real power of the work is in the overarching sum of the parts. Still, sections such as the brightly ringing clamor of the percussion-driven “Spirit Duet” definitely make a lasting impression.

Knowing the fictional setting of the dance piece, I felt a clear connection to the depth of emotion—the fear, the anger, the questioning, the resignation—that a group of people facing death together might experience. Of course this was my own listener’s fiction, but especially as the work proceeds through later moments of suffocating delirium only to conclude in a space of haunting emptiness, Childs’s presentation of these ideas in sound became an ever more powerful listening experience.

Sounds Heard: Justin Rubin—A Waltz through the Vapor

Posted on February 19, 2013 by - Albums, Listen

Although A Waltz through the Vapor is only the second* full CD devoted to the music of Duluth, Minnesota-based Justin Rubin, he is an extraordinarily prolific composer. His website offers PDFs of more than 250 of his compositions written over the past 20 years—and that is not even his entire output! Of the scores available for download, roughly a quarter are for solo piano, so it is not surprising that the new CD is dominated by solo piano music (although his previous CD, Nostalgia, was devoted to his music for bassoon).

In the booklet notes for the new CD, Rubin confesses that “in my teens and early 20s I longed to be progressive but somehow through the curious lines of artistic invention I found myself in my late 20s and 30s writing waltzes amongst other unfashionable things.” And indeed, regular triple meter and lush harmonies pervade much of the music here. That said, in the year 2013 it is hardly unfashionable, and in these compositions these devices help to shape a fascinating listening experience to music that exists somewhere between tonal and non-tonal realms—not quite comfortable being limited to either paradigm but totally comfortable in the ambiguity.

The disc opens with The Still Waters of Sagamore Hill, a hauntingly beautiful piano piece inspired by the historic home of Theodore Roosevelt. Perhaps appropriately for a work created in response to someone from the turn of the last century, the music seems equal parts Claude Debussy and Charles Ives with a slightly more contemporary twist, perhaps a touch of McCoy Tyner—it was, after all, composed in 2001. It has a clear triple meter pulsation although it is in fact a slow 6/8 which actually makes it a composite of duple and triple meters. Though it ultimately resolves conclusively to F♯ major at the end, it is tonally ambiguous up until that point. In fact, the opening series of measures, which is something of an idée fixe throughout the piece, seems to incorporate a full tone row. However, on a careful examination of the score only 10 of the 12 pitches of the chromatic scale are used. Rubin subverts atonality as much as he subverts tonality.

There seems to be a more clearly articulated use of twelve-tone vocabulary in the next piano piece, “Affetuoso,” though Rubin is not afraid of repeating notes or including a few major triads here and there in his traversal of the complete chromatic, giving the work the overall effect of sounding polytonal rather than atonal. Considering that Schoenberg conceptualized the twelve-tone method as a means to achieve pantonality rather than atonality, Rubin—who immersed himself in Schoenberg’s music back when he was a piano student in the preparatory division at the Manhattan School of Music—is simply fleshing out what is already implicit in dodecaphony. “Affetuoso” is the second section of Rubin’s five-part Piano Album 2008 which is included in its entirety on the present disc, though not on consecutive tracks and not in numerical order. As Rubin explains, since he has composed “dozens of individual shorter pieces for piano over the years,” he began to put them together into piano albums “with variable performance sequences.” In fact, the next piece on the disc, the equally chromatic contrapuntal “Lullaby for Max,” composed for his son, is part of Rubin’s Piano Album 2006, although it is the only work from that particular album included here.
The next work, however, is perhaps my personal favorite. Musical Specimen, composed in 2011 and scored for the unlikely trio of piano, marimba, and bassoon (the bassoon’s sole appearance on the current disc), presents cascades of rising and falling sequences that seem very intent on going somewhere but ultimately just float around. Though the score is strictly in duple meter throughout, Rubin subverts regularity by beginning many of the phrases off the down beat. His description of why he wrote this piece is priceless…

 

I overheard a friend once trying to describe my style to someone asking what my music was “like.” He hesitated, backtracked a lot, and couldn’t quite say with any conviction whether it was tonal or not, consonant or strident, lyrical or angular, consistent or scattered. I decided I needed a brief Musical Specimen featuring some of my favorite timbres to help the argument along.


However, next up, “Con serietà” from the Piano Album 2008, returns to the opulent quasi-impressionism of the opening track and has the clearest tonal pulls of all the music on the disc thus far. Something of a tug of war between D minor, F major, and D♭ major (all of which share the note “F”), F major ultimately wins the day. However, Rubin never offers an easy resolution; the final clearly F major utterance comes immediately after a full F♯ major chord (a severe clash) which lingers on even once the last chord is articulated, resulting in something of a sonic blur.

Nothing is quite so ambiguous in Rubin’s unabashedly tonal Variations on “There Were Three Ravens” for flute and piano. The score even proudly proclaims a key signature. Of course this is music based on pre-existing material—specifically “There Were Three Ravens” by the early 17th-century English composer Thomas Ravenscroft—and Rubin composed it, or so his notes seem to imply, in order to exorcise a tune worm. “Consolante,” again from Piano Album 2008, creates variety and momentum from subtly altering a motive with chromatic shifts.

The heftiest piece on the present disc, the two-movement Sonata for Violoncello and Piano, opens with an unaccompanied cello, the piano eventually entering echoing the cello’s phrases in call and response fashion. The often fiery opening movement offers a constantly shifting web of imitative counterpoint. In the second, much slower movement, the roles are initially reversed. The piano enters first, with a monophonic bass line; nine measures later the cello finally joins in an almost chorale-like texture, albeit one that is far more chromatic and tonally ambiguous than anything a Baroque composer would have written. Extremely dense harmonies persist throughout, slightly thinning out—although not to a tonal resolution—at the very end.

“A Waltz through the Vapor” is the earliest of the pieces included here. Rubin initially wrote it in the summer of 1998, shortly after relocating to Minnesota from his native New York. Since this piano piece provides the title for the entire disc, it’s tempting to conclude that it somehow sums up Rubin’s compositional aesthetics even more than Musical Specimen does. And indeed it is difficult to definitively declare it to be tonal or non-tonal or even rhythmically regular or irregular. Although nominally a waltz, off-kilter measures of seven and eight beats occasionally intrude, although the flow is never broken.

“Chiaramente,” the final piece of Rubin’s 2008 Piano Album, though fully chromatic, is full of clear post-Tristan, almost ultra-romantic tonal yearnings. The Waltz for cello and piano is a lush miniature that would be perfectly at home on a standard cello recital program. Let’s hope some cellists open to exploring new but totally satisfying repertoire will read this and fulfill my assessment of it. Ending the disc with the brief but gorgeous “Cantando” (actually the fourth of the five pieces in Rubin’s 2008 Piano Album) perhaps ultimately advocates for tonality over non-tonality in Rubin’s language. It is unapologetically in B minor, again notated in the score with a key signature, and what a wonderful sonority that is, although cascades of passing tones offer some space for the rest of the chromatic scale.

After going through this disc multiple times I’m not sure I’m in a better position than Rubin’s friend who couldn’t decide if this music was “tonal or not, consonant or strident, lyrical or angular, consistent or scattered.” But I’m perfectly content for it to be somehow both at once, and eagerly await my next opportunity not only to listen to the disc again but to learn more of Rubin’s music, since there is so much of it to explore on his website.

* [Ed. Note: I stand corrected. It turns out that A Waltz through the Vapor is actually the third disc devoted to the music of Justin Rubin as I was delighted to learn when an additional MSR CD devoted to his chamber music for strings showed up in the mail the other day. Can’t wait to listen to it!!!—FJO]

Sounds Heard: Joseph Byrd—NYC 1960-1963

Posted on February 12, 2013 by - Albums, Listen

Joseph Byrd is a tremendously imaginative composer who spent much of his life moving in the same circles as experimental music luminaries Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Morton Feldman, Steve Reich, and John Cage, yet has remained a somewhat lesser-known name in part because of his incredibly broad range of output. “I had always been eclectic as a composer,” Byrd admits in the notes to an album by his psychedelic rock band The United States of America; “Indeed it was a detriment to my finding a single distinctive voice in the avant-garde, as I changed styles with almost every piece.”

This undogmatic, uncommitted, exploratory spirit is one of Byrd’s chief virtues as an artist, although it’s easy to see how this same quality makes him difficult to pin down in our increasingly soundbyte-based world while also being absolute anathema to the marketeers who preach branding and the kind of “image” that is not character, but a consistent act. This fantastically-performed disc featuring ACME and percussionist Alan Zimmerman reveals Byrd’s seemingly unquenchable curiosity and delight in uncharted territory, rarely settling into one aesthetic or approach to composition for very long and always pursuing new ground even as some of his cohorts pursued a narrower range of musical experience, with more single-minded purpose. This disc—the first commercial recording of Byrd’s “concert” music—fills a gaping hole in the recorded history of experimental music and should be one of the most exciting releases of 2013 for anyone interested in experimentalism or the New York scene.

Featuring music composed during a few of Byrd’s NYC years (1960-63), the material on this disc is nonetheless typically wide-ranging, with a greater aesthetic variety than most composers develop in their entire lives. The gamelan-like Animals which opens the disc wells up from whispers of rhythm into a climax of great textural richness, with a prepared-piano part negotiated with assurance and sensitivity by Timothy Andres, whose playing enlivens several of the album’s finest moments (particularly in the manic acrobatics in the solo prepared piano work, Three Aphorisms). In Loops and Sequences, Andres is joined by cellist Clarice Jensen for some Feldmanesque semi-improvisations on the composer’s given parameters; this kind of piece can easily become an indulgent slog unless invested with real attention and heart, and the musicians of ACME deliver plenty of both throughout the disc.

Four Sound*Poems is one of my favorite works on this disc, a work which develops small snippets of text by Gertrude Stein via an imaginative array of devices. The result resembles a kind of tripped-out, stuttering/hocketing polyphony that stands at the intersection of linguistics and musique concrète—a great introduction to the kind of unexpected combinations that result from Byrd’s imagination at its most anarchic and fertile. Likewise, Byrd’s Water Music—given a haunting and ultimately ominous performance by percussionist Alan Zimmerman—makes effective use of a tape part designed to resemble and resonate with a carefully-chosen battery of percussion timbres.


I would be derelict if I failed to mention the work that closes this album, Prelude to “The Mystery Cheese-Ball” for antiphonal rubber balloons, which was originally a relic of one of Yoko Ono’s famous loft parties. Byrd is most compelling when he’s flying free beyond the orbit of strong personalities such as the aforementioned Feldman, yet this short bit of Fluxus/Dada-inspired silliness is genuinely winning in the hands of the ACME musicians, who understand that a lot of what makes slowly releasing air from rubber balloons so interesting/funny/bracing is in the “how” part. If more presenters of obscure and experimental music approached the matter with the combination of genial nonchalance and curious attention that the members of ACME have mustered for this release, then the fate of Joseph Byrd and his varied successors will rest in trusty hands.

Games Played: Proteus

Posted on February 5, 2013 by - Listen


Proteus is a game by Ed Key and David Kanaga in which you wander around an island and stuff happens. Its minimal resemblance to a typical game has caused some to brand it an “antigame,” or not a game at all. This ongoing turf war in the gamer community over what is and isn’t afforded that status is a curious echo of old 20th-century arguments about music and art. In fact, Proteus could just as easily be called an interactive audiovisual artwork, raising the question: What is the difference, anyway? Does it even matter?

Despite what the semantic warriors insist, Proteus does have a very effectively game-like progression, with mysteries to solve, discoveries to make, and yes, an unmistakable ending. Because this progression is so essential, still images of Proteus really don’t do it justice. While the pixelated aesthetic Key creates is appealing in a way that invokes early Atari games, playing the game is another experience entirely. As the title suggests, Proteus is all about change and transformation. Without giving too much away, encountering these transformations is where the game really takes off. (The sunrises and sunsets, in particular, are mesmerizing.)
But Key’s visual design only tells half the story. Kanaga’s sound design—or “music design” as he calls it—is incredibly dynamic and layered, with samples culled from an overwhelming number of sources. The game makes use of over 350 audio files, from short blips to longer textures. Making your way across the island, these sounds are constantly intermixed and juxtaposed according to where you are, when it is, and what’s around you. The countless, ever-shifting combinations that result make it hard, at times, to even revisit a particular sound palette.

Kanaga’s musical aesthetic mirrors Key’s visuals in certain ways. Like the jagged pixel edges, the music also has visible (audible?) seams. Paradoxically, these quirks become part of the immersive experience, as you explore a world with qualities slightly orthogonal to our own. When a texture loops, there’s no particular effort to disguise or smooth out the endpoints, and it can be jarring to hear pure synth tones mingle freely with field recordings and fleeting orchestral fragments. Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe is most prominently featured, though an astute classical music fan may detect many more references. On the other hand, maybe not, since they’ve likely been chopped up, sped up, slowed down, pitch shifted, reversed, or otherwise obscured.

While Kanaga says he has forgotten the origin of many samples, an hour-long mix created last year as a prelude to a live set reveals some of his influences and inspirations, including Alice Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Brian Eno, Erik Satie, the Beach Boys, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Gesualdo, Satie, Bach, and Ravel. In this mix, too, Kanaga allows these disparate musics to overlap in unexpected and poignant ways.

Proteus: Timeline

click image to enlarge

Kanaga views his overlapping textures as a kind of counterpoint, and draws a connection between theories of polyphony and the discourse of free improvisation. Both traditions look at “multiplicities as unities… [placing] an almost ethical weight on the idea of the independence of parts… collective freedom, sort of an Enlightenment idea.” He credits his experiences with improvisation as essential to the development of his musical aesthetic, explaining, “Improvisation is very important to me. Many of the most profound musical experiences I’ve had have been non-performance improvisations with friends that probably wouldn’t have sounded very good, or maybe even interesting, to an outside listener.” This led him to conclude that the interactive and tactile aspects of music making were just as important as the music itself. To illustrate this, Kanaga invokes one of Theodor Adorno’s maxims: “To interpret language means: to understand language. To interpret music means: to make music.” Kanaga translates this as: “Play is FUNDAMENTAL to musical experience.”

This sense of play is immediately apparent from the first moment of Proteus, and Kanaga hopes to find it in classical music, too. He suggests, “I think we’re at a point with classical music that to bring it back to life—not as an old man on life support but once again as a DANCING CHILD—perhaps we’ll need to destroy it with even greater vigor.” He points to John Cage and the avant-garde developments of the ’60s and ’70s as productive destructions in this vein, but laments their current legacy. “I think it’s a shame that sound should become amusical… Sound is dry, rational… music is irrational, playful. Many people these days are afraid of irrationality, but it’s exactly a kind of acceptance of the unknown in music that’s needed.”

Proteus is currently available for PC/Mac and downloadable through the game’s website or though Steam. Kanaga’s music can be found on Bandcamp and his writings at wombflashforest. He also releases solo and collaborative improvised music with Ilinx Group.

Sounds Heard: Marcus Fischer—On Shore

Posted on January 29, 2013 by - Albums, Listen

shore,
strings,
sound…
wind,
waves,
wires…
tape,
tines,
time.

The above liner notes could read as a poem for Portland, Oregon-based musician and multimedia artist Marcus Fischer’s On Shore, a single 29-minute track that was originally released as a Japanese tour CD. But it’s really more like a shopping list of sound sources that can be heard throughout the course of the track. While at first glance, wind and waves might conjure images of a Windham Hill recording or something otherwise new age-y, I can assure you that this music is nothing of the sort. What it is, rather, is original and striking ambient music, well worth the half-hour soak for the ears.

Fischer is a versatile artist, active in music as well as in photography and other mediums (including the building of treehouses!). The hard copy version of On Shore, packaged in a letterpressed chipboard sleeve, is regrettably sold out (apparently there were only two rounds of 30 copies made), but the audio may be purchased via Bandcamp.

On Shore brings together aspects of the electronic music world that are not so easy to combine well, and manages to do so in a cliché-free environment. Field recordings and hand-crafted sounds are mixed with electric guitar improvisation and DIY electronic constructions, creating a long-form evolving texture that maintains interest throughout and yet never pushes too hard towards the next phase of activity. It’s the kind of sound world that allows space for the listener to explore and find different listening angles upon repeated plays.

The track begins with the sound of waves juxtaposed with close-miced burbling water, into which a languid melody slithers at about 2:45. Plucked guitar tones pop into the forefront, creating structural beams for the interplay of textural material that spreads across the spaces between strikes. At 14:15 the harmonic content starts to thicken out, and a faster pulse enters. By 18:13 you notice that the bottom has dropped away, leaving behind bare guitar strumming, joined by soft yet slightly menacing sounding low tones that gradually pull the water and wind gusts into the soundscape. The mixing of this track is extremely well done, in that the various complex sound sources never mush together—like really good instrumental orchestration, each layer can be clearly heard.

On Shore has many of the qualities I find myself searching for in electronic music; it is organically constructed in a way that makes sense, it’s unpretentious, it contains just the right amounts of grit and sparkle, and it is not afraid of patience, nor of silence.

Sounds Heard: Ehnahre—Old Earth

Posted on January 22, 2013 by - Albums, Listen

Arnold Schoenberg famously preached the liberation of dissonance, but left implicit the symmetric relation in that statement: that dissonance can, in and of itself, be pretty liberating. Ehnahre, the Boston-based experimental metal group, has a knack for dissonance, amplified into bone-crushing clouts of familiar overdrive distortion. But the real, dark fun of Old Earth (Crucial Blast) is the way the music, fueled by dissonance, constantly slips free of such genre expectations.

For the group’s third full-length album, Ryan McGuire (bass), John Carchia (guitars), and Ricardo Donoso (percussion and electronics) stretch out in full experimental sweep; laid out as a continuous, four-part track, Old Earth covers a lot of ground. (The album represents something of a swan song for the group, at least this iteration of it: Donoso has moved on to focus more on electronic music; McGuire and Carchia, having recruited three more musicians (Brandon Terzakis, Rich Chowenhill, and Jared Redmond), are about to start touring with the new lineup.)

Schoenberg is a particular and acknowledged inspiration for Ehnahre; 12-note techniques lie at the heart of much of their material. Serialism has been hanging around the edges of various heavy metal subgenres for a while, especially technical metal, with its pursuit of ever-increasing noise and virtuosity. But Ehnahre goes further, borrowing not just the theory, but something of the aesthetic as well: a thoroughly expressionist fascination with death and decay, aiming for nothing so much as the venerable sensation of the uncanny, the intersection of terror and clarity. The group has a poetic streak, too—their previous album, Taming the Cannibals, found lyrical inspiration in such writers as Whitman, Jeffers, and Trakl. Old Earth turns to none other than Samuel Beckett, adapting his “Fizzle 6.” Not that it’s entirely intelligible translated into a full, guttural doom-metal howl—but the mood translates surprisingly well, precise but fugitive glimpses of nature’s brutal indifference.


There’s metal to be had, of course—the third part, in particular, is a crunching, asymmetrical pummeling to be reckoned with. But much of the album unfolds in heavy, slow-moving clouds of sound. A long, musique concrète-tinged prelude; dark chimes from Carchia’s guitar; a moody arco double-bass solo from McGuire—at times, Old Earth feels more like a free-jazz album, albeit one with all the knobs turned to ten. The group draws forth the extreme quality of metal but also pushes it in different directions: extreme restiveness, but also extreme stasis, extreme haziness. Switching between shadowy warmth and carpet-bomb assault, Old Earth envelops the ear in harsh and gleeful hair-trigger possibilities.

Sounds Heard: Mariel Roberts—Nonextraneous Sounds

Posted on January 15, 2013 by - Albums, Listen

If anything is clear in the first few moments of Mariel Roberts’s debut CD Nonextraneous Sounds, it’s that this will not be just a polite collection of unremarkable wallpaper works for solo cello. Actually, unless you are already prepared for what’s coming, it’s not even completely clear that a cello is what’s at the forefront of the mix.

Opening with a transfixing performance of Andy Akiho’s Three Shades, Foreshadows, Roberts touches bow to strings at various points to percussive effect (the thwack of col legno, scratching and creaking tightly across the strings, the whisper of bow drawn across bridge, etc.), but the body of the piece is filled with dense streams of pizzicato along with knocks and taps against the instrument’s body and strings. The live solo line is ensconced in three electronic parts built out of samples of acoustic cello. The resulting quartet—an effect further underlined by the way the electronic part moves around the sonic field—is as much a percussive exercise as anything. The deep, muted bell tones which open the work and obscure the source of the sound are revealed in the liner notes to be the sonic result of plucked strings with clothes pins attached to them near the base of the fingerboard. Still, for as much creativity as has been employed in conjuring the timbral world of the piece, Akiho never seems to get distracted by it or employ techniques as a mere gimmick. Only in the work’s final fading moments, with the last remaining line clicking away like a spun-out film projector, did I even remember that the palette he was drawing from was not the way one generally went about playing the cello in the first place.


Sean Friar’s Teaser plays with listener expectations along a different line. He spins the music’s emotional character on a dime, mixing charming scraps of delicate tune work with fiery bombardments of sliding double stops and lines scratched across the instrument’s strings that might send a chill through you. Daniel Wohl also makes generous use of some fairly abrasive timbres in his Saint Arc, but these sharp objects play out in the context of a great deal of “air” which he lets into the piece through the quiet brush of the moving bow and extensive harmonic usage. A pre-recorded electronic track further amplifies this scenario. Alex Mincek then keeps the brushing but drains the aggression for his Flutter. Beginning in a place that is restless rather than hostile, the work skitters lightly across quick snatches of bowed phrases and nervous col legno, slowly gaining confidence, weight, and a striking, deep-snoring calm by the piece’s final measures.

That nap is not to last, however. Particularly if the demanding techniques employed in the album’s middle works have begun to emotionally exhaust the listener, Tristan Perich’s Formulations represents as a welcome shift of gears (not that Roberts gets to take a break). That it is a Perich piece will be immediately apparent to anyone familiar with his 1-bit work. In this case, his programmed microchips emit a rapid-fire sequence of flickering notes within which Roberts matches pace. After the first ten minutes, Roberts gets a breather and when her line returns to the mix after a two-minute recovery, she enters with firm, long strokes, as if steering the flickering swirl of pitch that surrounds her, slowing its frantic pace, and guiding everyone home.