I'm not going to lie to you. Jason Eckardt's music is hard to listen to, if only for the demands it places on its listener. Eckardt favors a sound that stems from Xenakis, Lachenmann, Grisey, and other Euro-titans and feels closely related somehow to Sciarrino, and maybe Ferneyhough. You might stumble, as I did, during your first encounter with Eckardt's hyperactive über-expressiveness. But as your senses enjoy being overwhelmed and you begin to relax into Eckardt's stringent music, try to refrain from analytical listening and simply enjoy the beautiful flow of morphing timbres. It's actually really hard to do as the music unwittingly focuses a zillion floodlights at Eckardt's compositional concerns, which seems to entail, well, bringing some kind of order to chaos. This subtle and, more often than not, blatant push and pull hints at the composer's manifested interests in juxtaposing activity and inactivity—the corporeality expressed by the cellist in After Serra, rapidly sawing notes like a competitive lumberjack which is suddenly halted by near silence—in balancing macro-melodic directions and stabilizing a set of narrowly preferred intervals—the shrill piccolo melody over a rising, brutal piano accompaniment in A Glimpse Retraced—and imposing randomness into fixed zones of pitch and register, like forcing square pegs into round holes.

While I understand Eckardt's connection to the dwarfing and disorienting feeling evoked by the huge, monolithic steel sculptures by Richard Serra that inspired After Serra, I sense a closer affinity in his music to the sculptures of Sarah Sze: giant aggregates of sprawling material that jettison against the laws of gravity and pixilate into tiny, intricate worlds that lay awaiting discovery entirely separate from the whole.