Alexander Berne

Flickers of Mime/Death of Memes (2 discs)

Innova Recordings

http://www.amazon.com/Berne-Flickers-Mime-Death-Memes/dp/B005S7JEOI

What do you get when you combine Kubrick moods, outer space, Middle Eastern vibes, clouds of metal timbre, and a lot of talent in mixing those ingredients? Something similar to a disc by Alexander Berne. How about combining the primeval, the creepily serene, and the sense of slow motion. You’ll get the same thing.

Now, coalesce both of those, and you’ll get an illustration of the arc of human nature woven into an ambient collection. Or, more accurately, you’ll get Alexander Berne’s new album Flickers of Mime/Death of Memes.

Flickers of Mime/Death of Memes is the third collection of works by Berne and his Abandoned Orchestra. Berne is a composer from New York who has primarily immersed himself in the jazz scenes of America and Belgium. He is a saxophonist and has also invented a new wind instrument, one he calls the “saduk,” a mixture between a saxophone and a duduk.

Flickers of Mime/Death of Memes is an album divided into two discs. The first, Flickers of Mime, is meant to symbolize what a mime might create using its bare movements. Many of the tracks off this disc include very 80s-space sounding, sustained notes, such as “Flicker I” and “Flicker VII,” while many others include eastern scales and timbres. However, these tracks are not obviously themed. Each is soon invaded with other ambient sounds that help the disc do what it was meant to do; through each of the “flickers” on the first disc, a different world, structure, or mood is built. Despite some of the celestial sounds, Flickers of Mime/Death of Memes does not use any synthesizers or the like. “Flicker VIII” sounds like calm, Middle Eastern-sounding club music, and can be compared to songs by Mocean Worker with its sassy wind motifs paired with loose piano phrases. “Flicker X” is a whirlwind of sounds that the listener arrives at in linear ways, like passing each one in a car.  While each track is one train of thought without much individual development, the way the flickers are lined up in the album creates one leg of the arch that is Flickers of Mime/Death of Memes.  “Flicker XI,” the last track on the disc, is eerily similar to “Flicker II,” but with faded glances back at previous flickers.

The second disc, Death of Memes, is meant to be the second leg of the arch—the one that recedes back to the ground. One would more literal apocalyptic sounds on a disc that illustrates the downfall of a society. But the pieces on the disc are mostly loosely primitive, like the aftermath of said apocalypse. While Berne’s album’s first disc focuses on the construction of aural formations, the second one is the destruction of those. The perspective is also different on the two discs. Flickers of Mime is, hypothetically, meant to come from the hands of one man. Death of Memes describes the downfall of a large mass, like a city. Many of the tracks on the disc are much more subtle, such as “Meme III,” a piece of unfettered yet serene piano accompanied by ambient drones. “Meme I” is one of the only tracks that moves slightly in the realm of more aggressive dystopia, with subdued timpani and other percussion.

Alexander Berne’s Flickers of Mime/Death of Memes is an album that doesn’t fall into the whirlpool that ambient music, or music of the sort, sometimes can—monotony. Because of the well thought-out relationships between the two discs, Berne has constructed a body of work that works together in ways not only aurally, but conceptually. It offers a new way of looking at the arch of humanity; the arch that we ourselves, as humans, might never understand.

PRISM Quartet

Dedication

innova records

Timothy McAllister, soprano saxophone; Zachary Shemon, alto saxophone; Matthew Levy, tenor saxophone; Taimur Sullivan, baritone saxophone

• Roshanne Etezady: Inkling
• Zack Browning: Howler Back
• Tim Ries: Lu
• Gregory Wanamaker: speed metal organum blues
• Renee Favand-See: isolation
• Libby Larsen: Wait a Minute
• Nick Didkovsky: Talea, Stink Up! (PolyPrism 1 and 2)
• Greg Osby: Prism #1
• Donnacha Dennehy: Mild, Medium-Lasting, Artificial Happiness
• Ken Ueno: July 23
• Adam B. Silverman: Just a Minute, Chopin
• William Bolcom: Scherzino
• Matthew Levy: Three Miniatures
• Jennifer Higdon: Bop
• Dennis DeSantis: Hive Mind
• Robert Capanna: Moment of Refraction
• Keith Moore: OneTwenty
• Jason Eckhardt: A Fractured Silence
• Frank J. Oteri: Fair and Balanced?
• Perry Goldstein: Out of Bounds
• Tim Berne: Brokelyn
• Chen Yi: Happy Birthday to PRISM
• James Primosch: Straight Up

I don’t think there are enough words to describe the technical precision, the unity of sonic intent, the musicality, and the timbral facility present in the Prism Quartet’s playing. Fortunately for me, I don’t really need the words; I have this disc instead. These 23 compositions, all short and wonderfully focused, paint a wonderful aural picture of this amazing sax quartet. The slithering of Roshanne Etezady’s Inkling showcases the extreme fluidity of their sound and as soon as it is over – BAM – we are hit with the spiky and strident Howler Black by Zack Browning. Adam B. Silverman’s Just a Minute, Chopin is as tender and expressive as Gregory Wanamaker’s speed metal organum blues is not, yet Prism sounds like they were born to play both. Compositions using lots of extended techniques like Ken Ueno’s July 23… (the full title takes longer to read than it takes to listen to the piece) and Jason Eckardt’s A Fractured Silence are gorgeous and rich sounding. The composers’ voices are strong and resonant and Prism plays these works as if no effort was involved (the effort for these pieces is considerable). Frank Oteri’s Fair and Balanced? exploits Prism’s pitch and tuning control with his four microtonal movements. By the time the disc is over, you’ll think there is nothing the Prism Quartet can’t do. And you’d be right.

Barton McLean
Soundworlds
Innova CD 234

Barton McLean’s latest release finds the composer/pianist/electronic musician presenting works that draw upon a variety of inspirations. These range from local to more exotic geographies, from field recordings to laboriously crafted computer sounds from customized software, and from live performances to overdubbed studio-wrought virtual ensembles. What brings these seemingly disparate works together is McLean’s distinctive ear for timbre, and his delight in creating various sonic echoes and digitized instrumental doppelgangers.

The earliest completed piece, 1989′s Demons of the Night, explores the darker side of a summer evening in rural New York. Various dark denizens, real or imagined (we can’t be sure!), are evoked by cackling saxophone and agitated synthesized glissandi.

On Concerto: States of Beingg (2009), McLean serves as piano soloist while the “Petersburgh Electrophilharmonica” provides a virtual accompaniment. The three movements – “Wonder,” “Attainment,” and “Tranquility” – each evoke a different stage of life or state of mind. The solo part is fluidly rendered and, given the subject matter, suitably wide ranging. The accompanying timbres are equally multifaceted in makeup, but generally favor echoing reverberations that trail the piano’s attacks and bell-like sonorities. Magic at Xanadu is a showcase for McLean’s electroacoustic prowess, particularly his facility with MAX/MSP (from which the work takes its title). Its blending of more atmospheric timbres with ostinatos crafts a work of variegated texture and intriguingly intricate formal design. More exploratory still is the live electronics piece Ice Canyons, which blends ephemeral wisps of melody with string pads and ambiguous harmonies blurred with glissandos.

More acoustically based is Ritual of the Dawn, a chamber sextet for the Syracuse Society of New Music. It is a contemplative millennial work that features shimmering pitched percussion, insistent gongs, McLean’s virtuosic pianism, and soaring wind duets. It captures both the nervous excitement and reflective moments that can take hold of us, sometimes in quick succession, at times of significant change. Finally, Rainforest Images II makes successful use of field recordings and natural sounds in a sound installation; a genre that is often rife with cliche is here given considerable compositional focus. Thus, the CD presents many facets of McLean without ever diluting the impression of a composer with keenly refined vision.

Psst … Psst!

Innova

Molly Barth, flutes; Brian McWhorter, trumpet/flugelhorn; David Riley, piano/celesta; Phillip Patti, percussion.

• Mysteries of the Macabre – Györgu Ligeti (arr. Beta Collide)
• Mollitude – Frederic Rzewski
• Trio – Valentin Silvestrov
• Memories of an Echo – Robert Kyr
• Nanosonata No. 7 + Mollitude – Frederic Rzewski
• Waterline – Stephen Vitiello
• Kryl – Robert Erickson
• Nanosonata No. 7 – Frederic Rzewski
• Yellow – Stephen Vitiello
• Nude – Radiohead (Beta Collide Remix)

Psst…psst! is an amazing collection of music and performance by the quartet Beta Collide.  Each performance is virtuosic yet effortlessly musical.  Each piece chosen for the disc suits the instrumentation well and the variety of works performed highlights the performers’ own mercuriality.  Their arrangement of Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre is wonderfully energetic and manic.  I honestly prefer their take on it over the original.

Beta Collide presents a “Rzewski Sandwich” in the solo flute work Mollitude, Nanosonata No. 7 for piano, and combining both pieces in the aptly named Nanosonta No. 7 + Mollitude.  The Silvestrov Trio for flute, trumpet, and percussion is delivered in a sparkling fashion.  Haunting pieces like Waterline and Yellow flow with the same effortless sound as the more flashy and chaotic works.  I am especially enamored with Memories of an Echo by Robert Kyr as an achingly beautiful duet for flute and trumpet.

Closing off the disc is a remix of Radiohead’s Nude. Their spin on this track is, in many ways, the antithesis of their arrangement which began the CD.  Their brief meditation is governed more by a contemplative mood than raw energy.

Glint

Timothy McAllister, saxophone

Innova 764

Lucia Unrau, piano; Robert Spring, clarinet

I knew Timothy McAllister’s recently released CD, Glint, was a hit when it grabbed me through my Jeep’s speakers as I drove down the highway. An athletic, delicate and powerful performance, Glint showcases Mr. McAllister’s command of the full sonic potential of his instrument. Along these lines, the works featured on the album cast a wide net over the landscape of contemporary music, making Glint a must-listen for any composer with plans of working with saxophone, regardless of aesthetic preferences.

The CD plays like a recital one would never forget, and samples a wide variety of instrumental combinations, soloistic colors and modern musical styles. For example, Caleb Burhans’ Escape Wisconsin (2006), Roshanne Etehazy’s Glint (2006) and Gregory Wanamaker’s Duo Sonata (2002) represent the kind of groove-oriented saxophone music I’ve observe to be very popular for saxophones, though, each of the three are very different. Escape Wisconsin is heavily rooted in repeated rhythms and melodic figures, as is the first movement of Mr. Wanamaker’s Duo Sonata, though this piece quickly departs to explore beautiful two-part counterpoint and – ultimately – the blues. Ms. Etehazy’s Glint is a tightly wound composing-out of an opening string of triplets, and presents – much like Mr. Wanamaker’s Duo Sonata – the nearly identical sounds of clarinet, played by Robert Spring, and saxophone in varied combinations.

Offering a more aggressive and abstract sound are Kristin Kuster’s Jellyfish (2004), Kati Agócs’ As Biddeth Thy Tongue (2006) and Daniel Asia’s The Alex Set (1995). Ms Agócs’ and Mr. Asia’s works are perfect large-scale solo works, particularly As Biddeth Thy Tongue which feels like a dramatic soliloquy and possesses a wide expressive range thanks to is juxtaposition of great lyricism and extended techniques. The Alex Set similarly opposes the saxophone’s sweetness and rhythmic facility within a more rigid structure of expository set pieces separated by contemplative interludes. Ms. Kuster’s Jellyfish is one of two works on the CD that pairs Mr. McAllister with piano, played by Lucia Urnau. The work flows smoothly through three movements, and the first – “medusa” – is compellingly indecisive, vacillating between capricious, fast gestures and slower, recitative-esque passages. This is followed by the sincere and elegiac aria, “blob” –some of the most profound music on the CD – and then closes with the piano and saxophone working almost as one line on the light and mecurial, “thimbles”.

Glint’s final two tracks enter a more severely modernist sound world: Philippe Hurel’s OPCIT (1984) and Peter Terry’s Rise (2004). OPCIT is a stochastic and contrapuntal exploration of duration, volume and timbre superimposed onto the single voice of the saxophone. Like an evolved iteration of the polyphonic movements in Bach’s solo suites, Mr. Hurel’s composition uses spectral techniques to create a multi-layered network of extended techniques and gestures, which intensify over the work’s four movements, climaxing at the peak of the instrument’s range. Rise is similarly focused on extreme colors and throws electronics and piano into the mix with Mr. McAllister’s saxophone. Mr. Terry’s work explores a handful of concepts such as textural density, the “nature of rhythm” and “starting in the middle is as good a place to start as anywhere.” Rise is an excellent walk off piece for the album because it culminates so much of what the preceding works have explored both in terms of instrumental virtuosity and timbre. Semi-chaotic, Mr. Terry’s work projects its intended image of a “dangerously overloaded machine” and – in the scope of the whole CD – acts as a satisfyingly exotic musical destination to which Glint’s previous tracks lead the listener.

I highly recommend this album for anyone interested in contemporary saxophone music or any composer about to embark on a project with a saxophonist. All musicians will benefit from experiencing Timothy McAllister’s staggering performance ability. The works he selected for Glint are equally impressive and demonstrate the saxophone’s superb fluency in all areas of the modern musical language. Finally, if for no other reason, listen to Glint because it is a wildly successful recorded object, and will engage its audience in any environment, even a noisy car speeding down the interstate.

Matthew McCright

Second Childhood

Innova CD 739

Pianist Matthew McCright’s recital disc on the Innova imprint has been given a cute but apt ‘in house’ descriptor: “Kinderszenen aus Northfield.” Indeed, the Carleton College professor and new music advocate has assembled a disc of new works which simultaneously channel and elevate the “music for childhood/music about childhood” genre.

For those who’ve slaved through dull character pieces and rhythmically inert etudes during childhood piano lessons, several of the pieces on Misplaced Childhood will no doubt repair these memories. Indeed, the disc replaces them with the type of fare one wishes was in the folders – and practice routines – of more students today. Namely, the composers featured here are able to evoke childhood and, often, to write with student performers in mind, while never ‘writing down’ to young musicians. One is particularly charmed by the dance compositions of Daniel Nas and Laura Caviani; both have written suites filled with jazzy character pieces which seem readymade for the student recital stage. John Halle’s “Lullaby” and “Misplaced Childhood” are both lithely evocative standouts as well.

McCright’s detailed and engaging renditions amply demonstrate that pieces for intermediate  performers, as well as those for advanced pianists who are channeling memories of childhood, can still make for interesting listening and prove themselves of considerable substance.

We spend a lot of time, energy, and words on the differences in art—what separates artists, what makes for different styles, what distinguishes one period from another, etc. Occasionally we are nudged into hearing these things in a different light by unusual juxtapositions of pieces in a concert program or on a recording.

It is tempting, easy in fact, to hear the music of Morton Feldman and Milton Babbitt as irreconcilably opposed. Where Feldman is expansive, Babbitt compressed; where Babbitt bubbles, Feldman flows.

This disc, however, almost forces us to hear the common ground between these two totems of the mid-century style wars. The two pieces are wholly characteristic of the composers’ mature style, yet their common instrumentation (and their juxtaposition on the disc) highlighted their similarities. This is also due in part to the beautifully nuanced performances by clarinetist Mark Lieb and members of the Phoenix Ensemble.

Specifically, I am struck by the expressive/structural use of register in both pieces. Both Feldman and Babbitt use the return to and movement away from pitches fixed in a particular register as markers in the progress of the piece. I wonder if there’s been much analysis/research on the use of register in music of the second half of the twentieth-century, because it seems to me to be a uniting factor in an era known for adversarial diversity.

This is an outstanding recording. Highly recommended for fans of the genre and either or both composers.

“From the 9th to the 15th centuries, the area which is now modern Spain was home to the greatest peaceful agglomeration of cultures ever known in the post-literate world…Even more remarkable than the flowering of art itself was the confluence of cultures that produced it: under the rule of Islam, Muslims, Jews and Christians lived and worked together in relative harmony.”
-Maya Beiser, Provenance liner notes essay
Cellist Maya Beiser’s latest CD for the Innova imprint seeks to craft music that celebrates the rich multiculturalism of the Iberian peninsula. Using medieval Spain as a jumping off point, Beiser has commissioned a collection of works that celebrate Christian, Jewish, and Muslim musical traditions. The participants frequently interweave stylistic and ethnic boundaries. The results are frequently engaging musical hybrids.
Iranian kamancheh composer and master Kalyan Kalhor’s “I Was There” features Beiser alongside oud performer Bassam Saba and percussionists Jamey Haddad and Shane Shanahan. This rhapsodic piece allows cello and oud each to negotiate long-breathed melismatic cadenzas. Eventually, Beiser and Saba come together, duetting in supple, then increasingly rhythmically incisive phrases.
Armenian dudukahar Djivan Gasparian’s “Memories” is a haunting and evocative piece. While Gasparian is not necessarily a household name, his performances on duduk (a double reed instrument) have populated a number of Hollywood films, including Blood Diamond and Gladiator. “Memories” captures the essential flavor of Armenian folk music, all the while bearing in mind the cello’s proclivities for generous-toned lyricism. Above an omnipresent drone, Beiser unleashes keening, ardent modal melodies.
Israeli composer Tamar Muskal took Ladino folksong as the basis for “Mar de Leche,” her collaboration with Beiser. Sung by Sephardic Jews in Spain, Ladino is a linguistic hybrid of Spanish and Hebrew. Muskal’s piece, a work for chamber ensemble that features the same musicians as the Kalhor work, abetted by the dynamic vocalist Etty Ben-Zaken. Beiser and Saba once again exhibit considerable musical chemistry. Beiser also incorporates some of the undulating vibrato and pitch-bends of Ben-Zaken’s vocal style, creating an organic set of timbral ensemble interactions.
In the summer of 2009, Beiser travelled with composer Douglas J. Cuomo to Cordoba and Granada: a field trip to do research that would abet the composition of his contribution to Provenance: “Only Breath.”
Inspired by the work of Sufi poet Jellaludin Rumi (one of my favorites!), the piece finds Beiser in collaboration with sound designer Shahrokh Yadegari. Seeking to evoke the sound of wind passing through the prevalent minarets in Andalusia, Cuomo has crafted a work that plays with mobile filigrees and reverberant echoes. It makes good use of looping technology too; rather than using it to fashion a pad of repeated utterances, the loops instead allow for slow-building counterpoint of phantom cello Doppelgängers. The final result is a series of dovetailing, angst-filled melodic lines amid ghostly, floating verticals. I’ve heard many vocal settings of Rumi that have had much less to say than this more abstracted, yet tremendously thoughtful, instrumental meditation on his work.
Evan Ziporyn’s arrangement of the Led Zeppelin song “Kashmir,” for Beiser and prog-rock luminary drummer Jerry Marotta, closes out the disc. While its clear that this is the piece with the most accessible crossover appeal on the CD, that awareness takes nothing away from its inclusion. It points up another kind of hybridized music-making – the influence of Eastern signatures on Led Zep’s rock-oriented sound. What’s more, Beiser and Marotta just plain tear it up!
Sometimes, a concept album contains a creative inspiration that is far better than the reality it imagines. In my view, Provenance extolls a wonderful collaborative atmosphere: a model for many future cross-cultural projects. Alas, this type of music-making is a relatively recent innovation and, in many venues, is still far from prevalent. One wishes Maya Beiser were able to make multicultural music without extolling the virtues of dhimmi under Muslim rule. During the Middle Ages, dhimmi – “people of the book” (Christians and Jews) – were sporadically allowed limited religious freedom in Iberia. But there were significant legal and cultural restrictions placed upon non-Muslim citizens; these were terms of surrender, not of collaboration or accommodation. Thus, my reading of history doesn’t allow me to share Beiser’s utopian view of medieval multiculturalism. I’d rather listen to Provenance as a hopeful and tantalizing glimpse at what music-making and, indeed, cultural coexistence, may increasingly look like in the future than to revise or rewrite our spotty attempts at getting along in the past.

Alabama Places

Ellen Tweiten, piano; Kurt Carpenter, microtonal keyboard

innova Recordings

“The synthesizer uses a piano patch and is detuned by 40 cents.” You know, when you encounter tid-bits like this in the booklet notes, you are talking about a different kind of animal altogether, in whose habits, care and feeding I do not claim to be familiar. So, I’ll be very brief before exhausting my knowledge on the subject. It seems that microtones are intervals of less than an equally spaced semitone. In Western music, which is based on 12 equal intervals to the octave, microtones have been of negligable importance (not so in music of the non-western world from Africa to Bali, where considerable use is made of them). Contemporary interest in semitones has been spurred by real-time computer music performance systems in both electronic and rock music. Beyond that, there seem to be literally hundreds of possible microtonal keyboard designs, which may vary considerably in the way they take and modify information from another source, such as a traditional keyboard instrument.

Alabama Places is a set of twelve duets for piano and microtonal keyboard, which composer Monroe Golden describes as “the fruit of an introspective four-year journey.” Each duet is connected in some way to a place that has either a strong personal association for the composer or some regional or historic significance. While we aren’t given specific information as to the type of microtonal keyboard employed here, Golden does inform us that these pieces were conceived as studies in the tradition of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, only in overtone-based harmony rather than key relationships. “The keyboard is detuned by an interval between 4 and 48 cents, in 4-cent increments, for each of the twelve pieces,” says the composer. “Thus, the entire set explores twelve different 24-note scales made up of two asymmetrical 12-note equal-tempered scales. Available pitches at a given moment correspond to overtone relationships from fundamental frequencies that also shift in 4-cent increments.”

Confused? I must admit I don’t follow the theory involved, so I’ll focus on the affective side of the music. Other critics have spoken of the “beauty and elegance” of these microtonal duets, finding them “delightfully disorienting” and “sumptuous, yet arcane.” Since my own ears have not been sufficiently “detuned” or “re-tuned,” I must confess there seems to be more than a little family resemblance among them, or, as Lewis Carroll’s dormouse would have put it, “much of a muchness.” The effect on the listener can be described as “mesmerizing,” if one is inclined to like what he hears, or “stupefying,” if one isn’t.

There is a kind of calming, soothing effect, perhaps even pensiveness or nostalgia, in the simplicity of Golden’s writing for the piano, which goes along well with the evocation of place names like “Iron Road,” “Natchez Trace,” “North Shelby,” and “Pell City.” The music in each duet did not always strike me as a perfect correlative for the place name. There are two duets with notable water-associations: “Tensaw,” inspired by a canoe trip down the Tensaw River, is described by Golden as “slow moving, lyrical, effortless, and buzzy” like the river itself (“Buzzy”? Maybe that’s the sound made by cicadas on the riverbanks on a hot summer’s day?.) “Coosa Basin” is more energetic, with cadences allegedly inspired by the hydroelectric plants in the area. Other correspondences are not as obvious, however: “Demopolis,” in a region of the state that time seems to have forgotten, is characterized by music not so very different from that used for “Montevallo,” Golden’s tribute to his alma mater, the liberal arts university where he studied in the early 80’s and where he fell in love with his first Moog synthesizer.  Switch the name plates, and we might be none the wiser.  There is, however, something for just about everyone to like in Alabama Places, whether you are a microtonal buff or not.

Ballad Nocturne  

Music of Ann Millikan

Bulgarian National Radio Symphony Orchestra

Grigor Palikarov, conductor

Innova Records

• Ballad Nocturne (with Emanuele Arciuli, piano)
• Trilhas de Sombra
• Landing Inside the Inside of an Animal

Ann Millikan’s music is a wonderfully eclectic mix of several contemporary compositional styles and yet Millikan retains an individual and consistent voice throughout each work on this Innova CD.  Ballad Nocturne, (2009) for piano and chamber orchestra, puts jazz harmonies and figurations through a Druckman-esque prism.  Neither straight-ahead jazz nor purely-abstract instrumental music, this piece encapsulates Millikan’s musical personality: that of a synthesizer.  Disperate elements flow together and mix in seamless compositions.  Around the 8 minute mark of Ballad Nocturne, time simply stops as high strings and a repeated high piano figure float over a slightly-disturbed walking piano bass.  The piece switches gears from pseudo-lounge to Morton Feldman without dislocating the listener’s eardrum.  Instead of ending the piece at this moment, which I fully expected, a more traditional jazz ballade lugubriously emerges and clarifies everything we’ve heard previously with the subdued juxtaposition of earlier elements.

Perhaps jazz transformations aren’t your thing.  No worries there, because the orchestral triptych Trilhas de Sombra, (2009) a programatic work based upon a story written by Millikan’s niece, feeds any needs you have for good ol’ American atonal expressionism.  Except, of course, when Millikan doesn’t need such language to express the ideas in the story.  Gestures and textures tend to abound instead of melodies but the music is still a cohesive unit that moves in a single, unified direction.  The melodies that emerge are long and fluid and showcased with solid and direct orchestrations.  Millikan doesn’t get caught in the trap of being overly clever and instead crafts a wonderfully picturesque and programatic work and like many great programatic orchestral showcases, Trilhas de Sombra doesn’t come across as a movie soundtrack without the visuals.  Unabashedly contemporary in sound, this is an approachable and enjoyable work that does not condescend to the listener.

Millikan has been flexing her synthesis muscles in the previous two works and the final composition, as one would expect, merges elements from the previous two (even though it is the earliest piece on the disc – 2008).  Landing Inside the Inside of an Animal is just as trippy and fun as the title might suggest.  I don’t know how to land “inside the inside” of something, nor do I wholly understand how the spacey, abstract, atonal music of the first half relates to the Afro-Cuban inspired dance rhythms that drive the second half.  I also don’t know how this all ties into the “story of initiation” mentioned in the program notes.  You know what?  I don’t care that I don’t know how this works.  It works. Being a fan of WTF moments in compositions, Landing Inside the Inside of an Animal hits me right where I live.  This piece is a journey but, unlike Trilhas de Sombra, there didn’t seem to be a predetermined path to follow.  It is as if Millikan just struck out to go somewhere and ended up in the most wonderful and fantastic places.

I do have one problem with this disc.  While the Bulgarian National Radio Symphony Orchestra sounds great on each piece, it really irks me that such purely American music written in the last 2 years had to be outsourced for the recording.  I should think that American orchestras would be falling all over themselves to perform and record Millikan’s output.