CD Reviews

Neither Anvil Nor Pulley

music of Dan Trueman

performed by So Percussion

Cantaloupe Music

So Percussion: Eric Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, Jason Treuting

Neither Anvil Nor Pulley

1. Another Wallflower [from Long Ago]
2. 120 bpm [or, What Is Your Metronome Thinking?]
3. A Cow Call [Please oh Please Come Home!]
4. Feedback [in Which a Famous Bach Prelude Becomes Ill-Tempered]
5. Hang Dog Springar [a Slow Dance]

Trueman’s percussion/laptop quartet Neither Anvil Nor Pulley derives its musical core from fiddle tunes and string timbres. While a percussion ensemble might seem like an odd choice of instrumentation for string sounds, So Percussion is the perfect fit for Trueman’s musical ideas. Neither Anvil Nor Pulley is a perfect example of composer/performer collaborations. The score is almost inconsequential in terms of specificity and exactness. Instead, the pages contain a mixture of precision and vagueness which allows So Percussion to inhabit and interpret the piece. Since music notation wasn’t of primary importance to performers in the folk fiddle tradition, it seems wholly appropriate for rote/community learning to be the foundation upon which this album was constructed.

The first, third, and fifth movements are the most true to the fiddle inspiration. Each movement begins with a “drop the needle” on a turntable (a real turntable is needed, even among the four laptops) and So Percussion provides accompaniment and interaction with the recordings. A lot of the instrument choices and dynamic shaping is left up to the performers and So, as always, makes every choice sound like the right one.

The rest of the movements are substantially larger and contain more elaborate drawn-out formal shapes. The second movement, “120 bpm,” transforms through chaotic/structured clicking into sustained string samples being triggered by tether controllers. This transformation is smoothly done and even though I never could have predicted that the movement was headed in that direction the formal shape feels perfectly balanced. “Feedback,” the fourth movement, is a show-stopping aural exploration of the famous G major Prelude from the first cello suite by Bach played via feedback excitation of a concert bass drum. The rhythm of the original piece is stripped away entirely which makes the score seem more like a Schenker sketch of the work then realized over the course of 16 minutes. Philosophically, it reminds me of 9 Beet Stretch or Call Me Maybe slowed down 1000% except this is done acoustically. Again, you might not think of a percussion quartet as the perfect instrumentation for this kind of sonic treatment of the material but So Percussion frequently demonstrates that they make the unexpected sound perfect.

The computer/percussion interaction goes along with the piece’s larger philosophical idea about the man/machine relationship (I’ve been using a lot of slashes in this review, haven’t I? I’ll stop). The computer doesn’t really SHOW the user what it does (as opposed to an anvil or a pulley). In that way, the integration of the laptops within the percussion quartet is extremely well balanced. Just listening, one is never sure if it is “live or Memorex.” And, after following the score, I can say the same confusion holds. Furthermore, this recording is not physically available; downloads only. But Trueman and So have gone the extra mile to make a physical release matter. You can get the recording with a recycled LP, a speaker driver, or even a tether controller like those used in “120 bpm.” Given the amount of creativity and artistic thought that went into the creation and performance of Neither Anvil Nor Pulley, it is encouraging to see the same level of interest go into the packaging of the work.

So Percussion

Where (we) Live

music by Grey McMurray

Cantaloupe Records

• This Place the Place
• Five Rooms Back
• Strange Steps
• Moat
• Room and Board
• In Our Rooms
• All Along
• Strangers All Along
• Five Rooms Down
• Thank You

So Percussion: Eric Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, Jason Treuting; Guitar and vocals: Grey McMurray

Where (we) Live, a collaborative composition/performance/event by Grey McMurray and So Percussion, does everything in its power to communicate a sense of place and space. The first track sets McMurray as the leader of a guided meditation asking the listener to think about various places he/she has lived and how it felt to move into a new place. It is the kind of metaphor one might expect someone to build a piece around but it is a narrative which would require ample program notes (and listeners who would read them) in order to communicate the piece’s true intent. McMurray cuts right through that and after 20 seconds, you know exactly what he is shooting at. Even before his narration comes in, though, we get a sense of space. The scratchy LP sounds and the distant piano recording established a sense of space and mood immediately. Being asked to think of the places we’ve lived just takes us deeper inside.

So Percussion and McMurray keep all details focused on mood, tone, and event throughout the disc. All details, from subtle timbres to large formal designs, all point back to the whole composition. Even a track like “Moat,” which contains some jarring shifts from loud and percussive moments quickly dropping into subdued delicate textures all seem to convey the very idea of what a moat is and what it does: a drastic shift in the landscape meant to isolate one thing from another. As this particular track continues, the disparate elements are unified into one cohesive unit.

“Room and Board” walks that fine line between a work for narrator and ensemble and a story on This American Life with a slightly more exuberant soundtrack. “All Along” is a straight-up groove for a while but gives way to spare electric piano chords at the end. While the disc has a mostly ambient sound world about it, So Percussion gets plenty of rhythmic and driving moments to contrast the pointallistic and quieter moments. Everything blends so well together, every sound is so perfectly chosen, each component is exactly where it needs to be.

It can be difficult to talk about this disc as a collection of tracks or songs. Where (we) Live is a complete and unified whole. It is equal parts groove and sparse points, equal parts spoken and sung, equal parts soloist feature and ensemble playing, equal parts acoustic and electronic, equal parts of all things. It isn’t casual listening, either. I can’t have this on in the background. It becomes the foreground, takes over my listening space, and puts me in its world. When the disc is playing, it is where I live.

Bang on a Can All-Stars 

Big Beautiful Dark and Scary

Cantaloupe Music

Ashley Bathgate, cello; Robert Black, bass; Vicky Chow, piano; David Cossin, drums and percussion; Mark Stewart, guitar; Evan Ziporyn, clarinets, saxophones, gongs

• Big Beautiful Dark and Scary, Julia Wolfe
• sunray, David Lang
• For Madeline, Michael Gordon
• Music from Shadowbang, Evan Ziporyn
• Instructional Video, Matt Damon, Breakfast at J&M, David Longstreth
• Study 2a, 3a, 3c, 11, Conlon Nancarrow (arr. Ziporyn)
• Life, Marijke van Warmerdam (video) Louis Andreissen (music)
• Ridgeway, Kate Moore
• Closing (live), Philip Glass (iTunes exclusive track)

Bang on a Can certainly knows how to celebrate turning 25. This two-disc release of new recordings features the mainstay composers of BOAC and stellar performances all around. Big Beautiful Dark and Scary also showcases shrewd marketing and promotion. Not only was the recording made available as a free download before the physical CD release, the CDs come with Marijke van Warmerdam’s video component to Life. But, to complete the experience, you’ll also hop over to the iTunes store and pick up the live recording of Closing, an iTunes exclusive track. Yes, I’ve done all these things and I am pretty satisfied with the results.

Disc one contains music by the BOAC Quadrivium: Wolfe, Lang, Gordon, and Ziporyn and each work is an exceptional model of their musical personalities. Julia Wolfe’s title track Big Beautiful Dark and Scary is one continuous and compelling swell that lives up to every adjective in the title. Wolfe’s music is constantly pushing forward through waves of tension and tremolo until it finally releases a scant 10 seconds before the end of the piece. When I think of the music of Julia Wolfe, I think of intensely focused compositions that make even the most basic of materials into a mesmerizing kaleidoscope and this work is a perfect example of her technique, craft, and emotional shaping. Sunray’s vibrant rhythmic texture, lighter instrumentation, and somewhat emotionally detached affect make David Lang’s piece a great contrast to Wolfe’s previous composition. The music hovers around a bright textural groove with occasional heavier monophonic ensemble sections.

Michael Gordon’s For Madeline is more obsessive in its treatment of materials than the Lang. For Madeline floats around a nattering piano/vibraphone chatter while the others smear around in uncoordinated lines. After 5 minutes of almost undetectable raising tensions, the sliding lines take over as the prominent textural material. Eventually the chattering elements are wiped out, leading the rest of the ensemble into a sparse and vacant ending. Evan Ziporyn’s three movements from Shadowbang are equal parts fun and funky (Angkat), timeless and still (Ocean), and hypnotic (Meditasi, Head).

Disc two opens with pure awesomeness. Instructional Video by David Longstreth is a delightfully charming piece of postminimalism/totalism. The guitar strums instantly establish a wonky rhythmic environment and gradually other instruments join in and interlock with each other in mind-bending ways. The piece simmers as such for a short time and cadences with unison rhythms. At under 2 minutes, this track functions as the “elevator pitch” for what makes the album Big Beautiful Dark and Scary worth hearing. Longstreth’s other two compositions, Matt Damon and Breakfast at J&M are equally attractive for opposite reasons. Matt Damon is slow, lyrical, and just pretty. Breakfast at J&M has the same quirky spark as Instructional Video but focuses more on ensemble textures than cumulative processes.

The arrangements of four of Nancarrow’s player piano studies are right in the wheelhouse of the BOAC All-Stars. Ziporyn’s arrangements are sensitive and fresh sounding and the ensemble performs them with a joyful comfort and playful laziness that makes the music sound anything but mechanical.

The mood-painting in Louis Andriessen’s Life are thoroughly engaging as they are but when paired with the spartan video work of Marijke van Warmerdam the work is complete. Both the video and the music revolve around similar themes (movements are Wind, Couple, In the distance, and Light). Andriessen’s music is not a soundtrack to the video nor is Warmerdam’s video a reaction to the music. Both elements hang in similar spaces that reinforce each other while not interfering with each other. The video (exclusive to the CD release) captures environments over actions and I was especially impressed with the simplicity of Couple. An older couple is sitting on a bench while the camera gently sweeps up and over and around them. It sounds simple, yes, but it is incredibly entrancing nonetheless. The four video elements function as a cycle, too, with that couple appearing again in the final section. My biggest complaint is that the m4v file that is included on the second disc is not very high quality. At full screen resolution on my computer there was a high level of pixelation that really destroyed the elegance of van Warmerdam’s work. I would have happily paid for an HD file of this video.

Kate Moore’s Ridgeway is a panoply of polyrhythmic textures that serves as a strong finish for this 2-disc set. These textures are woven together with a direct narrative trajectory that keeps me engaged throughout its duration. The extra bonus track available via iTunes, a live rendition of Closing from Glassworks is a delightfully understated palette-cleanser. The obligatory minor-third oscillations are present, as are long melodic lines and all the harmonic progressions you have come to know and love. Unfortunately the piano’s entrance sounds overly compressed and unnatural and doesn’t mix well with the rest of the ensemble. Ignoring that detail, Closing is sonic comfort food. But in my opinion, you’d just be better off spending your $0.99 on the Expanded Edition Glassworks track.

Cruel Sister  

Ensemble Resonanz

Brad Lubman, conductor

Cantaloupe

The big question I had when putting in this disc for the first time was “Will a string orchestra be able to recreate the visceral power and energy that I find vital in Julia Wolfe’s string quartets?” My fear was that the harder and sharper attacks I enjoy will be too diluted with more players in the ensemble. It was a silly skepticism to hold and any trepidations I had quickly melted away once I started listening. Also, Ensemble Resonanz is the same group that recorded Weather and a disc of Xenakis. I was pretty sure I was going to have a good time with this CD.

Ensemble Resonanz and Julia Wolfe make an excellent team. Not only did Wolfe obviously compose music better suited for an orchestra than a quartet (it was foolish of me to doubt that she would) but Resonanz also threw serious energy behind both pieces. Cruel Sister, inspired by a dark Old English ballad, is expressive and emotive balancing the programmatic elements with a clean dramatic line that makes sense in the abstract. The hollow open intervals which throb away at the beginning enmesh with more angry and spiky punctuations. The four attacca movements are woven together in a solid and disrupted narrative. Ensemble Resonanz brings power and control to the whole range of the sonic spectrum and Wolfe adeptly showcases register and texture. I am especially fond of the transition between the second and third movements which is (to my ear) simultaneously abrupt yet smooth.

Fuel is a far more abstract work driven by the problems the world faces regarding the necessity of fuel. Ensemble Resonanz masterfully blends in a variety of coloristic techniques, making sounds like scratch tones a part of the woven tapestry of sound. The CD notes go so far as to state that electronics were not used at all and that all the sounds in the piece are acoustic. I think that disclaimer is a bit  much. There is certainly a wider variety of string techniques and timbres in Fuel than in Cruel Sister but I never had a “What the heck was that?” reaction. Scratch tones, harmonics, tremolo, and filtering the sound via bow placement are all active parameters in the sound world. Again, Resonanz brings a whole lot of power throughout the registers and forms a massive hyper-instrument blend  the likes of which make string quartets secretly jealous.

Wolfe’s music is also doing what she does best: frenetic power created through post-minimalist techniques that transcend mere repetition. The music materials are sharp, taut, basic, and the economy of material is expertly managed. Wolfe knows how to make a lot out of a little AND pull the listener along for the ride. Both works have programmatic elements but not knowing the program does not interfere with the listening experiences. These works sound fresh and contemporary and I’m confident that audiences in the future will continue to relate and connect with the ideas therein.

Tristan Perich
1-Bit Symphony
Cantaloupe Music (computer chip housed in jewel case)

Electronic music composer and visual artist Tristan Perich is fascinated with 1-bit audio. 1-bit Music, his first release for the Cantaloupe imprint back in 2006, featured a computer chip and on/off switch housed in a jewel case. Listeners looking for the CD found a headphone jack. All one had to do was plug in a pair of headphones, flip the switch, and voila! A fragile yet supple music, redolent with signatures of early electronica, was revealed.

Perich has expanded his use of 1-bit audio in the past few years, developing it in several collaborations with classical instrumentalists. Thus, for his next music maker in a jewel case, Perich has correspondingly expanded the ambitions of the work, having it reflect the formal issues addressed in symphonic music.

1-Bit Symphony utilizes on and off electrical pulses, synthesized by code and routed from microchip to speaker. Thus, a script of computer code (included in the liner notes) is transformed into sound. The results are sometimes reminiscent of the ambient looping heard in minimalist keyboard works such as Terry Riley’s organ pieces from the late 1970s. Occasionally, it replicates the soundtracks of early computer games, but the blips and loops are far better finessed!

The juxtaposition of 1-bit audio, and its relatively simple sound wave building blocks, with a more expansive musical design proves an oddly adorned yet appealing amalgam. Gone is symphonic bloat, replaced instead by delicate circuitry. And the artifact itself is easily the coolest physical recording medium I’ve come across in some time.

Florent Ghys

Baroque Tardif: Soli

Cantaloupe Music EP

A couple of weeks ago, we highlighted Florent Ghys’ multimedia capabilities on the  homepage. But the first of a projected three EPs for Cantaloupe,  Baroque Tardif: Soli, is an altogether more inward and intimate venture. It involves French composer/bassist Ghys in a project for a virtual ensemble: built out of recorded overdubs of himself performing. While the resulting music is designed for the medium of recording – it would have to be refashioned for an actual ensemble to be replicated live – one never gets the sense of sterility that often inhabits such multi-tracked endeavors.

Instead, Ghys uses his experience collaborating with the Bang on a Can All Stars during their summer workshops in 2006 as a jumping off point for some Downtown music-making, Bordeaux style. On “Soli,” Ghys focuses on basses in an organic, acoustic fashion. But “Simplement” brings a multi-instrument approach that includes vocals as well, with much of the melodic material snazzy in its syncopation and doubled in octaves.

“Coma Carus” takes on a more blurry, ambient cast with washes of dreamily treated sonics juxtaposed against backgrounded bass  ostinati.  Chorused vocals take center stage on “Clignotants,” creating a fetching interwoven pattern of repetitions then taken up by instruments. The EP closes in a more lyrical vein with “Béchamel,” a gentle and lyrical piece consisting of supple arco lines in counterpoint over a slow-moving pizzicato walking bass.

So much variety and material in five short pieces. One is eager to hear the rest of this EP series.