For those of you who, like me, have been wondering whatever happened to the once ubiquitous S21 familiar Ian Moss but have been too forgetful to ask around, we have news of two upcoming concerts and an explanation for his absence.

The first concert is a surprise (well, I guess we gave it away) reunion show on Thursday night with Ian’s jazz/metal/awesomeness band, Capital M which will be playing a set of 100% improvised music at the old Knitting Factory Tap Bar, one of the legendary venues for experimental music in New York and, alas, another historic spot getting ready to flee the island for Brooklyn soon due to enormous pressures in the local real estate market. This will be one of last shows in the Tribeca location.

Thursday, October 30
Capital M @
Knitting Factory Tap Bar
74 Leonard Street
8pm (7:30 doors)

Then on Saturday, November 22, C4, the choral collective that Ian co-founded will present a concert called “Brazen Guns and Gentle Doves” at St. Joseph’s Church on the Upper East Side.  

Saturday, November 22
C4: The Choral Composer/Conductor Collective
St. Joseph’s Church
404 E 87th Street
8pm

For more updates on the adventures of Ian, check out his blog, Createquity.  p.s.  He’s been going to business school, of all unlikely things.

Kronos Plays Holmgreen:  I don’t approve of recordings in which people talk while I’m trying to listen to music but I’m making an exception for the Kronos Quartet’s new Dacapo recording of works by the Danish composer Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen.  Kronos Plays Holmgreen  is the culmination of 20 years of collaboration between Holmgreen and the Kronos Quartet, and includes his Concerto Grosso for string quartet and orchestra (1990; rev. 1995); Moving Still, written for Hans Christian Andersen’s bicentenary in 2005 and featuring Paul Hillier; and Last Ground, his Ninth String Quartet, written in 2006 and dedicated to the Kronos Quartet.  Moving Still is the piece with the talking:  in part one, Paul Hiller reads Hans Christian Andersen’s prophetic text In a Thousand Years, a Jules Verne-like fantasy predicting that Americans will one day be able to fly over the Atlantic and “see Europe in a week.”  The text for part two comes from Andersen’s patriotic poem “Danmark er jeg født” (In Denmark I Was Born).  If you don’t like talking, you can simply skip those cuts like I do.  Holmgreen is a brilliant jokester, a kind of musical Samuel Beckett, drawing from Baroque music, Pygmy music, jazz, plainchant, the sounds of everyday life, and sheer noise to create music that is both absurd and sublime.  The closest American counterpart I can think of is Sebastian Currier.   

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFPS7-gg8Ng[/youtube]

3 thoughts on “Ian Moss Lives! Kronos Plays Holmgreen”
  1. “…The closest American counterpart I can think of is Sebastian Currier…”

    And I would think a European counterpart would be Mauricio Kagel.

  2. “Lots of the clientele were in hedge-fund uniform: well-cut suit, open-necked shirt, deep tan.”

    — Monday’s Financial Times

    *

    Ian, the shirt and beard are fine; but I’m afraid you’re going to have to work on your tan and suit a bit.

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