Tag: recording review

CD Review, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, File Under?, Film Music

Skjálfti on Sono Luminus (Recording review)

Skjálfti 

Páll Ragnar Pálsson and Eðvarð Egilsson

Sono Luminus SLE-70031

 

Today, where the list of practitioners frequently overlap, how does film music translate to concert music adaptation? On the Sono Luminus release Skjálfti (translated: Quake), the Icelandic composers Páll Ragnar Pálsson and Eðvarð Egilsson present a compelling album length suite that is more ambitious than the clip show often heard on soundtrack recordings. 

 

The cello concerto Quake is Pálsson’s best known piece, but Skjálfti doesn’t feature music from it. Instead, it is from Tinna Hrafnsdóttir’s film of the same name, for which Pálsson and Egilsson composed the soundtrack. The album isn’t merely excerpts, but fully developed pieces based on the themes and mood of the film. Electronics, piano, strings, and subtle use of voices populate the music with a hybrid ensemble. It’s not dissimilar from the makeup of totalist ensembles such as Bang on a Can and Icebreaker, but the vibe is far more ambient than the prevailing one for these groups. 

 

“Saga” is one of the best movements of the work. It is like a mini-symphony, developing an ambitious amount of material in three minutes. “Safavél” and “Miklabraut” are other favorites, the former starting with a string and keyboard ostinato until, partway through, a pause, and then guitars and drums join. The accumulation of material and long crescendo is reminiscent of post-rock. Tortoise watch out. 

 

“Gleyma” is listed on the streamers as the hit tune. It begins with mysterious drones and pentatonic shimmering, to which is added an undulating guitar pattern, pattering percussion, and string synth pads. Ostinatos are a time-honored tradition, but they get bogged down in lots of film scores. Pálsson and Egilsson avoid this by creating asymmetric shifts in the texture. Here, a melody and counter melody wend their way around the chord progression in a pleasingly asymmetric fashion.

 

Skjálfti is an intriguing and enjoyable project: one hopes for further collaborations by the duo, both for film and concert music adaptation. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Chamber Music, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Minimalism

Manchester Collective – Neon (Recording Review)

Manchester Collective

Neon

Bedroom Community

 

Alex Jakeman, Flute; Oliver Pashley, Clarinet; Rakhi Singh, Violin; 

Hannah Roberts, Cello; Beibei Wang, Vibraphone; Katherine Tinker, Piano 

 

Manchester Collective’s fourth recording, Neon, includes totemic pieces by Steve Reich and Julius Eastman, as well as works by Hannah Peel and the first concert music composition by Lyra Pramuk. It is a well-considered and excellently performed program.

 

The centerpiece is Steve Reich’s Double Sextet, a work for two “Pierrot plus Percussion” ensembles that won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. The piece can either be performed live by twelve musicians or by a single sextet against an overdubbed rendition of the second grouping. Manchester Collective opts for the latter. The performance is so tight that the lines between live and recorded are erased. This is due in no small part to the energetic and laser beam focused playing of violinist Rakhi Singh and cellist Hannah Roberts. Double Sextet is one of the best of Reich’s later compositions and this performance is a welcome addition to his recording catalog. 

 

Julius Eastman’s “Joy Boy” begins with vocal improvisations that display a surprisingly Reich-like harmony. Pitched percussion and repeated ululations bring the performance to a cadence point, after which the instruments vie for dominance in the texture. The second section is based on just a few harmonies, but their elongation and the sudden eruptions that periodically occur keep things interesting. 

 

In an affectionate homage, Hannah Peel tropes ideas and sounds from Steve Reich in the recording’s title piece. We are treated to some flavors reminiscent of Double Sextet, but also samples from Shinjuku train station, a nod, albeit a far less angsty one, to Reich’s Different Trains. Peel is expert at bringing together these disparate strands. The first movement, “Shinjuku,” is ostinato filled and brightly hued. The second movement, “Born of Breath,” has some lovely clarinet writing for Oliver Pashley, a fine player with excellent control of limpid runs and upper register forays. Flutist Alex Jakeman is compelling too. Here she contributes shorter lines, often dramatic in the timing of their appearances. Less minimal in design than the other movements, it has a beguiling ambience. The finale, “Vanishing,” features vibraphone and piano, played with keen attention to dynamic shadings by Beibei Wang and Katherine Tinker, with repeated patternings from the rest of the group coalescing into a lovely surface.

 

Lyra Pramuk produced Neon and, encouraged by the group, tried her hand at creating a composition for them. A producer, vocalist, performance artist, and composer of electronica, it is not surprising that she excels in adding another component to her polyartist career. Of her work Quanta, she says,  “There is no universal time. Quanta explores the notion that each of us has an individual sense of how time traces through our lives.”

 

The ticking of a grandfather clock opens the piece, at first keeping strict time, then devolving into varying tempos, and finally stopping. Sustained tones emerge from the grandfather clock’s ticking, followed by a diatonic duet for clarinet and cello. Shimmering vibraphone announces the return of the rest of the ensemble, playing extended triadic harmonies to accompany successive solos from each of the wind and string players. The language is lush, with overlapping lines from the entire group creating a tapestry of interwoven melody. The next section adds flute trills, glissandos, and pizzicato to further enhance the texture. A long decrescendo compresses the material until it vanishes. Pramuk’s Opus 1 suggests she should add more concert music to her resume. 

 

Neon features a thoroughly engaging program and talented ensemble. Recommended.

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, File Under?

Favorites 2022: Andrew McIntosh – Little Jimmy (Recording Review)

Andrew Mcintosh

Little Jimmy

Yarn/Wire

Kairos

Composer and sound recordist Andrew Mcintosh has worked with Yarn/Wire, a quartet of two pianos and two percussionists, for over a decade, and this Kairos portrait CD demonstrates their keen musical connection. The title work references a special scene: recordings of Rosenita Saddle in Angeles National Forest, where Mcintosh routinely walked. It has since been ravaged by damage from wildfires. Sounds from wildlife, particularly wind, birds, and crunching underfoot during nature walks, connect Little Jimmy’s title work and solo piano piece “I Have a Lot to Learn” with feelings of the loss of the Little Jimmy trail camp and verdant memories of vitality.  

 

Pianist Laura Barger opens the CD with “I Have a Lot to Say” (2019). Harmonics provide ritualistic punctuations. These alternate with brief, widely spaced enigmatic chords. Russell Greenberg plays the solo percussion piece “Learning.” Featuring pitched percussion accompanied by environmental sounds and sine tones, the piece is a beguiling tone poem in which birdsong and mallet percussion create a sonorous treble register that the electronics halo with lower sonorities. The resultant blend creates a gradually evolving sound world that evokes connections between the natural world and the organicism of spectralism. 

 

“Little Jimmy” features all four of the performers in Yarn/Wire – Barger and Julia Den Boer, pianists; Greenberg and Sae Hashimoto, percussionists. Bowed vibraphone and quick altissimo runs from the piano begin the piece in tintinnabular style. In the second movement, wind and birdsong are haloed by slowly evolving pitches from bowed and pitched percussion; the pianos chime in with Messiaen-like birdsong of their own. The third movement is a brief interlude that brings back the initial treble gestures. The fourth movement, the longest at ten and a half minutes,  is intriguing. Here, bowed percussion and strummed piano strings combine to create shimmering, slowly evolving textures. The last section of the movement moves towards great aggressiveness, with a clangor of repeating patterns and low sine tones. It is well-crafted, but goes on too long with the same rhythmic attacks and dynamic relentlessness. Alternating piano chords and pitched percussion chimes elaborate the prior movements’ harmonic structure in movement five. All of the various materials from previous movements are combined, leading off with birdsong and electronics, then piano harmonics and mallets. Feedback against birdsong is an interesting choice, and it seems to foretell the tragic end of Little Jimmy Trail. Repeated piano harmonics, triangle punctuations, and the insistence of birdsong and sine tone underscore this portentousness. Chimes toll, wind howls, there is a crescendo in the piano drones and bowed percussion, but nothing can repress the insistence of the nature sounds. A last tolling closes the piece with a sense of mourning rather than closure. Andrew McIntosh is a multalented creator. Little Jimmy provides his multiple muses, the natural world and longtime collaborators, a chance to interact in myriad, often beautiful, ways. It is one of our Favorites of 2022.

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical

Best EP of 2021: Light Past Blue

Best EP of 2021

Light Past Blue

Alex Somers & Aska Matsumiya

Mini LP

 

Sometimes music sneaks up on you. This recording, Light Past Blue, just dropped Friday, indeed out of the blue, braving the hustle bustle and list making of the holiday season to provide 20 minutes of exquisite calm.

 

Alex Somers is a composer and producer who has worked with a heady roster of talents that includes Sigur Rós, Jónsi, Julianna Barwick, Sin Fang, and Gyða Valtýsdóttir. He performed in the duo Jónsi & Alex Somers, who released two albums Riceboy Sleeps (2009) and Lost and Found (2019). Somers has been prolific in creating solo work, with two LPs, Siblings 1 and Siblings 2, out in 2021 alone. Aska Matsumiya, based in LA, is a Japanese composer and producer with numerous television, film, and advertising credits, She is currently at work on a number of installation projects and her first solo album. The duo bring their diverse backgrounds to bear in a five-movement suite, Light Past Blue, that originally was an installation work for 26 surround speakers that appeared at the French artist Claire Taboret’s exhibition “If Only the Sea Could Sleep” (2019).

 

The music must have been something in that surround setting, as it is quite encompassing in stereo. The sounds of maritime field recordings – ship bells, groaning lines, and rhythmic splashing of water against hulls – provide an ostinato underpinning for all five movements. Triadic drones build up through the piece from long bass notes to angelic overtones. Snippets of melody intertwine in asymmetric repetitions. Contributions by guest artists are highlights of the arrangement. Mary Lattimore’s harp provides harmonic continuity and avian gestures that buoy the soundscape, while cellist Gyða Valtýsdóttir adds layers of tenor register melody and sonorous bass notes to warm the wash of synthesizers in the mix.

 

In a year in which the genre flourished, Light Past Blue is some of the most beautiful ambient music of 2021. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Electro-Acoustic, Experimental Music, File Under?

Supersilent 14 (Review)

Supersilent

14

Smalltown Supersound
2018

On Friday September 28th, Supersilent – the experimental trio of Arve Henriksen (trumpet, voice and electronics), Helge Sten (Electronics), and Ståle Storløkken (keyboards and electronics) – released a fourteenth album, their second for the label Smalltown Supersound. The group is best known for performances of “slow jazz:” avant jazz that unfurls at a gradual rate. Supersilent 14 revels in slow tempos, as the track “14.7” (embedded below) demonstrates. However, this time out there are a few other components shifted t0 make for a different listening experience.

The recording’s dozen tracks – labeled with numbers and nothing more – are relatively aphoristic, ranging from the horror movie industrial cast of the one-minute long “14.9” to the comparatively spacious and spacey “14.12,” which clocks in at five minutes and thirty-nine seconds. Thus, “slow jazz” tracks and more primarily electroacoustic soundscapes are allowed limited room for development, instead presented as atmospheres that often seem to begin in progress. Some Supersilent releases have hewed towards a lusher palette than 14, which instead tends towards the edgy. Henriksen’s trumpet is frequently distressed and sometimes subsumed by electronics. Sten, who also releases electronica under the name Deathprod, produced and mixed the recording. His approach revels in noise and overtones in nearly equal measure. The result is an impressive amalgam of both ends of the “sound art spectrum.” Occasional moments of recognizable patterning, like the Middle Eastern scalar passages that supply a coda to “14.4,” sounding all the more remarkable for their relative isolation in the proceedings.

At a certain point in their respective careers, most recording artists find it difficult to come up with fresh ideas. With “14,” Supersilent not only seems to have reconsidered their music afresh; they sound like a group just getting started.

by Christian Carey