Tag: TAK ensemble

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

Five Experimental Recordings

Five Experimental Recordings

Anna Heflin

The Redundancy of the Angelic: An Interluding Play

Shannon Reilly, Emily Holden, violins; Anna Heflin: viola, voice, composer, writer

Infrequent Seams cassette and download

“I’m sitting on a galaxy. Stars and moons blanket the deep red spa chairs. I rest on constellations. Space itself supports me. Luna lifts me.”

Thus begins Anna Heflin’s debut recording, which encompasses a spoken word play, sound art, and string duets filled with secundal dissonances and sustained drones. Heflin acknowledges a debt to Mozart in the violin/viola duo textures of the music, as well as to Bartôk’s own dissonant writing, but these touchstones do not encompass the variety of microtones and the scratching textures that are brought to bear in her music. The spoken word interludes range from the spaciness in the above quote to more mundane questions about everyday life. The Redundancy of the Angelic is an unusual assemblage, but a quite compelling one. 

Claire Rousay

A Softer Focus

American Dreams Records

Claire Rousay creates sound collages that combine spoken word, ambient sounds, and warm synths. Place making is a central issue of A Softer Focus, her latest recording on American Dreams. Crackling street noise in “Preston Avenue” introduces us to Rousay’s varied sound world. It is followed by a contrasting track of sumptuous minimal synths on “Discrete (the Market).” “Peak Chroma” (video below) draws out a minor chord, successively adding overtones and a mournful melody. Eventually, the harmony progresses, with each chord is given a weighty presence corroscated by fragmentary speech samples. “Diluted Dreams” alternates sounds of children at play and traffic noises with minimal repetitions and extended held tones. Altered vocals and industrial percussion populate “Stoned Gesture.” “A Kind of Promise” closes the recording with glacially paced piano and cello (with spoken word around the edges). An enthralling listen.

“Peak Chroma’ is one of two tracks on a softer focus featuring sung lyrical content. The lyrics for it started as an iPhone Notes entry. This entry was a reminder to not fall into traps of nostalgia and the second-guessing that sometimes follows that. Reminiscing on something that not only is in the past but is something that is never coming back.” – Claire Rousay

Peak Chroma Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWTvRAV7DYg

claire rousay a softer focus release show 

April 10th, 2021 | 3:30 PM PDT

Livestreamed on Bandcamp

$10 | Tix + info

Stephanie Cheng Smith

Forms 

A Wave Press

Stephanie Cheng Smith inhabits sound sculptures of two different varieties for the extended compositions on her latest A Wave Press release Forms. The first, “Birds,” uses b-z-bowls, which the composer describes as, “an instrument of suspended, vibrating plastic bowls that are filled with and muted by various objects (i.e. bells, balls, beads, clips, and cups).” B-z-bowls create a plethora of textures, from subtle shakes to swaths of white noise, and Cheng Smith does an excellent job using these deliberately restricted means with artful pacing. “Fish” is for violin, dark energy synthesizer (!), and laptop. It was performed within Anja Weiser Flower’s “Cosm, Organization-Construction, Second Instance” at Human Resources Los Angeles. Thus, the performance occurs within an artwork, using it both as an acoustic and aesthetic site. Thrumming, serrated synths against an insistent bass drone accompany violin harmonics and glissandos. This texture is replaced by bubbling percussion and short wave style distortions in an extended middle section. Gears shifting in grinding gestures signal a final section in which the electronics begin to spin out, joined by upper register scratched violin textures. The registral spectrum is filled out with muscular noise envelopes down a couple octaves from the main fray, only to have the top drop out and the bass register plumbed with muscularity. A denouement of progressively spaced out static attacks followed by an oscillating third on dark synth concludes the piece. The album title points out one of the most compelling aspects of Cheng Smith’s compositions: their unerring formal designs.

Matt Sargent 

Tide

Erik Carlson, violin; T.J. Borden, cello

The first iteration of “Tide” was in 2015 for double bassist Zach Rowden, who overdubbed a ten instrument cluster of sustained notes and pealing harmonics. The composer, Matt Sargent, fed sine tones to Rowden while he played, each one exhorting him to match it in realt time, creating an evolving of upper register harmonics. The current release captures two new versions of the piece, both for higher instruments and correspondingly more stratospheric results. The first is for ten overdubbed violins and ten overdubbed cellos. The two instruments’ span of harmonics interact, creating a texture that is sometimes gritty and at others glassine. The second version is for ten violins. Its shimmering harmonics are offset by downward glissandos that provide a counterweight to the altissimo highs. Both new versions of Tide supply significant and intriguing  diversity within prevailing sonic density. 

Taylor Brook

Star Maker Fragments

Tak Ensemble: Laura Cocks, flute; Madison Greenstone, clarinet; Marina Kifferstein, violin; Charlotte Mundy, voice; Ellery Trafford, percussion; 

Taylor Brook, electronics

Star Maker Fragments is a setting by Taylor Brook of fragments from Olaf Stapledon’s 1937 novel Star Maker. A history of billions of years and an early example of multiverse theories, Star Maker is one of the most ambitious early science fiction books and remained influential for generations. The ensemble and Brook create a suitably interstellar landscape, one that encompasses extended techniques and sounds both lush and at times akin to the bleeps on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. It is left to vocalist Charlotte Mundy to carry the narrative components of Star Maker Fragments forward, which she persuasively does through spoken word and singing. One of the most imaginative sections of the piece is “Musical Universe,” which in the book is depicted as a universe that contains only music and no physical space. Tak and Brook respond to this prompt in a rapturous vein. Brook is an abundantly creative composer to watch.

-Christian Carey

by Christian Carey
Chamber Music, Composers, Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Performers

ArchiTAK at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music

NEW YORK – On February 10th, 2018, Architek Percussion and TAK ensemble presented five US premieres in the DiMenna Center for Classical Music’s Benzaquen Hall. The program, charmingly titled ArchiTAK, was composed entirely of new music by New York and Montreal composers. Walking into the hall expecting some sort of configuration to accommodate five percussionists, a flautist, clarinetist, violinist, and vocalist, I was instead greeted by nine chairs in a tight, even row behind nine microphones. I heard members of TAK ensemble behind me discussing the location of “the knives.” I was ready to expect the unexpected as the program began with Myriam Bleau’s Separation Space. The piece began with these nine performers manipulating electronically processed microphones with tapping, scratching, sandpaper, and yes, a chef’s knife. Adding to the rich amalgam building in the speakers, performers began to play pre-recorded media from cellphones, and two began to sing in a close, gently pulsing dissonance. The work was an excellent opening to the program. I found myself having a thought that I would return to many times throughout this program. New music can be strange, intimate, challenging, and moving, and in capable hands, can be all four at once. Taylor Brook’s Incantation left the stage to Architek Percussion, with each member of the quartet equipped with a hi-hat prepared with a small towel, two metals bars (each tuned to form a microtonal octachord spanning the width of about 2 semitones), a brake drum, and a violin bow. Early questions I raised to myself about the authenticity of their performance considering the handicap of headphones (presumably playing a click) were quickly replaced with a respect for these performers as they flawlessly moved through the aggressively fast and equally demanding piece with incredibly tight ensemble. The first half of the program concluded with A Song About Saint Edward the Confessor by Isaiah Ceccarelli, which again utilized the full complement of players. Opening as a vocalise before later unfolding into a proper song, the piece capitalized on vocalist Charlotte Mundy’s unaffected voice and pure tone, while still leaving her room to realize a richly expressive performance. While her diction was very clear and the hall was intimite, I felt that omitting the text from the program was a missed opportunity.  

Moments into New York composer David Bird’s Descartes and the Clockwork Girl, I understood why this was programmed after a short break. I again found myself considering the strange, intimate, challenging, and moving as the piece worked through timbre pairings that were as conceptually attractive and musically effective. I am still particularly taken with Carlos Cordeiro’s performance, balancing passages that demand incredible dexterity with clean, sustained bass clarinet multiphonics. The program concluded with Taylor Brook’s Pulses. For the fifth time that night, I found myself almost entirely outside of time, so engrossed in the performance that I honestly could not give an accurate break-down of the roughly 90 minute program.

After the final piece concluded and members of Architek Percussion and TAK received a strong round of much deserved applause, a gesture towards the audience revealed that both David Bird and Taylor Brook were in attendance for this performance. For all these musicians did to curate and present moving and compelling works of new music, there were several missed opportunities in the presentation of the program itself that could have gone a long way to making the music more accessible. Given that each piece contained such evocative, programmatic titles, I have a feeling including program notes would have provided audience members with a better vocabulary to appreciate the work of both the composers and performers. With a composer present for three of the five pieces on the program, I feel it was a real missed opportunity not to hear about their work from them, especially considering the intimate nature of the venue.

 

ARCHITAK

Myriam Bleau —Separation Space

Taylor Brook — Incantation

Isaiah Ceccarelli — A Song About Saint Edward the Confessor

David Bird — Descartes and the Clockwork Girl

Taylor Brook — Pulses

 

Architek Percussion: Ben Duinker, Mark Morton, Ben Reimer, Alessandro Valiante

 

TAK ensemble: Charlotte Mundy, voice; Laura Cocks, flute; Carlos Cordeiro, clarinet; Marina Kifferstein, violin; Ellery Trafford, percussion

by Cortlandt Matthews