Record Roundup: Envelope Pushers

Here are seven albums that work on many levels, each one of them seeking to take their chosen form - whether chamber music, folk rock, or electronic music - somewhere new. Their ultimate success, however, is the shifts they cause within me, either displaying future vistas or calling back to early memories I'd nearly forgotten. What will they do for you?

Ted Reichman - Dread Sea The tale Reichman tells in the liner notes and in a poem contained in the Tripticks cassette's j-card, of encountering a "heavily drugged juvenile sloth" attempting to swipe him with a "long, slow arc of its claw," has a certain lysergic flavor that matches these multi-layered audio collages perfectly. Assembled from electronically treated mbira and accordion combined with prepared piano, synth, and tape, the resulting tracks come to your ears fully formed, as if created from one instrument. Of course, there is no requirement to think about aggressive sloths (I prefer the cute ones I see on Instagram!) while you listen. The music will most likely transport you to realms related to your own experiences. Take the journey.

Greg Davis - New Primes As a recovering arithmophobe, reading that prime numbers form the basis of Davis's new album on Greyfade is enough for me to tune out to avoid past anxieties. But that stuff is all behind the scenes. You don't need to know that Davis is using "custom-written software to translate prime number sequences" into music, using only sine tones as his medium, to listen and respond to the sounds contained herein. And while all that sounds super-cerebral, there is definitely an emotional reaction to have to these throbs and drones as they rise and fall, thicken and attenuate. I can't help being taken into an alien space of almost pure loneliness, as if engaged in a space-walk between ships, hungry for the noise, clatter, and melodiousness of human existence. But I can just as equally let the hum of an air conditioner, laboriously beating back the heat, blend with Davis's music as I zone out to the play of leaves and sunlight just outside my window. My mind drifts, imagining the activities of tiny animals for whom a blade of grass might constitute their entire universe. Davis is surely on to something here, and you don't need to know any math for it to grab you.

Congregation Of Drones - Twenty Twenty That artists have their antennae up is well known, so the idea that violinist/composer Pauline Kim Harris and electronic musician Jesse Stiles came together to record the first two foreboding tracks here in February 2020, just days before COVID lockdown, makes perfect sense. After an interruption of some months, they reconvened virtually and continued the project. When complete, they named each track after a headline in the New York Times from the day it was recorded: Gesture Of Devotion, See What Happens, Experimental Treatment, and No Spinning. With that background, it is also no surprise that these richly evocative tracks could make for an excellent soundtrack for reflecting upon what we’ve all been through for last two - now almost three - years. 

But Twenty Twenty is so much more than a mirror to the past. This is stunning, nail-you-to-your-chair music, with Harris’ extraordinarily versatile sound-making abilities - from long, arcing lines to percussion, pizzicato, and beyond - fully matched and intertwined with Stiles’ starlit and multi-hued electronics. While some of it is spaced out and slow, it never lets up in intensity, occasionally exploding into segments that are near metallic. This landmark in electro-acoustic music is also available on vinyl, which should be a fantastic experience, although I do like losing myself in the full 71-minute sweep without having to change sides. I urge you to get to Twenty Twenty STAT, through whatever medium you prefer, and let it mold itself to your life.

Josh Modney - Near To Each I think I might have just found David Bowie's next band and it's a goddamned pity he's not around to take advantage. But knowing how Blackstar's collaboration with Danny McCaslin and Co. turned out, get your mind around Bowie working with Modney, a brilliant violinist here making his debut as a composer, Ingrid Laubrock, a saxophonist equally at home in jazz and new music, Cory Smythe, the genius pianist with the International Contemporary Ensemble, and Mariel Roberts, a fearless virtuoso cellist whose last album was a series of brutal improvisations. And they really play like a band, too, with Modney tailoring the compositions to each player's unique style and engaging in deep collaborations to arrive at the final product. 

The results are a series of gripping dynamic pieces of chamber music that incorporate drones, spiky duels between instruments, pounding ensemble work, and moments of crystalline beauty. Near To Each opens with a solo violin piece that casts back to Engage, Modney's triple-album from 2018, which included a series of improvised solos, but other than Tenor Solo for Laubrock, the rest is all about interaction, juxtaposition, and overlap. The pieces also take you through a series of emotional states, from angst to contemplation, and how you relate those to your own life will be very personal. A couple of my favorite passages in Whalefall and Crystallization I bring to life that sensation of lying back on grass on a hot summer's day, only to have the whine of a small airplane cross the sky - and your consciousness. It's a lonely, restless sound that brings the vastness of our planet into dramatic focus. 

Ballad contains yearning interplay, with Smythe's measured chords reminiscent of Messiaen's Quartet For The End Of Time, his custom software subtly enhancing the sound world. The last piece, Chorale, is a 23-minute tour-de-force and the track that put Bowie dreams in my head. Opening with Roberts' violent cello intertwining with Modney's squirrelly violin, the work gradually develops a narrative flow as searching piano from Smythe transitions it to a different mood. While Chorale doesn't echo anything specific from Bowie's world, it rhymes very nicely not only with Blackstar but the exploratory sides of Low and "Heroes" in the way it works with unexpected sounds and structures to create something as grabby as an avant garde pop song. I can imagine an adventurous listener and creator like Bowie being jazzed by this piece and the others, becoming eager to get involved. I know I am!

Steven Ricks - Assemblage Chamber Rather than questing into the future, Ricks bravely spelunks into the Baroque, pulling out modes and methods (and the occasional harpsichord, played by Jason Hardink) to inform his own bricolage approach. This gives the three acoustic pieces here a wonderful off-kilter feeling as past and present collide in lighthearted and inventive ways. The addition of guitar (Dan Lippell) and bass clarinet (Benjamin Fingland) creates ever more delightful anachronisms in Reconstructing The Lost Improvisations of Aldo Pilestri, while the title track eliminates instruments altogether, with Ricks cutting and pasting bits and pieces of the earlier works into a sound collage that both sums everything up and points in new directions. With great playing by members of Counter)Induction and the NOVA Chamber Music Players, among others, this is a satisfying feast of a collection suitable for gourmands of many genres.

Maya Bennardo - Four Strings Bennardo is one half of the redoubtable duo AndPlay, a core member of the Mivos Quartet, and has played on countless great records in recent years. Here, she finally steps out on her own and the results are captivating. Consisting of two long works for solo violin, Four Strings not only allows Bennardo to pursue her interests in stasis and simplicity, but premieres two important pieces by composers demanding wider attention. The first, Kristofer Svensson’s Duk med broderi och bordets kant, has a folk-like simplicity, with a repeating motif and overall warmth that will call you back home, wherever you're from. The title piece by Wandelweiser composer Eva-Maria Houben is a spacious meditation on individual tones and notes, like pick-up sticks where none of the sticks are touching. Bennardo's concentration and the care she gives every draw of the bow shine brightly here, making a nice contrast to Svensson's more gregarious work. Bennardo can do no wrong, apparently, and I will be glad to follow her to more fantastic music in the future. P.S. She and her AndPlay partner Hannah Levinson publish one of the best newsletters in the biz - in fact, it was they who led me to Twenty Twenty! Subscribe here.

Florist - Florist The permission granted by The Beatles on the so-called White Album to fill a double album with a wide variety of styles and approaches is often more of a curse than a blessing. See under: Sandinista by The Clash or that new goulash by Big Thief, which has some very good songs but makes you work to find them. Not so with Florist, sometimes the solo project of Emily Sprague, but presented here as a full band. Drawing together all of the threads cast out by a decade's worth of Florist releases, as well as those under Sprague's own name, Florist presents everything these musicians can do at the pinnacle of artistic success. From the gleaming chamber-folk perfection of a song like Red Bird No. 2 to the sketches like Duet For Guitar And Rain, the parts assemble into a whole that envelops and inspires. The use of field recordings or ambient sounds of nature only enhances that sense of environment, as if you've turned on one of those old lights with a paper cylinder that sends stars rotating around your room.

Like the sounds in the background, the lyrics are filled with references to nature, relating the night sky, fireflies, breezes, and so on, to various inner states. The results are pure poetry, as in these lines from Spring In Hours: "oh, the light inside you now oh, the wild inside you now/maybe there’s something that takes us beyond this/and flowers like spring in our arms." Among the shorter songs and fragments are several longer tracks that really show off the interplay between Sprague (vocals, guitars, synth), Jonnie Baker (guitars, synths, sampling, bowed guitars & bass, saxophone, vocals) Rick Spataro (bass, vocals, engineering, piano, synths), and Felix Walworth (percussion, vocals, synths, guitar), like 43, which extends into a jam reminiscent of Jonathan Wilson circa Gentle Spirit. And those player credits are a hint of what Florist means when they call themselves a "friendship project," also pointing out their gently radical reimagining of what a band can be when you break down silos between the individual roles in the group.

Whatever path Florist took, they arrived at a very special place and have given us a masterpiece of an album. I'm slightly despairing at the play counts on Spotify, which suggest people are picking and choosing between the songs.I strongly suggest that, if listening digitally, you entrust yourself to this whole album. I believe you'll find yourself richer for the experience.

You may also enjoy:
Record Roundup: Solos, Duos, Ensembles
Record Roundup: Rooms Of Their Own
Record Roundup: Novelty Is Not Enough
Best Of 2019: Electronic
Record Roundup: String Theories
Record Roundup: Avant Chamber And Orchestral
Best Of 2017: Rock, Folk, Etc. 

Record Roundup: Avant Chamber and Orchestral

These recent albums all celebrate the vitality of old instruments and even musical forms and the way they are constantly renewed through adventurous composers and novel approaches. 

Duo Noire - Night Triptych This brilliant album is a sparkling rejoinder to all who would respond to calls to diversify classical music with an “Of course - but quality is all that really matters!” So, here you have two African-American guitarists - the first two to ever graduate from Yale - playing music commissioned by them from female composers. Duo Noire checks so many boxes here that they’re almost in competition with Sacha Baron Cohen’s new character, that dolphin-loving liberal Dr. Nira Cain N’Degeocello, who takes PC to new heights of absurdity.

In a way the fictional interlocutor invoked above is right - quality IS all that matters. But good work is also where you find it and nothing will change in classical music unless people make the same kind of effort Thomas Flippin and Christopher Mallett have made here. They’ve obviously done their homework, tapping an international array of young composers (none were born before 1978) to expand the repertoire for two guitars in marvelous ways. Often using extended techniques and electronics, the works both transcend and exemplify the characteristics of the instruments. A perfect example is Byblos by Mary Kouyoumdjian, the second work here, which puts the guitars against a starlit electronic backdrop, allowing their tense arpeggios and riffs to bloom and almost become pure sound rather than the familiar acoustic textures. It should go without saying that this wouldn’t work without the Duo’s phenomenal technique. 

The title piece, a three-part invention by Iranian-born Golfam Khayam, draws both on her Persian heritage and her interest in sound-art to arrive at a place of beauty that feels totally natural. Works by Clarice Assad, Courtney Bryan, Gity Razaz, and Gabriella Smith fill out the collection, which is a delight throughout. When ideology intersects with music it only advances the cause of both when the results are as compulsively listenable as what Duo Noire has put forth on Night Triptych. The album, out now on New Focus Recordings, is a complete success on all counts and if you are moved to seek out more music by the composers involved, further rewards will follow. 

Joshua Modney - Engage Modney’s activities in the Mivos Quartet, Wet Ink Ensemble and the International Contemporary Ensemble have kept him busy enough that he can be forgiven for taking this long to release his solo debut, which comes out August 3rd. All that group work seems to have resulted in a build up of both ambition and ideas as, like George Harrison with All Things Must Pass after The Beatles, Modney has given us a triple album. Fortunately, his conceptual abilities equal his playing skills as each program stands alone as a satisfying and adventurous listening experience. 

Disc one’s four pieces cover a lot of ground. Sam Pluta’s Jem Altieri with a Ring Modulator Circuit (2011) finds common sonic ground between live electronics and the violin at its most squirrelly and scratchy. Like Michael Nicolas’s extraordinary Transitions did for the cello, Pluta’s piece will have you instantly contemplating the violin itself as a piece of technology. As a statement of purpose it couldn’t be more perfect and following it up with Taylor Brook’s Vocalise (2009) was a stroke of genius. Brook took inspiration from Hindustani music and occasionally approaches a sort of desert romanticism that takes advantage of the violin’s liquid tones. Kate Soper’s Cipher (2011) finds Modney and the soprano in pure symbiosis over its four movements, creating a new form of art song. Anthony Braxton’s #222, one of his Ghost Trance Music pieces from 1998, finishes out the set and it’s a woozy delight. 

Bach’s Ciaccona (1720) leads off the second disc in an arrangement by Modney in Just Intonation (JI), which is a more modern conception of tuning than what the composer used. I can imagine Bach being intrigued by some of the theories behind JI but for the listener any intellectual underpinning becomes less relevant once you press play. To my ears, the JI takes away some of the Baroque harmonic mystery, leaving behind a stringent view of the labyrinthine structure and melodic invention. Modney’s technique is as flawless here as in the modern works. Eric Wubbles’s “the children of fire come looking for fire” (2012) features the composer on prepared piano in a 25-minute tour de force of texture and rhythmic drive. It’s another example of how Modney’s direct engagement with composers can bear fascinating fruit. 

Also just like All Things Must Pass, Engage ends with a series of jams in Modney’s own Violin Solos (2017), improvisations which feature the instrument unfettered by electronics or post-production. The five pieces are a remarkable acknowledgement of the endless adaptability and possibility of the violin, with the sounds of today’s world uncannily reflected back by this antique construction of wood, horsehair and gut. Modney has made a commanding statement with Engage and is now, in addition to all his other roles, a solo force to be reckoned with. Engage is also out now on New Focus.

Seattle Symphony - Berio-Boulez-Ravel My admiration for this ensemble and its conductor Ludovic Morlot was solidified by their definitive premiere recording of John Luther Adams’s Become Ocean in 2014. Even so, I can’t be 100 percent sure I’ve kept up with all their recordings since, which is a shame, since this well-conceived and brilliantly executed collection is another reminder that my admiration was in no way misplaced. 

Linking the three 20th Century classics included here is the idea that each composer drew on other, older material to which to apply their transformative art. In the case of Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia (1968-69), he pulls in texts from a wide array of sources including Claude Lévi-Strauss and Samuel Beckett and musical themes from Debussy, Beethoven, and especially Mahler’s Second Symphony. The second of the five movements, O King, was composed in memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. and uses only parts of his name, sung mostly sotto voce, in an emotionally piercing tribute. The live recording is wonderfully dynamic, with rich, detailed sonics and a perfect balance between the orchestra and the eight voices of Roomful Of Teeth. The inclusion of the latter ensemble is a coup as it is doubtful that any other modern vocal group could better their work here. This version more than holds its own against others, including the debut recording (of the four-movement version) by the New York Philharmonic with the Swingle Singers conducted by the composer.

Pierre Boulez’s Notations (1978) is next, and, in typical fashion, the scraps for this quilt come from his own work, specifically a piano piece from 1945, also called Notations. In theory, Boulez allows the performers to pick the order of the four movements but, because he is SO not John Cage, suggests the order used here, sequenced for “maximum contrast.” He’s got a point, but however you listen, each movement is a celebration of orchestral color and texture, full of pulse-pounding rhythms and flashes of melodic sparkle. Morlot and the Seattle players sound fully engaged and make a strong case for the piece, of which many recordings, including Daniel Barenboim's under Boulez’s supervision, are sadly out of print.

Maurice Ravel’s La Valse (1920) is also played to a fare-thee-well but cannot escape feeling like a warhorse to these ears. Maybe I just have a block where Ravel is concerned, but if you feel differently you’ll have no issues with this version. A piece by Messiaen would have been my dream pairing for this record; as it stands, the album is just shy of perfection. 

Tracks from the albums reviewed here can be found in this playlist, along with a wealth of other "classical and composed" sounds from 2018.

You may also enjoy:
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Best Of 2017: Classical
Record Roundup: On The Cutting Edge
The Inspired Viola Of Melia Watras
Immersed In Become Ocean
Multiplicities Of Genius, Part One