New chamber music played lyrically by this fun New York sextet, featuring Hideaki Aomori on clarinets, CJ Camerieri on trumpet, Clarice Jensen on cello, Rob Moose on violins and guitar, Nadia Sirota on viola and Alex Sopp on flute and piccolo.
Though featuring mainly the work of young, indie artists, most every piece has something of that Gershwinian Manhattan boogie-woogie about it, trains and taxis and caffeinated pedestrians swiftly weaving in and out of each other, trying to get somewhere on time. The tone is set with multi-boundary jumper Son Lux with his nervy title track, while “Proven Badlands” by Annie Clark (best known as St. Vincent) feels like a jaunt through the park, never quite far away from the traffic. Shara Wordon´s “A Whistle, A Tune, A Macaroon” is just a little thing, three minutes long, breathy and diaphanous as a New York butterfly, just long enough and just so.
The ensemble absolutely crests on “Daughter of the Waves” by by label co-founder Sarah Kirkland Snider, a gentle sightseeing tour that even the locals can enjoy. Wordon´s second entry “A Paper, A Pen, A Note to a Friend” is an even littler thing, two minutes long, and serves mostly to sluice us into Judd Greenstein´s ambitious “Clearing, Dawn, Dance”, horns and woodwinds bouncing like beach balls over a crowd of strings, a sunshiny day at a Coney Island of the mind. “Song” by Gabriel Kahane, with its moonlit cornet-electric guitar duets, draws the curtain and puts the collection gently to bed.
http://www.newamsterdamrecords.com/?portfolio=ymusic-beautiful-mechanical
Stephen Fruitman
Avant Music News 