These three pieces by Los Angeles-based double bassist/composer Scott Worthington represent one half of a collaboration with Italian photographer Renato D’Agustin. The other half is D’Agustin’s book of photographs. While each half complements the other, each also provides a gratifying experience by itself and on its own terms, as Worthington’s contribution ably demonstrates.
Worthington’s three compositions can be listened to separately, but together they create a consistency of mood and dynamic that makes them best heard as an interlocking triptych. The first of the three pieces, A Time That Is also a Place (2015) for flute and electronics, was commissioned by flutist Rachel Beetz, who performs it here. Structured as a series of long tones on flute alternating with silences, the piece is a meditation on breath as a marker of time. Both the tones and silences are given the duration of a breath—a necessarily inexact but very human metronome. The tonal richness of Beetz’s interpretation is supplemented by an electronic playback system, which gives unintrusive support to the flute by supplying ghostly echoes and a quite surf of static. There follows a brief electronic interlude that builds and thickens some of the timbres set out in the first piece, and serves as a hinge joining it to the concluding piece. This latter is the dreamily paced A Flame that Could Go Out (2016) for two five-string electric basses, a sequence of slow and seemingly randomly-ordered chord tones that imply a hesitant movement between tonic and dominant. As with Worthington’s other two pieces, it weaves minimal raw material into something hauntingly beautiful.
Daniel Barbiero
Avant Music News 