Author: dbarbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Pandelis Karayorgis & George Kokkinaris – Out from Athens [Driff Records CD2402]; Giorgio Pacorig & Stefano Giust – Così com’è [Setola di Maiale SM4740]

Two new recordings from southern Europe feature duets pairing the piano with another instrument often found with it in standard rhythm sections. The results on both albums are anything but standard.

As its title declares, Out from Athens was recorded in Athens, Greece, by two musicians, separated by a generation, who are natives of the city. Double bassist George Kokkinaris, the younger of the two, is currently based in Athens after having spent time pre-Covid living and playing in Berlin; pianist Pandelis Karayorgis has been part of the Boston music scene for decades, having gone there to attend the New England Conservatory in 1985. Out from Athens, which will be released later this month, is Karayorgis’ second release of piano and double bass duets in recent years; a previous one, featuring Damon Smith, came out in 2023. This album of concise piano and double bass duets follows the disc of duets Karayorgis released last year with free improvising double bassist Damon Smith. As with that earlier collaboration, the current one features a bassist who pushes the instrument into territory defined primarily by colorations of sound. On most of the tracks, Kokkinaris plays with a focus on extended technique and with frequent use of preparations. On Athene Noctua, for example, he uses the body of the bass as a percussion instrument; on Argle Bargle he draws rough-textured sounds from the prepared instrument with the bow. His solo piece I Wake to Sleep and Take My Waking Slow highlights the range of his sonic palette. In contrast to Kokkinaris’ willingness to distort pitch in order to take his instrument to timbral extremes, Karayorgis’ playing thrives on maintaining pitch relationships with the musical equivalent of precise diction. His sense of texture runs to the porous, particularly on the spare and abstract Throughgoing Line, a piece inspired by the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky. Even in the densest, most turbulent passages, such as on the high-energy Mumbling Urban Poems, Bumpy, and the title track, he retains a cooly managed and well-delineated sense of space.

On Così com’è (roughly, “that’s how it is”), the duets are for piano and percussion. Drummer Stefano Giust and pianist Giorgio Pacorig are both based in Friuli-Venezia Giulia in the northeastern edge of Italy; they’ve played together in various combinations since the early 2000s and appear with each other on several albums. Both also share a background in jazz-derived improvisation with leanings toward open form playing. Their new album features three long improvisations that undergo constant mutations of mood and dynamics. Pacorig is the more introspective player of the two, although on the second performance he plays with an outgoing, high energy; otherwise he tends to favor a discontinous line of short bursts and splashes of chords. Giust maintains a taut tension throughout, as he lays down a flexible pulse that pushes the music along with expanding and contracting tempos and dramatically varied phrasing. Giust is a master colorist, and the two sometimes become difficult to distinguish when Pacorig plays directly on the piano strings with hands and objects.

https://driffrecords.bandcamp.com/

https://www.setoladimaiale.net/catalogue/view/SM4740

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Ratti – Theta [Barly Records BD 1794]

Theta is the debut album of Ratti, a Bolognese ensemble which at the time of recording consisted of Roberto DiBlasio (alto and soprano saxophones and drums), Antonio Ciaramella (guitar and electronics), and Giulio Izzo (double bass). Since Theta was recorded the three were joined by drummer Simone Vincenzini.

Theta is an interesting mixture of composed and improvised music, with the emphasis falling on the side of composition. For a trio, Ratti gets a full sound; DiBlasio, Ciaramella, and Izzo make the most of the instrumental resources at their disposal with intricate arrangements that see melodic lines and supporting roles passed seamlessly around from hand to hand. Consequently, the music is propelled as much by shifts in instrumental color as it is by melodic or harmonic progressions.

A typical track is built around a core of a handful of melodic themes arranged for all three in unison or in harmony, followed by solos over elementary structures. The music itself contains elements of jazz, classical and rock blended in a way that mostly defies generic pigeonholing. Cremisi, which finds DiBlasio on drums, is a loose-jointed rock jam; Achab is a short, through-composed piece; Memories is a contrapuntal work that incorporates a quasi-minimalist pulse; Canto notturno, the closing piece, enters into experimental electronic territory. The playing is economical but tight, with DiBlasio, Ciaramella, and Izzo working together to forge a truly collective sound.

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: James Díaz & Julia Jung Un Suh – [speaking in a foreign language] [New Focus Recordings fcr395]

Depending upon how you look at it, the foreign language of composer James Díaz’s [speaking in a foreign language] is the language of electronics. Or it is the language of the solo acoustic violin. The album, Diaz’s first solo recording, is an electroacoustic collaboration with violinist Julia Jung Un Suh; it represents an instance of reciprocal translation in which each instrument takes on the inflections and accents of the other.

Diaz’s stated intention is to compose for “violin as electronics,” hence to make the acoustic instrument speak in a language foreign to it. But at the same time, the violin imprints itself on the electronics, making them speak in the foreign language of an acoustic string instrument – in particular, with its phrasing and its warmth of expression. The latter is a surprising quality to find in electronic music, but there it is, thanks to Jung Un Suh’s performance and Díaz’s sensitivity in choosing timbres and electronic overlays that by turns complement and enhance the violin’s unaltered sound. Díaz creates sound masses from the violin, loops it, alters its overtone profile, has it mimic a reed instrument, makes it surge and shimmer, but nevertheless its voice comes through the manipulations and distortions intact, particularly on “they became his angels” and “Noche digital,” where the instrument is allowed space to soliloquize in its native tongue. The electronics are an integral part of the hybrid voice that emerges in the album’s ten pieces, coming in as they do at two points in the compositional process: first while interacting with the violin in real time – which I suspect is a significant factor in the remarkably nimble interplay between the violin and electronics – and then afterwards in the studio, where Díaz “recomposes” – his term — the sound into its final form.

This is largely textural music, but not entirely; there is an underlying lyrical element that makes itself felt as a constant throughout all of the sonic evolutions the music undergoes.

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Klang! – Catastrofe del vuoto elettrodebole [Setola di Maiale SM 4720]

Klang! is the duo of Andrea Massaria on electric guitar and effects and Alessandro Seravalle on samples and live interactive electronics. The two are inspired by the music and composers of the semi-mythical Darmstadt school, as hinted at by the nicknames they’ve taken in honor of two of the main figures associated with Darmstadt: “Anton Klang,” Massaria’s homage to Anton Webern, and “Karlheinz Lärm,” Seravalle’s acknowledgment of Karlheinz Stockhausen. The album cover even mimics the trademark yellow logo of Deutsche Grammophon, the label that released a number of albums of Darmstadt-associated music. Both Massaria’s and Seravalle’s aliases incorporate German words for “noise,” and noise, in the form of abstract electronic sounds and timbral distortions of electric guitar, are very much on the agenda on Catastrofe del vuoto elettrodebole.

Although Massaria and Seravalle pay homage in their own way to the music of 1950s Darmstadt, their sound is completely contemporary. Perhaps a bit of Webern is detectable in the pointillistic single notes and chords Massaria provides on Fluttuazione quantistiche, as may be an allusion to Stockhausen’s early tape experiments with the recorded voice on the title track. Throughout the album the sound of Massaria’s guitar comes through at times as itself, and at other times distorted and almost made unrecognizable through granulation and other electronic manipulations. Seravalle adds a well-integrated layer of electronic abstraction to complete the effect of this highly atmospheric release.

https://www.setoladimaiale.net/catalogue/view/SM4720

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: IMPROLEVITAS (Maurizio Lesmi, Lorenzo Tosarelli, Roberto Bartoli) – Eros [Setola di Maiale, SM4690]

Improlevitas is the Bolognese improvisational collective of Maurizio Lesmi, soprano saxophone and effects; Lorenzo Tosarelli, piano; and Roberto Bartoli, double bass. Eros, recorded in Bologna this past May, is their first album. It represents an auspicious beginning.

Improlevitas’ approach to playing is influenced by Italo Calvino’s notion of a life as consisting of a continuous shuffling of styles, influences, and ideas – a kind of instability, but a creative one. An acknowledgment of improvisation as a potentially volatile admixture is contained in the group’s hybrid name: “Impro” (improvisation), and “levitas” (lightness and changeability). We can hear both lightness and changeability in the six performances here. The group may coalesce around a drone tone or fall into a harmonic or rhythmic pattern, generally set by Bartoli, punctuated by Tosarelli, and elaborated upon by Lesmi; they may on the other hand spin away from each other in ever-broadening, concentric circles of counterpoint. But always with a sense of melodic levity. The album’s long opening track, Puer Aeternus, puts all of this on display; it captures in microcosm Improlevitas’ variable approach to improvisation. There as on the other tracks song underlies much of the trio’s interplay, sometimes quite literally as when Bartoli sings wordlessly along with an arco bass melody, sometimes more abstractly, as in the deconstructed tango of Tango a tre. The group’s overall attention to the way individual lines and harmonies can interlock and unlock is a reminder that as with any free improvisation the nowness of the moment, encoded in agreements and oppositions, hesitations and forward momentum, and above all in sympathetic listening, is what the playing is all about.

https://www.setoladimaiale.net/catalogue/view/SM4700

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Artists for DJ Elettrodo – Tribute to a Radio Legend (2024)

Since 1992 DJ Giacomo Elettrodo has hosted experimental music programs on Rome’s Radio Onda Rossa, an alternative, non-commercial radio station that first went on the air in 1977 and today reaches an international audience via the web. With his programming choices DJ Elettrodo has been a discerning supporter of electronic and other experimental sound artists in Italy and elsewhere. Now, these artists are here to support him with this benefit compilation, all proceeds of which will go to Radio Onda Rossa, which runs entirely on listener support. The compilation was initiated and curated by bassist and sound artist Cristiano Bocci. (Full disclosure: Cris is a collaborator and friend of long standing.)

The album’s generous collection of forty-one tracks represents a number of the artists whose music has appeared on DJ Elettrodo’s radio shows. The tracks range from 1:12 to 8:47 and provide a good cross-section of some of the electronic music being made by contemporary Italian and other artists. Highlights include Laurogeigarren aro berria, a piano-based, rhythmic piece by Bocci, Mara Lepore, and Smiltzo; Maja Maiore and Loo(p)cy’s Cantami, O musa! for processed voice and electronics; the harsh, post-industrial soundscape of Sonologyst’s wryly titled Short piece for hairdryers and insects; Michael Bonaventure’s miniature cosmic epic OGRAL; progettosonoro’s expansive Cosmic Disorder; and Black/Lava’s voice-and-pulse work Venera. This is just a personal selection; anyone with an interest in current electronic music is certain to find something to like here.

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Kyle Bruckmann – of rivers [New Focus Recordings fcr399]

A solo recording by oboe and English horn virtuoso Kyle Bruckmann is like a communique giving news of the latest stages in those instruments’ ongoing musical evolution. Like his colleague and sometime collaborator bassoonist Dana Jessen, Bruckmann has taken a leading role in inventing and developing new techniques for a venerable if sometimes overlooked orchestral instrument, and in the process adapting it to the high-tech environments of contemporary composition and improvisation.

Bruckmann’s latest, of rivers, contains one composition by Bruckmann in addition to five other works, some acoustic and some electroacoustic, by five other composers. What all have in common is a willingness to push Bruckmann’s instruments and instrumentalism to the limits of their musical possibilities. This is apparent from the very first piece, Jessie Cox’s AT[ou]M, an acoustic work that sets extreme leaps of register as well as a number of extended techniques – overblowing, multiphonics, pitch bending – within an open-textured, fragmentary structure. Hannah A. Barnes’ Dis/inte/gration matches oboe with live interactive phase vocoder in a work that, despite its title, gradually integrates both instruments into an evolving texture of increasing density that culminates in an assertive rush of electronics and oboe lines evoking a frenzied soprano saxophone improvisation. Helen Grime’s Arachne is a brief, thematically beautiful solo for oboe that brings out Bruckmann’s more conventionally expressive side. For the electroacoustic DROP, Linda Bouchard created a graphic score whose figures are based on the sounds of water in its various states. Bruckmann’s interpretation of Bourchard’s score, played out against an abstract electronic backdrop, affords him the opportunity to create a virtuoso performance drawing on his wide-ranging technical resources. Bruckmann’s own Proximity, affect, is a solo piece reflecting its origin in the isolation of the Covid lockdowns. For this electronic work Bruckmann recorded and manipulated sounds originating from different parts of the oboe. The instrument’s presence is largely submerged in the processing, but occasionally the sounds of key clicks or breath blowing through the tube make themselves known. The album closes with Christopher Burns’ Mutiny of Rivers, a long piece featuring electronics artist Ernst Karel interacting with Bruckmann. As on DROP, Bruckmann improvises an exciting solo line on the basis of suggestive compositional material. In duet with himself via Karel’s electronic manipulations, Bruckmann’s warm acoustic voice dramatically counterpoints its processed double.

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Arne Eigenfeldt – A Walk to Meryton [Redshift Records TK 533]

Canadian composer Arne Eigenfeldt’s AI-facilitated Walk to Meryton comes at a moment when questions about artificial intelligence’s effects on the art, both potentially positive and negative, are in the air. Eigenfeldt, who has been working with generative compositional software since the 1980s, comes down on the side of those artists for whom AI is a useful compositional tool rather than an existential threat.

For A Walk to Meryton Eigenfeldt created compositions using a modular, interactive system of bots called Musebots that he developed with the help of a group of Australian coders. The system generated musical environments as well as scores that were given to Vancouver musicians John Korsrud (trumpet), Jon Bentley (tenor and soprano saxophones), Meredith Bates (violin), and spoken word artist/writer Barbara Adler. The scores served as guides for the live musicians’ improvisations, which were then laid over Musebot’s audio environments. These latter are tonal and rhythmic, and made up of washes of sound often recalling expansive string orchestras or carillons. The contributions from Korsrud, Bentley, and Bates are impeccable, the blend of synthetic and organic sounds being seamless and making for instrumental tracks that are lush and unapologetically beautiful. Adler’s Jane Austen-inspired texts and delivery also make for a good fit with Musebot’s evocative soundscapes.

No doubt the relative merits of AI and its ramifications for art will continue to be debated. But if evidence is needed for the ways in which AI can function as a benign element enhancing creativity, A Walk to Meryton surely can provide it.

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Gabriel Vicéns – Mural [Stradivarius STR 37292]

Mural is the fourth studio album from New York based guitarist Gabriel Vicéns, perhaps best known for his work as an improviser. With this album we see another side of his musical personality: the composer of contemporary chamber works. The seven pieces represented here, all of which were composed between 2019 and 2022, feature ensembles of various sizes and instrumental combinations, ranging from solo piano to mixed sextet of percussion, strings, and winds. What emerges is a consistent compositional language built of discontinuous sound spaces, reiterated micro-themes, dynamic contrasts, and fused timbres. All of these qualities are on display in the title track, a trio for clarinet, violin, and piano composed in 2021, which opens the album. The pivot point for the entire piece is a single note played on the piano, repetitions of which alternate with brief stabs of chords interspersed with silences. Vicéns arranges the violin and clarinet in short bursts played together or in alternation, creating passages of staccato rhythm and free-standing points of hybrid color. A quiet middle section marked by generous uses of negative space gives way to a brisk pulse crafted of call-and-response fragments for violin and clarinet laid over held piano chords. The sextet El Matorral (2022), for piano, vibes, flute, clarinet, violin, and cello, highlights Vicéns’ ability to create striking timbral effects given a rich palette of instrumental resources.

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Michael Hersch – Poppaea [New Focus Recordings fcr390]

The early Roman empire, known for its power and affluence, its arrogance and violence, has for centuries been a source of ongoing attraction – often horrified attraction — to Western historians and artists. The doings and indiscretions of the leading figures of the time – the emperors and aristocrats, particularly as they’ve come down to us through Suetonius’ scandalous storytelling – are a natural source of material for opera. Suetonius is one of the sources behind composer Michael Hersch’s Poppaea (2019), a one-act opera with a libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann.

Hersch and Fleischmann present us with a wrenching work about Poppaea Sabina, second wife of the emperor Nero, who in turn was her third husband. Hersch’s isn’t the first opera to have Poppaea as a focal character; Monteverdi’s last opera was The Coronation of Poppaea, and she is given a central role in Handel’s opera Agrippina. The Poppaeas in these two earlier operas are quite different, the first being portrayed as a cynical manipulator – as she had been in Suetonius’s and Tacitus’ histories — and the second as an innocent caught up in vicious court politics. Hersch and Flesichmann’s Poppaea is more ambiguous and takes her place in a tragedy that, being shaped for contemporary sensibilities, puts the psychological lives of its two main female characters at its center.

Hersch’s music is appropriate to the complex and often traumatic events depicted. As he remarks in the accompanying booklet, “violence and cruelty becom[e] characters” in themselves, governing the relationships at the heart of the opera. His writing, accordingly, consists of a kind of neo-expressionism played out in acerbic and aggressive dissonance as well as in an ample use of extended techniques. With them, he is able to create large effects with relatively small resources. The orchestra on this recording, the Ensemble Phoenix Basel, comprises only eighteen pieces but thanks to Hersch’s orchestration and dynamics, for sheer force it often sounds like a full modern orchestra. A full orchestra held in a prolonged state of high tension: the composer effectively parallels the characters’ emotional extremes with his dramatic use of discordant, stentorian brass and harshly fused timbres of strings and winds. Similarly, his writing for the vocal parts keys up the tension by putting them in the outer reaches of their upper registers. Like the orchestra the cast is quite small, consisting of Poppaea, sung by soprano Ah Young Hong for whom the part was written; Nero, sung by tenor Steve Davislim; and Nero’s former wife Octavia, sung by mezzo-soprano Silke Gäng. These three are joined by a small female chorus and three handmaidens.

In the end, with Poppaea Hersch and Fleischmann give us a complicated and ultimately tragic character capable of being, in Ah Young Hong’s words, both monster and victim.

Daniel Barbiero