Author: dbarbiero
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AMN Reviews: Ørvind Torvund – The Exotica Album [Hubro HUBROCD2580]
Back in the 1990s, there was a revival of interest in some of the popular music of the 1950s and 1960s—the music the WWII generation enjoyed after they returned home and moved out to the suburbs to start families and careers. Comprising several genres—exotica, space-age pop, beautiful music–it was slightly jazzy, slightly smooth and surprisingly…
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AMN Reviews: Sonologyst – Phantoms [Unexplained Sounds Group]; Kyle Motl & Zach Rowden – Gristle [Confront Recordings ccs97]
When Pierre Schaeffer asserted that musique concrète would provoke musicians to discard old habits vis-à-vis sound and return to actual experience, he helped point the way toward a paradoxical sound art where the concrete becomes abstract and seemingly simple sounds instead reveal themselves to be complex objects. Although very different from each other, two recordings,…
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AMN Reviews: Patrick Brennan & Abdul Moimême – Terraphonia [Creative Sources CS579CD]
The pairing of alto saxophonist patrick brennan and guitarist Abdul Moimême on terraphonia is an especially piquant one whose symbiosis is, paradoxically, an organic outgrowth of a constant polarity of sound. The album was recorded in April in Lisbon, the home base for Moimême, a Portuguese native who also has lived in Ireland and the…
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AMN Reviews: Three Free Radicals x Liis Viira – Atlas of the Heavens [Bandcamp]
Three Free Radicals is actually two people: Minnesota electronics artist Scott L. Miller and Estonian guitarist Mart Soo. Miller and Soo have previously collaborated on two albums; for this third album, they were joined by Estonian harpist Liis Viira. The result is a sound centered within a neat triangulation of sharp-edged electronics, atmospheric guitar, and…
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AMN Reviews: Bobby Naughton – The Haunt [No Business Records NBCD 105]
For a period of about a decade—from, roughly, the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s—New Haven, Connecticut was home to an exciting creative music community. Some of the principal figures were homegrown, some were from elsewhere, but the meeting of talent produced a cross-fertilization of ideas that resulted in excellent music, some of which was documented and…
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AMN Reviews: Thomas DeLio – Selected Compositions III (1986-2017) [Neuma 450-120]
Selected Compositions III (1986-2017) is Neuma’s third compilation of work by composer Thomas DeLio (b. 1951). As with the previous two CD releases, which surveyed his work of 1991-2013 and of 1972-2015, Selected Compositions (1986-2017) collects both acoustic instrumental and electroacoustic pieces, with a particular emphasis on DeLio’s settings of texts. When writing about the…
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AMN Reviews: Isaac Schankler – Because Patterns [Aerocade AM011-CD]
Identified as a significant artistic trend in the late 1960s, systems aesthetics—the quintessential programmatic statement was Jack Burnham’s 1968 essay by that name—has continued to represent a viable and important direction in contemporary art and music. Current systems music—simply put, music that is the product of a defined operation or set of operations performed on…
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AMN Reviews: Max Giteck Duykers / Ensemble Ipse – Folding Music [New World Records 80811-2]
In addition to being a composer, Max Giteck Duykers (b. 1972) is the co-founder of the Ensemble Ipse, which is featured on this collection of Duykers’ new and recent work for chamber ensembles. All of the pieces in the collection are scored for the so-called Pierrot sextet or its subdivisions, the Pierrot sextet, of which…
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AMN Reviews: Sam Rivers – Emanation [No Business Records NBCD118]
It is June 3, 1971, and the Sam Rivers Trio—which in addition to the multi-instrumentalist leader included Cecil McBee on bass and Norman Connors on drums and percussion—is playing Boston’s Jazz Workshop. The trio, which Rivers formed when he was at or near the end of his 1969-1971 tenure with the Cecil Taylor Unit, had…
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AMN Reviews: Cristiano Calcagnile – ST()MA [We Insist WEIN02]
ST()MA, the six-part suite by percussionist Cristiano Calcagnile, is a mosaic of reconciled opposites: acoustic and electronic instruments, pitched and unpitched sounds, extended and conventional techniques. Calcagnile, a native of Milan, is an instrumentalist and composer engaged in a variety of activities. His background includes classical studies as well as jazz performance; one of his…
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AMN Reviews: 4! – Factorial [Creative Sources CS532]; Andreas Fulgosi & Carlo Mascolo – Losca Mio Gulfos [Creative Sources CS523]
The sound of the human voice in predominantly instrumental, freely improvised music is always arresting. Part of this may be because it isn’t often found there, but another—larger?—part may simply be that the warmth and directness of the voice naturally compels attention. Whatever the case, the 4! Quartet—Patrizia Oliva (voice, electronics, flute and objects); Carlo…
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AMN Reviews: Ingar Zach – Floating Layer Cake [SOFA571]
One way of making existing material new is by rearranging it. On Floating Layer Cake Norwegian percussionist/composer Ingar Zach takes two of his compositions and reimagines them through creative reorchestration. The Lost Ones, originally written for Zach’s percussion and the text and voice of poet Caroline Bergvall, is here rearranged for an ensemble comprising the…
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AMN Reviews: João Pedro Viegas, Luiz Rocha, Silvia Corda & Adriano Orrù – Unknown Shores [Amirani AMRN058]
The ten tracks of Unknown Shores—an album from the quartet of bass clarinetist João Pedro Viegas, bass clarinetist/clarinetist Luiz Rocha, pianist Silvia Corda and double bassist Adriano Orrù—trace an arc from a fully realized, introverted exchange of lines that would be at home in a piece of Modernist chamber music, through a variety of abstract,…
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AMN Reviews: Alvin Lucier – Orpheus Variations [Important Records IMPREC469]
Orpheus Variations, a recent work for cello and seven wind instruments by Alvin Lucier, is a thirty-one minute piece based on a single seven-note chord. This would seem to be extremely limited material for a work of this length—and it is—but by exploring the timbral and resonant effects of distributing these seven notes across winds…
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AMN Reviews: Splinter Reeds – Hypothetical Islands [New Focus FCR222]
Extended technique long ago lost its shock value, which is all to the good. For many composers as well as performers, extended technique is a resource that can be drawn on as a matter of course—as one musical device among many, rather than as novelty or anomaly. As their fine second album demonstrates, the music…
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AMN Reviews: The Cloudwatchers – S/T [Unexplained Sounds Group]; Ståle Storløkken – The Haze of Sleeplessness [Hubro HUBROCD2616]
Forms by themselves are inert things: accumulated conventions and materials that, for all their inertia, are nevertheless available to be appropriated and made newly meaningful through the projects and programs that somehow have need of them. The Cloudwatchers, a quartet of musicians working in Spain, and the Norwegian keyboardist/composer Ståle Storløkken each take an awareness…
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AMN Reviews: Post-Haste Reed Duo – Donut Robot! [Bandcamp]; Lori Freedman – Excess [Dame cqb 1923]
The technical innovations of the past sixty or so years have given instrumentalists and composers a vast and diverse set of resources to draw on in creating new music both written and performed. Just how vast and diverse is something best seen in the context of music for solo performers or very small ensembles. Two…
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AMN Reviews: Andrew Voigt and Ed Herrmann – Three Duets [Pan y Rosas pyr270]
Dating back to 1991, Andrew Voigt and Ed Herrmann’s Three Duets delves into some of the creative possibilities of the then somewhat novel pairing of saxophone and analogue modular synthesizer. Nearly thirty years after it was recorded, the set still stands as compelling music. As musicians, the two have explored different paths. Saxophonist Voigt was…
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AMN Reviews: Pareidolia – Selon le Vent [JACC Records JR035]
Selon le Vent, a set of two long improvisations from the trio Pareidolia, features music that maintains a creative opposition between conventional and extended techniques and consequently, between line and color. The two tracks—Himmelkino, which roughly translates as “Sky Cinema,” and Herzkino, or “Heart Cinema”—were recorded during a residence in Coimbra, Portugal in May and…
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AMN Reviews: The J. & F. Band – From the Roots to the Sky [Long Song Records LSRCD146]
Some recordings just sound like they were fun to make. From the Roots to the Sky by the J. & F. Band is one of them. The J. of J. & F. is Jaimoe, the drummer for the Allman Brothers Band; F. is bassist Joe Fonda. In February 2018 they went into the studio in…
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AMN Reviews: Cecilia Lopez – Red/Machinic Fantasies [XI Records XI 140]
Sound recordings of multimedia events always present something of a conundrum: although a necessity for documenting the work, they necessarily leave some of it out. It’s a situation brought to mind by Cecelia Lopez’s Red/Machnic Fantasies, a 2-CD set capturing the audio of two mobile sound sculptures/installations by the Buenos Aires composer/electronics artist. Red, which…
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AMN Reviews: Eli Wallace – Barriers [Eschatology ER-004]
The title of Brooklyn pianist/composer Eli Wallace’s first solo release entails something of an artful misdirection. Far from being about barriers—such as would separate compositional thinking from improvisational practice, or conventional pianism from technical experimentation—the recording seems instead to demonstrate the permeability of these otherwise antithetical categories, at least in Wallace’s hands. Barriers is a…
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AMN Reviews: Quatuor Bozzini – Phill Niblock: Baobab [Collection QB CQB 1924]; Simon Martin: Musique d’art [Collection QB CQB 1922]
Founded by the Bozzini sisters, cellist Isabelle and violinist Stéphanie, the eponymous Montréal-based string quartet has been a significant presence in Canadian new music since the early 2000s. The Bozzini’s two CDs, one each of works by US composer Phill Niblock and Québec’s Simon Martin, are the latest additions to a substantial catalogue of recordings…
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