Author: dbarbiero
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AMN Reviews: India Gailey – to you through [Redshift Records TK511]
For this, her second solo album, Nova Scotia cellist India Gailey (b. 1992) put together a program of six works from a multigenerational selection of living composers—five by others, and one by herself. The oldest composer represented is Philip Glass (b. 1937), with his 2013 Orbit for solo cello. This challenging piece, with its steady,…
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AMN Reviews: Ra’maat Ubadah Hotep Ankh McConner Iheru 0 The African OmniDevelopment Space Complex We/New [Arteidolia Press, 2022]
The African OmniDevelopment Space Complex/We New is the brief—66 pages long—but engaging memoir of Ronald Ubadah McConner, aka Ra’maat Ubadah Hotep Ankh McConner Iheru (1939-2020), a bassist, creative music advocate, and community catalyst who ran a music and cultural center out of his home in Pontiac, Michigan for several decades. In the 1950s, ‘60s, and…
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AMN Reviews: Sergio Fedele – Le Melancholie di Tifeo [Setola di Maiale SM4400]
Sergio Fedele’s Le Melancholie di Tifeo is a unique work for an equally unique instrument. Taking its inspiration from the mythical figure of Typhon, the gigantic, monstrous, and half-human offspring of Earth and Tartarus, Fedele’s six part suite is an exploration of the sonic range made possible by the Ecatorf, a triple-belled hybrid instrument of…
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AMN Reviews: Francesco Massaro & Francesco Pellegrino – Double Exposure [Amirani Records AMRN068]
Like the photographic technique from which it gets its name, Francesco Massaro and Francesco Pellegrino’s Double Exposure overlays multiple images to make a complex, composite whole. In this case, the images are sonic images, provided by electronics and acoustic wind instruments set with and against each other to form sometimes sharp-edged, and sometimes blended, gestalts.…
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AMN Reviews: WEB [Modulisme 067]; Ernie Morgan [Modulisme 060]
Performing in the early 1970s as WEB, an acronym made from the initials of their first names, Warren Burt, Ernie Morgan, and Bruce Rittenbach were among the first artists to give live collaborative concerts using the analogue electronic instruments of the day. Given the ungainliness and frequent unreliability of the analogue synthesizers then available it…
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AMN Reviews: Mahakaruna Quartet – Life Practice [Setola di Maiale SM4360]
From the Mahakaruna Quartet comes this substantive and thoroughly enjoyable set of jazz-based free improvisation. The group, consisting of Giorgio Pacorig (Fender Rhodes piano and electronics); Gabriele Cancelli (trumpet); Cene Resnik (tenor saxophone); and Stefano Giust (drums and cymbals), were recorded live at the Jazzmatec Festival in Udine in Northeast Italy in the covid-darkened days…
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AMN Reviews: Fabrice Villard & Pierre-Stéphane Meugé – Musique Logique [Nunc]
Over the course of several decades, composer Tom Johnson has developed a style of composition based on rigorous forms derived from numbers games of various kinds. His Rational Melodies of 1982, a set of twenty-one pieces constructed of logical permutations of minimal pitch sets, exemplified the style. It also served as the inspiration for composer…
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AMN Reviews: Michael Francis Duch – mind is moving (iv) [SOFA 591]
mind is moving (iv) for solo double bass is a relatively early work by Michael Pisaro-Liu, a composer associated with the Wandelweiser collective since the early 1990s. The piece is part of a series intended to explore the sonic vocabularies of particular instruments played solo. The structure of the composition is fairly simple: there are…
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AMN Reviews: Marti Epstein – Nebraska Impromptu [New Focus Recordings fcr324]
Composer Marti Epstein’s Nebraska Impromptu is a collection of works highlighting her writing for small ensembles featuring clarinet, played here by Rane Moore. The pieces on the album span 2001-2017; although each has its own individual sound, all share a consistent aesthetic based on the unhurried deployment of mostly quiet, discretely bounded events made up…
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AMN Reviews: Marco Bellafiore – Forme e Racconti [Setola di Maiale SM4390]
As unwelcome as the covid lockdowns were, they had the unintended consequence of inspiring some fine work from artists forced to rely on nothing but what was immediately available at hand. Italian double bassist Marco Bellafiore’s Forme e Racconti, a home-recorded solo album created in isolation in 2020, is one such work. The tracks on…
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AMN Reviews: Paredes/Hatwich Duo – S/T [Neuma Records]
Robert Paredes (1948-2005) was a well-rounded experimentalist who composed electroacoustic works and text scores, and as a multi-reed instrumentalist performed with the Harry Partch Ensemble and played freely improvised music as well as jazz and Middle European, Balkan, and Greek folk music. In May and August of 2000, he played a series of improvised duets…
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AMN Reviews: Christopher Trapani – Horizontal Drift [New Focus Recordings fcr296]
For the six works on his album Horizontal Drift, composer Christopher Trapani chose an unusual array of instruments capable of producing a soundworld of microtones and extended timbres. The album opens with a piece for Romanian horn-violin (played by Maximilian Haft), a violin with a metal resonator, and horn used for amplification. Its sound is…
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AMN Reviews: Julyen Hamilton & George Kokkinaris – The Road to Amarillo (2022)
The Road to Amarillo is a collaboration between Julyen Hamilton, a dancer, choreographer, poet, voice artist, and musician originally from the UK and now based in Athens, among other places in Europe, and George Kokkinaris, a double bassist dividing his time between Athens and Berlin. The pairing here seems natural; Hamilton’s long history of performing…
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AMN Reviews: Andrea Biondi, Marco Colonna, Mario Cianca – Monk—the Gravity of a Language [New Ethic Society]
The idiosyncratic musical language of Thelonious Monk continues to be a source of inspiration for composers and improvisers. This live recording of the trio of Andrea Biondi (vibes and electronics), Marco Colonna (piccolo and alto clarinets), and Mario Cianca (double bass) is meant as a homage to Monk and his musical idiolect, even if the…
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AMN Reviews: Ensemble Ikosikaihenagone – Volumes II – Fiction Musicale et Chorégraphique – Création pour Grand Orchestre et Corps Actants [Dark Tree Records DT-15]
Volumes II—Fiction Musicale et Chorégraphique is an ambitious, large-scale composition by the French double bassist/composer Benjamin Duboc for orchestra, voice, and physical movement. Recorded in October, 2021, the nearly forty-five minute-long piece was realized by a mixed-voice, twenty-one piece ensemble—hence its name—and three actors, including one speaker. The composition unfolds in a long sequence of…
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AMN Reviews: Cyril Bondi-D’Incise & Blutwurst Ensemble – Zgodność [Insub]
The Blutwurst Ensemble, a seven piece chamber group from Florence, Italy, comprising trumpet, bass clarinet, accordion, harmonium, viola, cello, and double bass. Zgodność is a single, forty-five minute-long piece composed by Cyril Bondi and D’Incise for the group; the composers, who work together as an electroacoustic duo under the name Diatribes, also provided a background…
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AMN Reviews: Kate Soper & Sam Pluta: The Understanding of All Things [New Focus Recordings FCR322]
Kate Soper and Sam Pluta’s The Understanding of All Things is something of a scaled-down version of Soper’s Ipsa Dixit of 2018. The latter was a two-disc set presenting Soper’s six-movement work of music, text, and theater for soprano, flute, percussion, and violin; this new release is a five-part suite consisting of three through-composed works…
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AMN Reviews: Nonono Percussion Ensemble – Excantatious [Setola di Maiale SM4340]
“Excantation” is the act of freeing a victim of enchantment through counter-enchantment—wielding a protective bit good magic to ward off bad magic. It also serves as an apt metaphor for music’s capacity to counteract the two-year-long psychological thrall covid’s held us in. The music on this disc was recorded at the Teatro San Leonardo in…
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AMN Reviews: Canadian Electronic Ensemble -Modulisme Session 053 [Modulisme]
Founded in 1971 and still in operation, the Canadian Electronic Ensemble claims to be the “oldest continuous live-electronic group in the world.” The group was originally a quartet made up of University of Toronto graduate students David Jaeger, Jim Montgomery, Larry Lake, and David Grimes; over the next fifty years the ensemble underwent changes in…
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AMN Reviews: Futari (Taiko Saito & Satoko Fujii) – Underground Volume 1 [Bandcamp]
Futari is the duo of pianist Satoko Fujii and percussionist Taiko Saito on vibraphone and marimba. The music on Underground Volume 1, the first of three installments in a series, comes from their second collaboration; the first, Beyond, was released in 2020. For Underground the two collaborated at a physical distance—something that’s become more or…
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AMN Reviews: John Aylward/Klangforum Wien – Celestial Forms & Stories [New Focus Recordings FCR320]
Few products of the imagination have had the endurance of the mythological figures of the classical Mediterranean world. Whether as archetypes, allegorical figures, proxies for natural forces, or just examples of behavior not to emulate, the gods, heroes, and anti-heroes of the Greek world have gone through many metamorphoses and shifts in significance, but through…
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AMN Reviews: Eric Nathan – Missing Words [New Focus Recordings FCR314]
Composer Eric Nathan’s Missing Words is a six-song cycle of purely instrumental music. This sounds like a paradox and in a sense it is; the cycle is made up of translations into music of invented German words, which provide the texts for each movement. The words aren’t spoken or sung—and thus they’re missing—but they’re there…
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AMN Reviews: Various Artists – Late Works: Preparations 20.9.21 [Otoroku Downloads]
Prepared piano began its life as a way to create an entire percussion ensemble for one player. It’s come a long way since then; although prepared piano can be used to take on a purely percussive function, it also can provide a way for expanding the piano’s melodic and harmonic possibilities by varying its timbre.…
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AMN Reviews: Heather Stebbins – Olney [Zeromoon]
The music on Heather Stebbins’ Olney marks something of a departure for her. A composer of electroacoustic music as well as a performer on cello, Stebbins ordinarily works within scripted or otherwise preconceived musical structures. The music on Olney, by contrast, was the product of a process of exploring modular synthesis that she describes in…
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