Oct. 4 2024
A round-up of recordings I enjoyed that were released in July through September of this year. As always, names of artists who live or have lived in the Pacific Northwest appear in bold.
Sarah Davachi - The Head As Form'd in the Crier's Choir
"...a supremely gorgeous collection of modern music for old and new keys – pipe organs, Mellotron, and the like..."
Chrsitopher DeLaurenti - soft gradient
"Best heard on headphones, soft gradient reflects on the concept of the petit Bardo through multiple, often parallel presences - first through human movement in the soundscape and then by overlapping vestibules of abstract and concrete sound."
Amy Denio - Varieté
Orchestral soundtrack for the 1925 German silent film by Ewald Andre Dupont. Amy's mastery of complex meters and tuneful melody are on excellent display.
Bruno Duplant - de ce paysage au loin nous ne percevons que des sons. (France)
"From this landscape, in the distance, we only perceive sounds, sometimes distinct, which most often collide and resonate with each other, recalling to our memories, of the order of daydreams, of phantasmagoria. The indefiniteness of almost nothing."
Wendy Eisenberg - Viewfinder
"Writing this song cycle for improvisers was a process of meditation on the concepts of vision, the visible, signs, viewpoints, eyes themselves. Looking. That strange, faintly colonial relationship between seeing something and thinking you understand it, believing that you own it, in a way, because you can see it."
Eden Lonsdale/red panel - ricercari for rainy days
"Each of the three scores on this album is stripped down to its barest essence, allowing a substantial part of the creative process to take place at a half-way point between composer and ensemble."
Robert Alki Aubrey Lowe - Recessed Draughting
"A collection of pastoral and gestural compositional moments for voice and electronics..."
Rebecca Lloyd-Jones - Between Structures (Australia)
"Between Structures, composed for solo percussion and electronics, evokes vulnerabilities, intimacies, and ambivalences centered on disorienting temporal perceptions and exploring psychoacoustic phenomena. Its form rewards persistence by weaving together high- and low-frequency spectra, inviting contemplation of states of consciousness and the fragility of sonic material within liminal spaces."
Ben Monder - Planetarium
"Monder is well known for his tremendous guitar contributions to a wide range of artists, including David Bowie, Maria Schneider, Guillermo Klein, and, most recently, as a member of The Bad Plus. After three years of recording, Monder produced his grandest statement yet as a composer and conceptualist. This three-disc set features vast, highly wrought sound poems as well as spontaneous moments of improvisational brilliance."
more eaze - Lacuna and Parlor
"...soft-focus ambient Americana with sci-fi-tinged chamber minimalism and gurgling free noise..." (Boomkat) "...anchored in the left-field chamber music and incidental recordings that have long accented more eaze’s roving sound. Composed with one ear pressed to the rich textures of instrumental recording environments..."
Tanner Porter - One Was Gleaming
"...an outstanding, genre-defying album...with the complex sonic textures, timbres, and engaging motivic development one would expect from a composer steeped in the classical tradition, paired thoughtfully with incisive lyrics and powerful, unadorned vocalism of a skilled songwriting storyteller." (Lauren Ishida, I Care If You Listen)
Karen Power / Quiet Music Ensemble - We Return to Ground (Ireland)
"Three of Power’s large-scale pieces pairing natural sounds with musical instruments, written for and with Quiet Music Ensemble over an 8-year period. Beginning with instruments of ice in 2015, Power's experience of pairing natural sounds with musical instruments has evolved into a transformative body of work. Her approach to composition, creating space for interactions between field recordings and human performers, allows for the emergence of new sonic dialogues with the natural world.”
Jarrad Powell - Across Distances
"Seven new works for solo piano in several different temperaments, all played with great virtuosity by pianist Adrienne Varner."
Ellen Reid - Big Majestic
"Big Majestic assembles music from SOUNDWALK, a GPS-enabled work of public art that reimagines urban parks as interactive soundscapes. SOUNDWALK premiered in New York's Central Park, and expanded to urban parkland around the world, including Los Angeles's Griffith Park, London's Regent's Park & Primrose Hill, and Tokyo's Ueno Park. Influenced by the likes of Brian Eno, Nala Sinephro, Kamasi Washington, Air, and Floating Points, Reid is bold and graceful, bringing placid atmospheres into ominous complication with the subtlety of the sun moving across the sky."
Peni Candra Rini - Wulansih (Indonesia)
“The album mixes a wide range of materials, including traditional Javanese gamelan singing, Balinese chant, stringband music of the 1960s, and intercultural improvisations, bringing them all together through my contemporary compositional approach. We created experimental ensembles, and even experimental instruments and tunings to create an album that, whatever you think of it, sounds like nothing else.”
Patrick Shiroishi - Glass House
Original soundtrack to Volta Collective's Glass House, a dance film directed by Mamie Green. Very different and beautiful work from this LA sax improviser, combining field recordings, ambient piano, etc.
Nala Sinephro - Endlessness (Belgium/UK)
“British composer, keyboardist, and harpist Nala Sinephro juggles elements of ambient, jazz, and electronic music to create a soothing sprawl of sounds that is by turns meditative, propulsive, and lyrical... The entire 10-part, 45-minute work is built around a single arpeggio that’s transmuted, reshaped, and passed around from instrument to instrument as the album progresses—Sinephro’s attempt to convey the beauty and wonder of life cycles and eventual rebirth."
Marcos Valle - Túnel Acústico. (Brazil)
"Between the release of his first album in 1962 and today, Marcos Valle has released twenty-two studio albums traversing definitive bossa nova, classic samba, iconic disco pop, psychedelic rock, nineties dance and orchestral music. With his twenty-third studio album, Valle set out to bring it all together."
Yngel - Silva (Denmark)
Two electric guitars + string quartet - " the 6 musicians sensitively and skilfully improvise around one another to the point where the voices of individual instruments are often hard to discern."
Younes Zarhoni - Self-titled (Belgium)
“Drawing from an urbane Antwerpian upbringing and a Moroccan family lineage, the Brussels-based multidisciplinary artist’s latest focus is on the compositional power of pure harmony and silence: namely, his polyphonic renditions of medieval mystical poetry, sung in multiple voices and left to solemnly radiate beyond their given spatial grounds."