Music

Classical & Jazz

by Christopher DeLaurenti

Amid the ongoing flood of new releases, several striking discs caught my ear recently. Robert Millis, one-half of longtime Seattle sonic experimenters Climax Golden Twins, has a new solo album. Beautifully packaged with a lurid collage of photos, money, and other tourist ephemera, Leaf Music Drunks Distant Drums (Anomalous Records) brims with bewitching field recordings from Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar. Millis recorded musical snatches of conversations (such as children shouting, "Money! No!"), distant drunken sing-alongs, chiming temple orchestras of bells and gongs as well as eerie swarms of stridulating insects and a rackety taxi ride. Steven Feld's The Time of Bells (VoxLox/Earth Ear) also reveals the music enmeshed in mundane life. Traveling through Italy, Finland, Greece, and France, Feld vividly captures twinkling clusters of cowbells, clattering festival frame drums, and solemnly tolling church bells.

The Barton Workshop, an Amsterdam-based ensemble, serves up compelling performances on Christian Wolff's (Re):Making Music (Mode) and James Tenney's Postal Pieces (New World Records). Wolff's (Re):Making Music suggests the folk music of the future, as if musicians got together and gleefully intermingled Cape Breton fiddling, protest songs ("Stop Using Uranium"), Irish reels, and astringent atonal snatches of 1950s punktmusik. The results are refreshing and ear-opening. Comprising short instructions on postcards, Tenney's Postal Pieces range from the mysterioso undulations of "Beast" for solo contrabass to the classic "Having Never Written a Note for Percussion," whose elongated washes of rolling tam-tam strokes eventually unleash a typhoon of hiss, ear-bending room resonance, flecks of digital grit, and other flickering tones.

I've also been savoring Noah Creshevsky's Hyperrealism (Mutable Music), a smorgasbord of sliced-up churchly chants, sitars, guitars, and classical music. Creshevsky's virtuosic sonic suturing melds quick cutups into long-limbed melodies that ingeniously blur the boundary between rhythm and melody.

Are CDs dead? Not yet. I remain skeptical of DVDs, especially the fledgling DVD-Audio format. Most 5.1 surround setups I've heard are wholly inadequate, using cheap, tiny speakers. And worse, almost everyone I know soon surrenders to the demands of décor, stuffing satellite speakers against the couch or smothering the subwoofer with magazines. But DVDs do enable the presentation of 1970s quadraphonic works like Morton Subotnick's Sidewinder and Until Spring, reissued together on Morton Subotnick Volume 2: Electronic Works (Mode). The classic Sidewinder, accompanied by the colorful, spermatozoan light projections of Tony Martin, plinks, rattles, pants, clanks, and sings with startling rhythmic vibrancy. Essential.

chris@delaurenti.net

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