The taxonomy of contemporary classical music—new music, contemporary music, whatever you want to call it—is a thorny issue. But every month, we’ll take a look at some of the best composer-driven music to surface here on Bandcamp, that which makes room for electronic experimentation, improvisation, and powerful takes on old classics.
Adrián Demoč
Piano
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Piano elsewhere
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Compact Disc (CD)
Over the last three or four years Slovak composer Adrián Demoč has produced a steady stream of beautifully articulated music drawn from reduced materials. He exhibits an impressive sense of imperturbability, discovering richly nuanced potential in the most stripped-down forms. This new album features three pieces for the titular instrument, deftly performed by Czech pianist Miroslav Beinhauer—featured in the previous edition of this column, playing music for the ultra-rare sixth-tone harmonium—all of which were either designed or adapted for variable instrumentation. I was immediately enraptured by the familiar melody of “Ma fin est mon commencement,” which had previously been realized by the British ensemble Apartment House in a trio account on the 2021 album Hlaholika. Demoč conceived that and the following composition, “Gebrechlichkeit,” with three instrumental possibilities in mind, and the transformation as a solo piano work is utterly convincing. It’s not a simple transcription for another instrument, but a wholly unique—albeit closely related—creation. Across all three works, Beinhauer digs in deep, imparting a delicate touch to each repeating phrase, morphing with molasses-slow placidity. Overtones hang forlornly over the proceedings as he weaves subtle shifts into the measured fabric in a way that almost makes Morton Feldman’s music feel impatient.
Christina Kubisch & Trondheim Voices
Stromsänger
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Stromsänger imprec
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Vinyl LP
Veteran German sound artist and composer Christina Kubisch found inspiration for Stromsänger while riding a tram in the Norwegian city of Liam, next to Trondheim, where her customized induction headphones picked up otherwise inaudible electromagnetic fields on the train, which she later recorded. The members of Trondheim Voices then sang pure tones in harmony with those electronic sounds, following loose instructions from the composer. That began a process in which those recordings were played back and recorded in Berlin’s Elisabethkirche multiple times, altered by the resonant frequencies of the space, á la Alvin Lucier’s iconic “I Am Sitting in a Room,” washing them out in an ethereal glow. All of this effort was implanted into the beginning of Stromsänger, which unfolds in three sections. The pre-recorded voices and electronic tones made while the tram was waiting to depart gradually segue into live wordless singing. In the next section, tones from the ride are broken into six separate channels, each given to one of the singers, upon which they improvise, sometimes engaging in duos or trios with the other singers. In the final section, the names of tram stops are announced as a form of sound poetry in overlapping voices until they linger over the final stop, Liam, which is voiced through a pre-taped iteration projected into the Norwegian countryside and recorded, as the voices were at the start of the piece. Even without knowing the context, the music takes the listener on a trippy sonic journey.
Nick Dunston
Colla Voce
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Compact Disc (CD)
Over the last few years, Nick Dunston has rapidly blossomed from first-call double bassist for the likes of Tyshawn Sorey and Vijay Iyer into a multi-layered creative force creating music that lays waste to any specific discipline. As strong as his previous work has been, this new juggernaut, which he bills as an “Afro-Surrealist Anti-Opera,” achieves new heights. I’ve never heard anything like it. The Berlin-based Dunston used a commissioning opportunity with JACK Quartet, America’s most adventurous and technically advanced string ensemble, to forge a work built on dualities, colliding composed and improvised music; acoustic and electronic sounds; and instrumental and vocal elements. The sounds played by JACK are insanely visceral, with lacerating scratch notes, un-pitched scrapes, and just intonation harmony. But at times Dunston treats them like readymades, layering them with his own furious bass playing, or dissolving them within an attack laid down by a string Berlin-based ensemble rooted in jazz. Working closely with producer Weston Olencki, Dunston operates like a master sculptor, using edits and electronic treatments to facilitate mind-melting blends further interwoven with a quartet of daring vocal improvisers from both sides of the Atlantic—Isabel Crespo Pardo, Sofia Jernberg, Cansu Tanrikulu, and Friede Merz—who toggle between language and pure sound. Dunston is juggling a sh*t-ton of material here, and it could’ve easily collapsed under its own weight. But instead, he’s created a suite of dazzling extremes and electrifying confrontation that reveals a razor-sharp vision. There’s not nearly enough space in this column to dig into a textual analysis, but nothing about Colla Voce is simple. After a dozen listens I’m still coming to terms with it, but each spin has only made the process more enticing and rewarding.
Danny Clay
No More Darkness, No More Night
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Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Bay Area composer Danny Clay named this stunning work after a line in the Hank Williams tune “I Saw the Light,” with some of the material originally written for a musical “séance” for the country great. Its most palpable connection to country music is the composer’s gorgeous pedal steel guitar playing, a liquid presence that both glides over and seeps into sophisticated string quartet writing. As with his superb 2020 album Ocean Park, Clay creates ambient music of uncommon depth, eschewing the typical swell and drift that makes most work under the rubric such a bore. At first listen, I was reminded of early ambient masterpieces by Brian Eno and Harold Budd; but Clay carves out his own space, constructing sounds for contemplation and meditation, marked by a level of detail and variation missing in almost all ambient music I hear today. The string arrangements—meticulously articulated by Friction Quartet—glide peacefully, but their motion is rigorously complicated by individual voices extending out of the fold, unveiling new textures and lovely melodic excursions, or by elegant contrapuntal writing that defies any hint of monolithic drift. The music gets a deliciously murky cast thanks to heavy reverb—the work’s sole concession to ambient convention—and the composer has also poured in layers of cross-faded e-bowed pedal steel that serve both as a soothing gloss and a connective tissue. The real focus, though, remains Clay’s arresting chamber-like writing. I don’t know of anyone creating more substantial, moving ambient sounds these days.
J.P.A. Falzone
A Curving Abacus
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J. P. A. Falzone: A Curving Abacus New World Records
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Compact Disc (CD)
I first encountered musician-composer J.P.A. Falzone as a key member of Boston’s daring Ordinary Affects, an ensemble devoted to experimental composition—whether it’s the music of Alvin Lucier and John Cage or members of the Wandelweiser Collective, or its own members like Jordan Dykstra and Laura Cetilia. The music featured on this terrific portrait CD, which spans 2017–2022, is less specific in its compositional motivation. As James Romig’s liner note essay points out, Falzone employs a variety of abstract generative strategies—most drawn from scientific or mathematical sources—to formulate his compositions, but it’s hardly necessary to get into those weeds to submit to his sumptuously brooding music. The album opens with the oldest piece, “Zipf’s Law IV,” a slow-moving chamber orchestra work that evokes Morton Feldman in its use of subtle permutations, a tactic that also arises in “Punctuated Equilibrium,” where a series of elusive interventions inject instability into the cycling machine-like patterns. The five-year span of the work indicates that Falzone is getting better over time, as the 2021 piece “Metamerism” contains more space and more fascinating timbres while deploying irregular and elusive patterns of development. The title composition features the legendary Arditti Quartet, a wobbly microtonal gem that toggles with lyric beauty and acrid harmony, but it’s the newest piece, “A Tension Span”—masterfully played by Switch~ Ensemble—that’s most distinctive, a brooding update of a medieval form that ditches the old harmonic model as e a series repeating durations are calibrated with a series of repeating pitches. It feels thoroughly contemporary even while inhabiting an ancient structure.
Baudouin de Jaer
Five Traces – Geomungo Compositions Vol III
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Five Traces - Geomungo Compositions Vol III Baudouin de Jaer
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Compact Disc (CD)
Belgian composer Baudouin de Jaer has wide-ranging taste and a deep intellectual curiosity, which has led him from the outer edges of European contemporary music to exploring and subverting the language and tools of traditional music from Korea. His latest project is a five-movement suite composed for the geomungo, an ancient six-string bass zither played with a bamboo stick called a suldae. There is certainly an aura of colonial baggage haunting this work, a fact acknowledged in the liner notes with a comment from 2013 by Korean scholar Kim Young-Jae lamenting a lack of engagement with more traditional practices. But there’s nothing facile or shallow about his music. In fact, South Korea’s National Gugak Center has even honored him for his compositions for another traditional instrument, the gayageum.
The composer calls this a wordless opera, as he sketches out 24 different 50-second sequences in the opening movement, which provide the language for the following parts of the work. Each movement is tackled by a different geomungo virtuoso, with sections three and four enhanced by a second musician on changgu, a double-headed hourglass-shaped drum. I can’t say how de Jaer’s music extends or overturns the instrument’s traditional usage, but the various melodic and rhythmic figures rippling through these pieces, in single-note runs that shiver, twang, and snap, is exhilarating. “Traces II,” played by Shin Ji-Hee, contains a recurring rhythmic passage that recalls a rock groove, but most of the music embraces a more exploratory bent, where the motifs established in the first section blossom in exciting ways. The work feels like an invitation to a mystifying new world, while simultaneously feeling ancient.
Patrick Giguère & Cheryl Duvall
Intimes exubérances
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Intimes exubérances Redshift Music
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Compact Disc (CD)
Toronto pianist Cheryl Duvall, a co-founder of the terrific Thin Edge New Music Collective, commissioned this piece from fellow pianist Patrick Giguère, but her involvement in its development runs deeper than simply making the request. Giguère had avoided writing for piano for nearly 15 years, wary of composing for an instrument with which he has such a long history, deeply aware of its rules and limitations in a way he lacks for other instruments. After creating an early version, he workshopped the piece with Duvall, which both impacted its final touches and invested the interpreter with greater involvement and understanding. As he says in Nick Storring’s thoughtful liner note essay, “I trusted Chery with tempo, dynamics, pedal, and a lot of other performance decisions,” choices which reflect both his confidence in the pianist and the role improvisation had in its very genesis. The thorny four-part epic churns through changing dynamics, and its execution here relies heavily on sustain, as the overtones from densely jagged phrases pile up. It’s as if the piano is kicking up its own thick cloud of dust, forcing it to find its way forward through an obscured pathway. At the same time “Intimes exubérances” is a work of impressive clarity, and when the swirl of overtones subside, Duvall delivers knotty passages with dazzling precision and force. As the title suggests, the music moves between stretches of hazy introspection and muscular energy, but each seems to grow out of each other in the most organic, fluid manner—a steady stream of change beautifully realized by Duvall.
Sasha Elina
Different Songs, Vol. 1
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Different Songs. Vol 1 Sasha Elina
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The debut recording from London-based, Russian-born singer Sasha Elina is concise both in its 20-minute running time and in its gestures. The music was composed by a handful of European figures associated with the Wandelweiser Collective, the post-Cagean crew who often work with generous silence and lean materials, which is certainly the case here. Elina’s precision eschews ornamentation and outward virtuosity, but there’s an undeniable focus in her readings that rejects operatic aesthetics in favor of one closer to indie pop. That unusual twist lies at the heart of this triumphantly modest collection, which the singer made alone at home—some occasional external noise seeps in—with occasional accompaniment recorded remotely.The album opens with “My Sweet Love,” a gorgeous a cappella piece by German composer Eva-Maria Houben—a Wandelweiser mainstay—in which Elina’s breathy, unadorned incantation gives the delicate melody a treatment neatly conveying its tender sentiment. Two miniatures by Argentine composer Tomás Cabado, with piano accompaniment by Tim Parkinson, follow seamlessly—as if the singer is waking from a daydream and bringing a sense of ardor to the quotidian. “Early Riser” by Amsterdam-based composer Seamus Cater is another unaccompanied work that paints an idiosyncratic portrait of the British painter L.S. Lowry: It clocks in at a comparatively long five minutes, with Elina inhabiting the first-person narrative quietly and sweetly. The album concludes with five vignettes by Swedish composer Johan Lindvall, all with guitar accompaniment played by Cabado. The collection comes and goes quickly, with such a gentle touch that it almost feels like a palette cleanser, but there’s hidden pleasures all around it.
Various Artists
Musica Elettronica / Computer Music 1966-1972
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Musica Elettronica / Computer Music 1966-1972 Die Schachtel
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Vinyl LP
When this collection was originally released in 1972, it heralded a new era in Italian experimental music. An electronic music studio in Turin lagged far behind other such research centers across Europe, but the resourcefulness of pioneering figures like Pietro Grossi, Enore Zaffiri, and Teresa Rampazzi managed to establish a new practice in the country in the years before synthesizers became common. This new reissue is enhanced by the inclusion of three previously unissued pieces from the earliest days of the studio, credited to SMET (Studio di Musica Elettronica di Torino) rather than any individual. And while they feel like crude experiments akin to proof of concept, a la the first works of Heinz Schütz at Radio Cologne, they are interesting as a sonic artifact. The remaining attributed works bristle with inventive experimentation, as composers became familiar with new tools. The rest of the music comes from 1971–72, when synthesizers had joined the arsenal. Two works by Lorenzo Ferrero use spoken and sung texts as sonic and contextual material, with the electronic elements offering a wordless commentary. Two bristling pieces by Zaffiri convey the feeling of sonic research with an improvisational brio, as bleeps and blorps evolve and shoot across the alien soundfield. Voices as well as blown-out samples from what sound like Ramayana monkey chant litter Giovanni Sciarrino’s “Wake in Progress,” the most visceral and modernistic piece here, while the closing composition by Leonardo Gribaudo is a richly multi-layered excursion using the studio’s VCS 3 synth. The release comes with detailed liner notes and a fascinating timeline of the studio’s history.
Robert Carl
Infinity Avenue
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Infinity Avenue Robert Carl
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Compact Disc (CD)
In his early years, American composer Robert Carl explored a variety of different styles, often colliding seemingly incongruous aesthetics with impressive rigor. Over time, he’s increasingly devoted his energies to writing music based on the harmonic series. That work fills this dazzling double-CD set, with each piece written for wildly varied instrumentation, including some works with electronic interventions. “Updraft” was scored for a trombone ensemble—although here Matthew Russo overdubbed each part for two bass, six tenor, and two alto trombones—rooted to electronic drones, resulting in a 10-minute fantasia of billowing, harmonically psychedelic swirls, while “Splectar” delivers a strangely jangly take on just intonation, with electric guitar played by Matt Sargent, his tones fed through software and effects pedals to produce a veritable fountain of intensifying, kaleidoscopic spumes. No less gripping is “Night Garden,” a surprisingly airy work for the late Robert Black’s double bass quintet Large Furniture, in which each member sticks to a single open string on their instrument, one of which must either be a five-string model or be fitted with a C extension. Like much of the work here, the piece opens up a warmly inviting sound world, with endless internal motion despite a relatively monolithic form. There are also two disparate versions of the title piece, each employing software designed by the composer; one shapes the massed, morphing tones of an improvising sextet, while the other warps a mostly notated chamber orchestra. “The Inevitable Wave (B)” features the Crane Percussion Ensemble rising and falling over a recording of a crashing wave digitally stretched into a slowly building 10-minute crescendo.
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