Alex Weiser – in a dark blue night
A plangent, plunging bass line and the traipsing and frolicking of Spiegelberg’s clarinet introduce the titular ‘Coney Island’, which in rhapsodic terms describes a day at the beach without adults or limits, whose highlights include such quintessential fare as a hot dog at Nathan’s and a frozen custard, which in the recollection of Weiser’s grandmother was habitually dropped on the boardwalk by her friend. The plainspoken and digressional quality of his grandmother’s reminiscences make for pliant and whimsical vocal lines against the swirl of the ensemble, which in Dionne, Coleridge and Yang comprises the three founding members of the critically acclaimed Merz Trio. More they imbue Coney Island Days with a beautiful ache, the sublimation of nostalgia which doesn’t merely trade in wistful memories of a burnished past but sketches out and daubs with watercolour old and sometimes long-forgotten places and summons as if traced by a caressing finger the faces of old friends, infusing them with all of the vim and vigour of the present. That allows moments of unvarnished sentiment to really place you in their choke, as when Weiser’s grandmother caps her day at the beach with the lines ‘I had good times. All my family was loving to me’ as between the clinking of change and splashing of water the ensemble glides to a halt.
Allan Gilbert Balon – The Magnesia Suite
On the opening song ‘Stella Maris’ from his debut long play, the artist and composer Allan Gilbert Balon offers a cloistered procession of organ and voice which feels both evocative and utterly self-contained. The music of the piece bears comparison with the sustained notes and partial tones of works for organ and carillon by Charlemagne Palestine, but where the self-styled ‘avant-garde Quasimodo’ has hewed towards the secular through the celebration of his soft divinities, his cherished pile upon pile of plush toys, here Balon retains a more liturgical air, where it seems possible to trace every dust sprite as it arches and circles a vault or filters out from nave to transept.
Caroline Shaw & Sō Percussion – Rectangles and Circumstance
Meanwhile at the midpoint of Rectangles and Circumstance the old Scottish traditional ‘The Parting Glass’ – apparently the most popular parting song in all of Scotland before Robert Burns wrote ‘Auld Lang Syne’ – gets an airing through rubbed crystal and an inverted chord progression from Johann Sebastian Bach’s chorale ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’. And the Eric Cha-Beach-penned ‘Who Turns Out the Light’, described as an expression of ‘the loving but exhausted thought patterns of a parent trying to coax and calm a young child’, possesses a spacious and starry, slow-padding and anticipatory quality, like Björk somewhere between the music boxes and glitch electronics of tracks like ‘Aurora’ and ‘Sun In My Mouth’ from Vespertine and the kismet of ‘Desired Constellation’, a steadfast Medulla highlight.
Christopher Cerrone – Beaufort Scales
With interludes drawn from the novels of Herman Melville and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the poetry of Anne Carson and the text of the King James Bible, the composer Christopher Cerrone pays tribute to the beauty and elegance of the Beaufort scale, as the listener – almost palpably buffeted by high waves and their overhanging crests, the rolling seas and their patches of foam and spume – is left only to wonder whether the siren calls of the nine-strong Lorelei Ensemble augur or help to ward off imminent catastrophe, as if through the capsizing of their vessel or structural damage and the uprooting of trees as the storm makes its way steadily inland.
Laura Cannell – The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined
Hildegard collected her cycle of seventy-seven liturgical songs under the title Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum or Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations. With a nod to that phrase, the opening track from The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined plunges us straight into a swooning and beckoning darkness. Carried by the plangent tones of the bass recorder, these ‘cosmic spheres’ are portals of self-discovery and they go where we might fear to tread. There is a blackness as well as a sense of solace to the pieces on this album, with Cannell noting that she tends to revisit Hildegard’s own compositions ‘at times when I feel overwhelmed, or when I need to reset my inner musical dialogue’, but ‘See the Moon and the Stars’ is more rustic and folksy, with a percussive element nestled between the layers of bass recorder through her fingerings and the resultant vibratos.
Sarah Davachi – The Head as Form’d in the Crier’s Choir
Embarking on a fresh voyage, Sarah Davachi drones out at sea on ‘Possente Spirto’ from The Head as Form’d in the Crier’s Choir, her latest collection for solo performers and chamber ensembles. The title of the piece alludes to the ‘Possente spirto, e formidabil nume’ of the opera L’Orfeo by Claudio Monteverdi, an aria which captures the moment when the bard Orpheus strives to convince the ferryman Charon to allow him to pass into Hades, from where he hopes to recover his wife Eurydice, who has died and gone into the underworld after being bitten by a snake. In this rendering, which is regarded as one of the high water marks of the late Renaissance and early Baroque period, the elaborate yet heartfelt aria lulls Charon to sleep and Orpheus crosses the Styx, with Davachi’s piece capturing the wash and spume and the staggered descent of the journey, written for sustaining continuo and duos of string and brass, with Davachi performing on Mellotron and synthesizers with tape delay while Andrew McIntosh plays viola and Mattie Barbier adds plaintive appeals on the trombone.
Simon Knighton – Sound Sculptures, Dynamical Systems, Natural Environments
Forced inside by the coronavirus pandemic, on ‘Sound Sculptures’ the composer Simon Knighton meticulously edits strings and winds in a blurring of the borders between concert performance and installation art, then explores the shimmering world of chime percussion over the three movements of his ‘Dynamical Systems’, building his own bells from sheets of brass to contort the multilayered percussion of the third act.
Scott Wollschleger – Between Breath
Wollschleger and Lang have dubbed the result of the trombonist’s overpressure technique on ‘Between Breath’ a ‘dirty split tone’, while after reaching inside of her instrument, at the halfway point Rainwater’s piano turns achingly pensive, conducting a kind of elegiac search party with the pianist peering out from a lighthouse while a muzzled trombone snarls through thickets down below. ‘Anywhere, where threads go, it all goes well’ carries the same atmosphere while introducing a voice which seems to linger on the cusp of the beyond, a siren or selkie perhaps or a snatched glance from some other creature at the bottom of a dank hole, with Nathaniel LaNasa behind the piano and Lucy Dhegrae singing soprano as queasy clusters on the pitch pipe add to the permeating moistness. According to Wollschleger, the elliptical text for ‘Anywhere, where threads go, it all goes well’ stems from a fake John Ashbery tweet, via a social media account falsely attributed to the late American poet.
Wild Up – Julius Eastman Vol. 4: The Holy Presence
Figuring both the onerousness of dogma and the sheer heft of divine revelation, the contemporary music ensemble Wild Up dig deeper into the oeuvre of Julius Eastman and discover that when the archangel Michael and his retinue of saints choose to speak through you, there attends the ringing of church bells, a rending of the clouds and very possibly a splitting headache. Focusing on the act of enunciation while eliding the words themselves, the ensemble are joined by the acclaimed bass-baritone singer Davóne Tines for a rendition of Eastman’s sonorous ‘Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc’, which encourages the medieval heroine and subsequent queer icon to ‘speak boldly’ before Seth Parker Woods honours Clarice Jensen’s painstaking transcription through the staggering tenacity of a ten-part cello solo.
