Sounds Heard: Lisa Bielawa—In Medias Res
Boston Modern Orchestra Project has long been forging ties with contemporary composers and developing new audiences for modern music in the concert hall and beyond. Every season since 2000 BMOP has hosted a composer-in-residence and in 2008 it launched house record label BMOP/sound, focusing on new and otherwise unrecorded orchestral works. For three years beginning with the 2006-7 season, composer Lisa Bielawa served as the BMOP resident composer, and her BMOP/sound CD In Medias Res draws a map through her time working with the musicians of this group. read more
By Alexandra Gardner
Published: 8/31/2010

Sounds Heard—Dawn of Midi: First
While Dawn of Midi is comprised of émigré musicians from three different countries—Pakistani percussionist Qasim Naqvi hails from Pakistan, pianist Amino Belyamani is Moroccan and bassist Aakaash Israni came from India—the music they create together does not betray their origins. Rather, their extremely heady stew has the energy of totally free improvisation, as well as the inevitability of a more straight-ahead approach to the music. So when Naqvi bangs on toys in addition to his drum kit, Belyamani sticks his hand inside the keyboard to increase the timbral possibilities, or Israni ekes out various whomps on his double-bass, the resultant sound is a bizarre yet completely natural sounding amalgam. It has an expansiveness reminiscent of Albert Ayler's pianoless masterpiece Spiritual Unity and yet at the same time the surehandedness of the Bill Evans Trio's legendary Village Vanguard sessions. Perhaps it's a sign that the avant-garde and the so-called mainstream are indeed, as Darcy James Argue has stated on these pages, no longer really all that far apart. read more
By Frank J. Oteri
Published: 8/24/2010

Sounds Heard—ETHEL: Oshtali
In addition to a steady stream of regular concert touring, the string quartet ETHEL routinely conducts educational initiatives throughout the country. Most recently they set up shop at the Chickasaw Summer Arts Academy in Ada, Oklahoma, working directly with 11 young composers ranging in age from 13 to 21 to record Oshtali, the first album in history to feature the works of American Indian student composers The students had received coaching from Chickasaw Nation Composer-In-Residence Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate in 2008 and 2009, and they participated in every aspect of the album production process, including recording sessions at the Oklahoma City University Wanda L. Bass Music Center. The project is part of ongoing initiatives created by the Chickasaw Nation Division of Arts and Humanities read more
By Alexandra Gardner
Published: 8/17/2010

Sounds Heard: The Music of Ezra Laderman Volumes 1-9
Ezra Laderman has been a major behind-the-scenes force in American music for many decades. Generations of composers have studied composition with him and he has also been a tireless advocate for the field at large. But perhaps as a result of all of this work helping other composers, Laderman's own compositions have not been in the public consciousness as much as they should be. However, over the past decade, Albany Records has released a total of nine CDs devoted to the music of Ezra Laderman, all in compelling performances that were personally supervised by him. And in late June, in honor of Laderman's 86th birthday, they issued all nine volumes together in a deluxe boxed set. Such a generous offering of a single living composer's output offers listeners an opportunity that is all too rare. It's a lot of music to absorb, but it's well worth the effort. read more
By Frank J. Oteri
Published: 8/10/2010

Sounds Heard: Scott Johnson—Americans
Composer/guitarist Scott Johnson has a knack for orchestrating the pitches and rhythms of recorded speech, and has evolved a signature style over the years, which combines this technique with elements of his rock music-inspired upbringing. His most recent CD Americans, takes that ball and runs with it. read more
By Alexandra Gardner
Published: 8/4/2010

Sounds Heard: thingNY—ADDDDDDDDD
Isabel Castellvi, Andrew Livingston, Paul Pinto, Erin Rogers, and Jeffrey Young, the five composer/performers behind ADDDDDDDDD, use bursts of noise tangled with a playful chamber orchestra to craft a hodgepodge of accompaniment throughout the 12-track piece, but the non-singing human voices stand front and center from start to finish. There's the Woody Allen-esque navel gazing neurotic, the irritatingly chipper infomercial salesman, and a whole host of actors emphatically giving voice to dialog that, for most of us, is usually kept internal. read more
By Molly Sheridan
Published: 7/27/2010

Sounds Heard—Corey Dargel: Someone Will Take Care of Me
For nearly a decade Corey Dargel has been making extraordinarily weird musical concepts sound natural and almost mainstream by packaging them as popular songs. Irregular meters and phrases, totalist polyrhythms, and unstable harmonic movement are commonplace throughout his oeuvre. But all of these advanced musical techniques are never ends in and of themselves; in fact, since these devices serve his songs so well, a casual listener might not even realize all of what's going on in Dargel's electronically generated song accompaniments. But if Corey Dargel's output has always been the work of a singer-songwriter who engages in heady compositional strategies, he completely ups the ante with the two song cycles that constitute his latest recording, the double-CD Someone Will Take Care of Me: Thirteen Near-Death Experiences and Removable Parts. For starters, rather than arbitrary collections of vignettes (as are most albums of songs), these two cycles are both self-contained larger-scale works which maintain coherent through-lines in terms of their verbal narratives as well as their musical setting—each contain recurring thematic material as well as consistent instrumentation. In fact, an aspect that sets all of this material apart from Dargel's previous work is its clear allusion to the sound world of "classical" song cycles. read more
By Frank J. Oteri
Published: 7/20/2010

Sounds Heard: Sqwonk—Black
Music for multiples always has the potential to reveal the superhero characteristics of the featured instrument. It's perfect territory for composers craving the aural illusion of extra notes, thick timbres, and never-ending strings of melody. There is also great potential for quirkiness, from active imaginations vamping on whatever-the-instrument-may-be on steroids, or what might happen if it could suddenly fly. The bass clarinet-wielding San Francisco-based duo Sqwonk, comprised of Jeff Anderle and Jonathan Russell, dive into both the supercharged and the potentially off-the-wall nature of instrument multiples with their CD Black. read more
By Alexandra Gardner
Published: 7/13/2010

Sounds Heard: Tom Hamilton—Pieces for Kohn, Formal & Informal Music
Fans of the music of Robert Ashley will know Tom Hamilton as the guy behind the consoles who has mixed the voices and processed the electronic soundtrack in real time for all of Ashley's performances for the past twenty years. The truly lucky have also been exposed to Hamilton's own fascinating compositions, such as London Fix, an algorithmically generated electronic score based on the vagaries of the London stock market, or his remarkable works for acoustic instruments and processors employing an electronic harmony generator that were collected on last year's Local Customs. But the starting point for Hamilton's unique musical evolution is the material contained on a new two-CD collection, re-issues of two long out-of-print LPs recorded in St. Louis over 30 years ago. read more
By Frank J. Oteri
Published: 6/22/2010

Sounds Heard: John King—10 Mysteries
Chance and improvisation are the primary forces driving composer/violist/guitarist John King's 3rd CD of riveting, inventive string quartets. Performed by his quartet, Crucible, comprised of King on viola, Cornelius Dufallo and Mark Feldman on violin, and Alex Waterman on cello, the three works on this disc are all very different from one another, and yet they share a surprisingly organic sense of flow and structure. read more
By Alexandra Gardner
Published: 6/15/2010

Introduction to A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music
One of the aims of this book is to help those younger artists in dealing with the richness of the legacy that they carry, as well as in understanding what has been achieved, what was shown to be possible, and what remains to be realized. read more
By George E. Lewis
Published: 6/14/2010

Sounds Heard: Dither—Dither
Dither, the four-man electric guitar quartet, delivers a bracing self-titled debut album that flexes the ears in quite a few compelling directions. read more
By Molly Sheridan
Published: 6/8/2010

Sounds Heard: Keith Jarrett and Charlie Haden—Jasmine
Like numerous recordings by the Standards Trio, the Jarrett-Haden duo session (titled Jasmine) evokes a bygone world not only with the material being performed (American popular song standards) and the approach to its performance (straight-ahead), but also in the production values that went into making the recording. There's no fancy multi-tracking or the opportunity for multiple takes. In fact, Jasmine was pretty much unrehearsed. It was recorded entirely in Jarrett's home, and features him performing on the piano he practices on every day, a worn American Steinway whose action is uneven across the keyboard. The conditions under which this album was made are akin to the extremely vulnerable settings in which most of the great golden age jazz recordings were made; it's a condition to which the present album successfully aspires. read more
By Frank J. Oteri
Published: 5/25/2010

Sounds Heard: Bobby Previte—Diorama
Previte didn't turn around, say anything, or in any way acknowledge my presence. In fact it wasn't until I looked up Previte online during the writing of this article that I had any idea what his face looked like. But his square jaw protruding behind his narrow neck, his blond mohawk springing from grey stubble, his bare feet—I'll just say these elements become pretty consuming, visually speaking, especially when you're practically straddling the dude. read more
By Trevor Hunter
Published: 5/19/2010

Sounds Heard: Jeremy Haladyna—Selections from The Mayan Cycle
Jeremy Haladyna's Mayan Cycle is a very thoroughly conceived sonic universe, but whether or not any of these devices are perceptible—I had no idea what this music could possibly be about before I read through the notes—is ultimately beside the point since the results are so fascinating. Haladyna's music sounds so strange, in part, due to the weird scale Haladyna uses for several of the pieces, an octave-less 39-pitch system featuring intervals which have no correspondence to any other tuning system and that stretches across the entire range of a piano. There are clearly discernible melodies and harmonies, but ones which are completely without any recognizable context. Complex Mayan mathematical schemes also suggest rhythmic relationships and the means to generate them. Many of the compositions feature turntable scratching, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with an attempt at hip-hop crossover. Rather, as Haladyna explains in his rather extensive CD booklet notes, it is yet another way to express the difficulty in aligning metacycles. read more
By Frank J. Oteri
Published: 5/11/2010