The great contemporary-classical ensemble Alarm Will Sound continues to share recordings of material it performed at the Mizzou New Music Summer Festival last summer. Previously covered here was Liza White’s Bernstein/North-esque “Step!” Uploaded earlier this week was “We Were All,” a chamber orchestra work by composer Yotam Haber that calls for voices and, as delineated in the score, a keyboard with the following qualities: “preferably synth with an electric piano sound that has an 80s retro quality.”
The keyboard isn’t the only participant here with a retro quality. There is, to the pulsing rhythms and emotionally distant chant-like singing, something reminiscent of Steve Reich of that same era, especially his wonderful Tehilim. Distinguishing Haber’s piece is a daring sparseness. It may be scored for a mid-size ensemble, 16 total instruments and voices combined, but at any given moment it sounds more like only two or three might be playing, and even then the demands placed on them are more about a virtuosity of attention and rhythmic restraint than about anything remotely like show-stopping flair.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/alarm-will-sound. More on Alarm Will Sound at alarmwillsound.com. More on Haber at yotamhaber.com, including the complete score of “We Were All” as a PDF (from which the above image is excerpted). The work was commissioned by the Adele and John Gray Endowment Fund. The recording was made live on July 16, 2011.
The wind chime is not the most likely percussive instrument in a hip-hop track — nor a likely melodic component, for that matter. It is slight, and prone to inaccuracy, and has all the swagger of a mid-nap pixie-dust sprite. But in the hands of Third Person Lurkin, a characteristically old-school member of the roster at the Bulgarian netlabel Dusted Wax, the chime serves multiple purposes. (It also, truth be told, may be a tiny bell and not a chime, but the effect is the same.) It initially appears in the track “Over Forgotten Places,” off the Cloud Mirror album, as an accent, one sound among many. Even when it initially repeats, it seems more like a flourish than a building block. But as the track proceeds, that’s exactly what it is: the key enabler of swing in the track, a swing that’s as fragile as a dust-laden cobweb in an afternoon breeze, but a swing nonetheless (
The beach is a useful metaphor for a drone album. It offers images and associations including stasis, a blank horizon, an abyss-like edge, the threat of undertow, the white noise of natural occurrences. The metaphor provides the title for the latest from Summons of Shining Ruins, aka Shinobu Nemoto. Titled On the Beach, it is five tracks of lightly layered drones. The hiss on “It Was a Tragedy of Microscopic Proportions” in particular sounds like distant surf, a persistent low-level whir that suggests some massive outbreak of tinnitus. Beneath and above it all is a cantilevered melodic pulse, an ebb and flow of church-organ gravitas that has the feel, again, of a wave coming and going. The deep horn-like sound in turn comes to figure that of a warning to ships in a deep, unforgiving fog (
You can, indeed, have your UI cake, or at least your UI eye candy, and eat it, too. And sometimes the easiest way to accomplish this goal is to relegate the two different tasks to two different online locales. The netlabel Pocket Fields, for example, is lovely, as is often the music that it releases. Each page on its Tumblr-powered site (