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.
Brian Baumbusch
Polytempo Music
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Polytempo Music Other Minds Records
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Compact Disc (CD)
Bay Area composer Brian Baumbusch has a thing for math, using numbers to create dense webs of simultaneous, overlapping rhythm to mesmerize and scramble the brain of his listeners. Last spring, I wrote about a stunning album of his that seamlessly blended the playing of the incomparable JACK Quartet with a gamelan orchestra, bridging wildly divergent musical systems. Now, he returns with something even more jaw-dropping. Building on a love for early minimalism—particularly the way some of the pioneering work of Philip Glass underwent such a slow yet steady transformation that shifts were often only noticeable after they occurred—he’s created a dense work where each voice of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players performs in its own tempo. For the recording, each musician listened to their own click track as they played, but the end result is a glorious feast of rhythm and harmony that seems to be in constant flux. The composer executed the piece with such rigor and exactitude that it can be easy to miss how these disparate lines come together with seamless joy, energy, and beauty. Charles Amirkhanian, the album’s executive producer, refers to the music as “inconspicuous complexity,” and indeed, the surface of the music is decidedly accessible and pleasing; it requires no special knowledge or training. All we need to do is hone in on this or that voice, and the way they interact with the others that surround them. Baumbusch refers to each part as a “tempo stream,” each operating freely while helping to construct a work of such intricate detail, contrapuntal grandeur, and fizzy propulsion that it feels like an act of nature.
Leo Chadburn
The Primordial Pieces
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The Primordial Pieces Leo Chadburn / Simon Bookish
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Compact Disc (CD)
British composer Leo Chadburn trawled through musical sketches he made more than 25 years ago to revise and develop the pieces found on his latest album, a stunning minimalist showcase where the most skeletal material feels gorgeously expansive. Pianist Ben Smith tackles three of the five works—with the composer adding subtle synth accents on two of them—beginning with “The Reflective Pool,” a series of patiently and elegantly intoned arpeggios whose sustain is underlined by electronic halos. It’s one of several pieces here that seem to levitate almost motionless, quietly enveloping the listener with decaying overtones that seem to reveal more action than the rolling lines from which they emerged. “Camouflage” goes through endless shifts in phrasing and accents while retaining the same harmonic contour—as if watching the infinite sparkle on the surface of a a placid sea—while the closing piece “A Secret” is an ascending scalar line “Map of the World” is a knockout string quartet in which a single chord is sustained for 10 glorious minutes of sensuous harmony, with variation coming primarily from shifting bow pressure or arco speed, casting a mesmerizingly beautiful ambience that could sustain for eternity. While certain listeners might complain that nothing happens, I only wish the reverie didn’t end so soon. “De La Salle (Violins)” employs a similar tact with greater aggression and volume, with the bows in constant motion to produce an eerily still yet pregnant atmosphere, effectively charged by terse single line variants. Technically, not too much happens, but it’s among the most exciting things I’ve heard all year.
Onceim
Laminaire
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Laminaire Relative Pitch Records
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Compact Disc (CD)
Onceim is a remarkable French ensemble filled with agile musicians from across the spectrum of improvised and contemporary music, closing the gap between practices that too often stunt new music when the players struggle with finding their way beyond the score. Founded by pianist and organist Frédéric Blondy, who serves as artistic director, the orchestra has forged an ability to interpret experimental scores, often produced by figures outside of the academy, including Ellen Arkbro, Jim O’Rourke, and Christian Marclay. The group performed one of the most memorable concert experiences of my life when I saw them play a piece from Éliane Radigue’s Occam Ocean series created with them. For this project, the ensemble itself created compositional forms collectively, in real-time—no mean feat for a group of 33 musicians. Most of this album is occupied by the piece “Gorges Gard,” a 48-minute behemoth that twists and turns through countless shifts achieved by some form of inner rapport that allows the musicians to think along similar lines. Sections of the orchestra seem to gravitate toward one mode or another, with assorted outliers creating dissension and offering other potential pathways forward. There’s an undeniable openness that makes it clear the musicians aren’t playing from a score, but the discipline and nuanced listening is still astonishing. That friction between improv and spontaneous form-building transmits a special in-between quality as the musicians test out and explore new timbres, counter lines, and harmonies as they go, holding on and expanding things that work, while pivoting almost imperceptibly from things that don’t.
Chico Mello / Helinho Brandão
Chico Mello / Helinho Brandão
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Chico Mello / Helinho Brandão Black Truffle
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2 x Vinyl LP
Brazilian singer, guitar, and composer Chico Mello has released only a handful of recordings over the last four decades, but his modest output has explored a dizzying array of approaches, nonchalantly colliding seemingly incongruous ideas. Since the late ‘80s he’s lived in Berlin, where he moved to study with modern classical composers Dieter Schnebel and Witold Szalonek. His music is featured on one of the very first releases on the starkly experimental label Edition Wandelweiser, working with fellow guitarist and Brazilian expat Silvia Ocougne to forge an unlikely but winning collision of samba and post-Cagean exploration. He later forged a deliciously arty bossa nova sound with the German musician Nicholas Bussman under the name Telebossa. Before leaving Brazil, he made this sui generis album with saxophonist Helinho Brandão, presaging the strange hybrids he’s pursued ever since. Mello pushed the experiments of bossa nova great Edu Lobo past the breaking point, blending harmony singing with prog flourishes, contemporary classical sonorities, and free improvisation in a way that still sounds sui generis four decades later. The opening piece, “Água,” sounds like it could be a score from some trippy ‘70s horror flick despite its richly melodic core, offering endless twists and turns—both serene and unsettling. From track to track, Mello pays no heed to stylistic purity, weaving together a feast of contrasting styles and approaches, but his scrupulousness and invention with such disparate ideas feels as original and deep as anything else in this column.
Amy Brandon
Lysis
Amy Brandon
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Lysis Amy Brandon
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Amy Brandon
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Eight years ago Amy Brandon released Scavenger, an album of her own classical guitar playing infused with jazz cadences, improvisation, and electronic treatments. The Canadian has largely put down her instrument to write for others, and on her first portrait album, her compositional voice reveals a staggering growth. Each of these eight works occupy richly varied spaces. “Intermountainous,” from 2017, captures an early stage of that transformation, with Brandon increasingly saturating the virtuosic 10-string guitar playing of Julian Bertino—which in itself is rich in microtonal overtones and jagged phrases—in ghostly electronics. But the subsequent pieces find her busting out of any single artistic mode. The terse opening work “microchimerisms,” played by flutist Sara Constant, is a texture-driven abstraction that aptly sets the tone for what follows—including “threads,” a bruising series of swelling gestures played by the string trio Chartreuse, which are loaded with microtonal bursts, visceral, slashing noise, and electrifying harmonies. “Caduceus” veers from down-tuned cello figures played by India Gailey and Leah Plave into the lush resonance of upper register gestures, haloed and enhanced by the composer’s sizzling electronics. Microtonal piano patterns played by Daniel Añez set the character for the remarkable “Tsiyr,” cleaved by the jittery arco lines played by Quatour Bozzini and the darting flute and clarinet of Jeffrey Stonehouse and Gwénaëlle Ratouit. “Affine” offers a constellation of staccato sounds which are gradually subsumed in acrid brass and reed harmonies, while “Simulacra” reveals Brandon’s feel for orchestral writing, with cellist Jeffrey Ziegler delivering a fierce solo amid the monumental swelling and receding melodic grandiosity of Symphony Nova Scotia. The album concludes with Bozzini tackling the title piece, a slow ascent from whispery shadows to hell-bent microtonality that leaves the listener off-balance and thirsting for more.
Splinter Reeds
Dark Currents
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Dark Currents Splinter Reeds
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Compact Disc (CD)
As much as I’ve enjoyed previous recordings from Splinter Reeds, the extraordinary winds quintet led by bassoonist Dana Jessen on Dark Currents feels like a highwater mark—a recording that finally reveals the fullest diapason of its dazzling versatility and curiosity. I wouldn’t necessarily have expected a piece by Bang on A Can co-founder Michael Gordon to create a piece that so powerfully reveals the ensemble’s mettle, but his idea-packed marvel “Tall Grass” does just that. Even as the composition sets off with familiar post-Philip Glass-adjacent minimalism, the way the composer utilizes each of the virtuosic voices—joining Dessen is oboist Kyle Bruckmann, saxophonist Nicki Roman, clarinetist Bill Kalinkos, and bass clarinetist Jeff Anderle—breaking them into fast-moving sections and injecting a steady array of harmonic effects that seem to transform the timbre into something almost electronic. The kaleidoscopic action morphs with astonishing fluidity, bringing psychoacoustic f*ckery within a dizzyingly peripatetic excursion. Paula Matthusen’s “Antenna Studies” veers more toward abstraction, delving further into more elusive sound worlds into which are woven aerated traces of radio broadcasts. The composer has claimed that the work is designed so that it “may be tuned into by performers and audience members at different points, either by radio or phone.” I’m not sure how it works with radio or phone, but listening to the meticulously placed sonic strata produced by Splinter Reeds on my speakers I’ve been tuned in and turned on.
Andile Khumalo
Tracing Hollow Traces
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Tracing Hollow Traces New Focus Recordings
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This invaluable recording offers the first substantial portrait of the bold South African composer Andile Khumalo, a figure who’s managed unlikely fusions of spectralism and indigenous styles of his homeland, situated within classical forms—more or less. The originality and bite of his writing arrive straight away in “The Broken Mirrors of Time,” a large ensemble piece crisply tackled by the Argento Ensemble. Richly detailed phrases voiced by brass, strings, and tuned percussion unleash a variety of memorable motifs, but the spectralist harmonic cast—in which musical materials are mathematically analyzed to generate into a graphic spectrum of sound—injects the music with adroit tension, opening up unusual and unexpected harmonies that lend the melodic figures greater interest. Many of the pieces apply such approaches within a more familiar compositional structure, which both adds an expansive aura to the music while making what might appear to be radical techniques more approachable. The title composition is a piece for solo clarinet masterfully tackled by Carol McGonnell—a four-and-half-minute marvel that compresses elegant form and visceral sonic effects. Chicago’s Ensemble Dal Niente recorded the composer’s haunting “Beyond Her Mask” on its 2021 album confined. speak., and it’s reprised here; but the group and its members also tackle three other pieces, including the wonderfully stark “ISO[R],” where Mabel Kwan’s opening piano suggests the rumbling of gong before reverting to a more commonplace sound, engaged in a agile, spry dance with the flute of Constance Volk and cello of Juan Horie. The tightly coiled quartet piece “Cry Out” finds four Dal Niente members articulating a slew of motifs put through the ringer, reshaped, redirected, and revoiced endlessly over the course of nine fraught minutes.
David Fulmer
immaculate sigh of stars
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immaculate sigh of stars New Focus Recordings
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A genuine triple threat composer, conductor, and violinist, David Fulmer reveals serious exactitude and range on this strong new portrait album which focuses on his writing. While working firmly within the new music establishment, Fulmer imbues familiar forms and styles with leading edge intensity and curiosity, enlisting a heavy-duty cast of soloists to bring his ideas to life. The album opens with a vast orchestral work that showcases the slashing virtuosity of violinist Stefan Jackiw in a piece that built outward from a hefty cadenza that Fulmer originally played himself. As the work, performed here by the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, he developed and composed significant passages before and after the cadenza—which remains at its core—turning to a string quartet within the large ensemble as its connective tissue. JACK Quartet cellist Jay Campbell is the jaw-dropping soloist on “Cantantes Metalles,” a fierce trio where all three musicians contribute clangorous bits of metallic percussion, with the soloist doubling simultaneously on bowed crotales, Conor Hanick preparing his piano with metal objects, and percussionist Mike Truesdell playing nothing that isn’t made from metal. A much different timbre and intimacy is projected on the next work, “I have loved a stream and a shadow,” a solo piano piece played by Conrad Tao, in which the tripartite structure wends through glassy introspection and lurching turbulence. The rest of the album sticks to solos, duos, and trios, but the intensity and density of ideas remain consistent.
Quatuor Bozzini & junctQín Keyboard Collective
a root or mirror, blossom, madder, cracks; together
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Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
In his sharply observed liner note essay, Canadian composer Martin Arnold refers to the two pieces on this beguiling album—written by Rebecca Bruton and Jason Doell—as “psychedelic,” which is not a description one expects for contemporary classical music. “It seems to me that undermining/displacing cultural conventions/pre-conditionings is not a straightforward task. You can’t just do something that’s not them: something the opposite or something exotically strange, for example.” Indeed, both works undercut a familiarity with weird, disorienting elements. In Bruton’s “Faerie Rhythm,” it’s the composer’s own folk-ish, wordless singing and shy whistling that feels deliciously alien, limning elegantly proportioned lines and shapes articulated by Montréal’s endlessly adventurous and adaptable Quatour Bozzini. All of that sits alongside the work of Toronto keyboard trio junctQín, which sticks exclusively to acoustic piano here. The relative activity of the two outer sections of the piece involved all the musicians, but the two middle parts strip things down to a sparse solo piano passage, which is soon enhanced by solo piano, joining to refashion the outer parts in a solemn, melancholy reverie of unabashed beauty and deceptive simplicity. Doell’s undeniably trippy “to carry dust & breaks through the body” get a lot of its warped qualities from the deceptive fake drone that emerges as the strings steadily pitch down half a step throughout the piece while the piano maintains the same tuning, which makes it seem as if the keyboard is losing it. The interplay between the work’s tender melodic thrust and the increasingly sour harmonic confusion provides its unalloyed power.
Aki Takahashi
Piano Space 3
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Aki Takahashi: Piano Space 3 musical observations
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Japanese pianist Aki Takahashi, who would go on to become one of Morton Feldman’s favorite interpreters, made her recorded debut in 1973 with a triple LP set focusing on contemporary music from her homeland, complemented by a set of music by European modernists and a single piece by John Cage. The collection firmly established her virtuosity and innate feeling for a vast repertoire of radical 20th century music. Musical Observations, the non-for-profit established in 1975 by New York violinist Paul Zukofsky, released the music in the U.S. a few years later as individual albums. Earlier this year, the label shared newly remastered versions of the music online, bringing out fresh nuances in Takahashi’s muscular yet lithe performances through Ian Turner’s deft engineering. Several pieces were written specifically for the pianist, including Joji Yuasa’s “On the Keyboard,” which inherently criticized the conservative values of many Japanese concert halls which forbade musicians from experimenting inside the piano. Yori-Aki Matsudaira’s “Allotropy for Pianist” translates the way certain chemical elements can exist in multiple states into sound, and the composition moves through a series of techniques the composer was taught to avoid as a student. The collection also includes bracing accounts of pieces by Toru Takemitsu and Keijiro Satoh, and collectively the album paints a vivid portrait of Japan’s stunning creative vanguard of the 1960s and 1970s, when the experimental advances of the New York school were adapted and transformed with indigenous aesthetic prerogatives.
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