Chas Smith is a musician who has created his own unique musical world—complete with its own instruments and language—which has often been compared to that of Harry Partch and Harry Bertoia. Smith’s, however, is a world of expansive musical tapestries and carefully sculpted textures that evolve via a slow, constant change of aural perspective. Twilight of the Dreamboats, a quintessential Smith electro-acoustic work, is an ever-evolving single gesture, a seamless blend of tones and timbres from his metal sound sculptures and his homemade and hot-rodded steel guitars. A 25-minute CD EP/single. Fanfare magazine wrote of this CD, “I am receptive to Chas Smith's instrumentarium and also to his music. Like early Ligeti (and like Brian Eno), Smith appears to favor clouds of sound that drift, expand, contract, and change colors and intensities. Twilight of the Dreamboats is innocent of rhythm, melody, and conventional harmonic progress…and what a feeling it creates!… Its drones sweep over and around the listener like a storm front, making him or her feel insignificant. Oh God, thy metallic orchestra is so big and I am so small. Even so, as mighty as Twilight of the Dreamboats is, its mightiness seems benevolent…. As most recreational drugs are illegal and potentially dangerous, I recommend Twilight of the Dreamboats every night before bedtime.” And Julien Cowley wrote in The Wire, “Chromium dreamscapes seeping out from resonant metal sculptures and steel guitars…. Twilight Of The Dreamboats, an oneiric montage of metallic tones and floating haloes, sonically chilly and alien yet with a strange otherworldly allure reminiscent of paintings by surrealist Yves Tanguy.” And Textura wrote, Twilight of the Dreamboats is a thoroughly satisfying piece of music, a lustrous mass of shimmering textures and evolving tonalities that unfolds with an unhurried elegance. Like a storm cloud moving so slowly across the sky it verges on imperceptible, Smith’s streaked-with-lightning setting subtly advances and recedes as it breathes controlled metallic fire for twenty-five absorbing minutes.”

35 Whirlpools Below Sound presents a fantastical soundworld of 19 short, richly detailed, multilayered electro-acoustic soundscapes jointly composed by Newman and Cox, whose musical friendship and ongoing working relationship date back to 1985. These enigmatic works, built of often mysterious juxtapositions of sounds, have been gestating and changing shape for many years, with ever an eye toward their eventual completion and release, which this CD marks. The album’s title was taken from a line in Hervey M. Cleckley’s classic psychology study, The Mask of Sanity, in which the author quotes the following sentence from one of his patient’s letters: "Until you gentlemen decide further what my occupation is, you may as well announce me as comforting 35 whirlpools below sound."

Six elegant, dark, sensuous soundscapes in which emotions seem to bubble just below cool surfaces. Harmonically rich and texturally subtle music that features idiosyncratic electric guitar playing techniques developed by composer/performer Cox, whom noted guitarist-composer Ry Cooder has called “a hidden master of the crepuscular and the diaphanous.” On this CD Cox is joined by celebrated composer/trumpeter Jon Hassell, popular film composer Thomas Newman (piano), and composer/performer/instrument designer Chas Smith (pedal steel guitar). The Wire magazine wrote of this album, “Gently undulating melodies are held in soft focus, without becoming cloying; [Cox’s] enveloping harmonies are less innocent than they first appear. Prettiness with a tough core.” And Fanfare magazine wrote, “If you imagine floating through the night sky on a large abstract tapestry, you’ll get a feeling for what Cox’s music is like.” Motion (UK), opined, “Quiet music of consummate musicianship…an achingly beautiful suite of pieces featuring slowly, oh-so-slowly shifting soundscapes. One of a kind and clear candidate for every ambienteer’s ‘Best of 2001’ list.”

Includes work(s) by Daniel Lentz. Soloists: Daniel Lentz, Jessica Lowe, Susan James, Bradford Ellis, David Kuehn, Arlene Dunlap.

River of 1,000 Streams is a wild new piece for piano and up to 11 ''cascading echoes'' that stack up to create dense sonic torrents, as well as more delicate textures. Performed by renowned pianist Vicki Ray, this virtuosic music rumbles from the piano's lowest notes up through its highest in a succession of lovely ever-drifting harmonies. Daniel Lentz has been a fixture on Southern California's new-music scene for more than 45 years, prolifically creating a very personal music that reflects and refracts various experimental and post-experimental trends. Hi smusic is both relentlessly propulsive and lushly beautiful, and it may hint at pop/jazz harmonies or toy with late Romantic gestures, while always offering Lentz's distinct musical vision and reveling in a joy of music-making. Grammy nominated new music champion Vickie Ray, a founding member of the California EAR Unit and Piano Spheres, has perfomred with the Los Angeles philharmonic and many other groups.

LENTZ Point Conception. 1 NightBreaker 2 • Arlene Dunap (pn); 1 Bryn Pezzone (pn) 2 • COLD BLUE 28 (46:22)


Daniel Lentz was particularly active and visible in the 1970s and 1980s, as one of the leading California composers of a Minimalist stamp. If Ingram Marshall was the moody, soulful voice of the Bay Area, with its fogs and mists, Lentz (b. 1942) was the L.A. freeway on overdrive: bright, edgy, poppy sounds and rhythms hammered about by mostly electronic keyboards. The music, with its sudden (and often) changes of harmony, felt like a sort of cubistic Minimalism. And its sound was unforgettable.


Of course the music lives on. I’m only using the past tense because Lentz seems to have dropped out of the scene (I’ll emphasize “seems” because it’s so easy to be contradicted by life). On the Web, the last mentioned piece comes from about 10 years ago, and there’s a cryptic reference to his current work of building kinetic sound-sculptures. I’d certainly be eager to experience whatever he’s whipping up now.


This disc contains one masterwork, Point Conception (1979). It’s a piece for nine pianos, but I doubt it’s really meant ever to be done live. Instead, this version is a multitracking of one player. What makes the piece quite ingenious is that each part plays nothing but octaves, often focused on one pitch. But when combined together, like the dots of a pointillist painting, the result can be dazzling. Aside from the technical trick, this is powerful stuff. The music clocks in at about 37 minutes, and it never lets up. There’s a sense that at each plateau, which could be an ending, the piece picks itself up, takes a breath, and then leaps to a greater height. Its energy and interest never flag.


Nightbreaker is from 1990. It’s a quarter the length of Point Conception , and it starts off as much more languid and jazzy. It picks up the pace, though, to reach a certain frenzy by the end. I would call it a sketch for the larger work, except that it’s a decade later—so perhaps we can call it a fragment from the workbench instead. In any case, it’s appealing; but it pales somewhat in comparison to its big brother.


Point Conception was released by Cold Blue on an LP about two decades ago, and its return in the remastered version is most welcome. Nightbreaker is a premiere recording. Both pieces help to round out our sense of a somewhat mysterious voice in the American progressive music tradition, who I frankly hope still has an act or two left in him.


FANFARE: Robert Carl

This exquisite, mobile-like, ever-focus-shifting music for three pianos is wonderfully performed by noted new-music champion Sarah Cahill. A 25-minute CD EP/Single. “If this is a long night, let it go on and on.” [Marc Geelhoed, Time Out Chicago] “It’s a beautiful and original piece, with ‘family’ links to such composers as Harry Partch, Henry Cowell, Conlon Nancarrow, and John Cage, and with allusions to ‘nature’ and the ‘East’.” [Int'l Record Review] “A commanding presence in the landscape of American music.... his music is passionate, fiercely intelligent and one of a kind. Gann’s music embraces a broad range of influences but sounds like no other.” [John Luther Adams, NewMusicBox (American Music Center)] “Long Night was intended to evoke Martin Heidegger's phenomenology of mood swings. Three unsynchronized piano lines flow parallel through sections of indeterminate length, overlapping like ripples from raindrops splashing into a pond in slow motion…. Sarah Cahill plays all three parts on this economical CD single, heightening the music’s gentle equanimity.” [Steve Smith, Time Out New York] “Best Albums of 2005.... The composer-turned-critic dusts off a minimalist piano sketch from his apparently not-so-misspent youth.” [K. Leander Williams, Time Out New York]

Post-minimalist John Luther Adams--not to be confused with "Nixon in China" composer John Adams--creates luminous musical worlds inspired by nature, particularly the landscapes of his adopted home, Alaska. THE PLACE WE BEGAN contains four evocative electroacoustic pieces that rework fragments of forgotten reel-to-reel tapes recorded by the Adams in the early `70s. Sculpting intriguing new soundscapes from furtive experiments in acoustic feedback and found sounds, Adams breathes new life into the material as a film documentarist would with old photographs and film footage.

Nothing and everything. Nowhere and everywhere.

Somewhere in the distance two pianos are playing. Slowly, very slowly, the sound comes towards you, and just as inevitably the sound recedes. This takes twelve and a half minutes. No development, no real movement, but no stasis either. What’s going on? Nothing and everything. Where’s the music going? Nowhere and everywhere. This sound world is our universe. It exists solely for itself. It’s electrifying.

So begins Dark Waters, the first track on this new John Luther Adams CD.

Before we go any further let’s get one thing clear, this is not the well known John Adams, the laid-back, new music guru, California-based composer of The Chairman Dances and The Transmigration of Souls, this is Meridian, Mississippi-born and, for the last thirty years, Alaska-based John Luther Adams. Starting as a rock drummer he discovered Frank Zappa, from Zappa’s notes he discovered Edgard Varèse, from Varèse’s sleeve-notes he discovered John Cage, but it was his discovery of Morton Feldman that gave him his epiphany. He studied at Cal Arts and after graduation started working in environmental protection, which took him to Alaska in 1975 where he moved permanently in 1978. If he’s known in this country at all it’s because he had a piece broadcast as part of the Masterprize competition some years ago.

Among Red Mountains, for a solo piano, is a study in clusters and opposing registers. Hard and brutal, unrelenting, yet strangely spellbinding and impossible to ignore. Just like Dark Waters, there’s no development of material as we understand the concept of development in the classical sense but this music does progress, if only in a very basic way, through repetition of the material. It’s hard to believe that there’s only two hands playing, considering the number of notes the poor pianist has to play.

Qilyuan is a duet for bass drums, and here the concept of minimal movement/maximum progress fails. Without actual pitches on which to hang our perceptions we’re left a bit at sea. And the bass drum isn’t renowned for its variety of timbre. True, it can play loud or soft, rolls can be executed, it can be hit with different sticks, but, and the percussion mafia isn’t going to like me for this, it isn’t an expressive instrument, it’s something you hit. One of the most impressive things about the other works on this disk is just how expressive they are; Dark Waters is quite beautiful in its hypnotic way. Just as Dark Waters and Among Red Mountains seem too short for their material, Qilyuan seems interminable.

Red Arc/Blue Veil, which gives the CD its title, is, in form, similar to Dark Waters. Starting quietly as a neo romantic nocturne for piano and vibraphone, it builds in intensity and volume, as the percussionist changes to crotales, and a big climax is built. Then a return to the music of the beginning, piano and vibes, gentle, restrained, beautiful. If the work has one fault it’s that there’s an overuse of the crotales – the overtones from the high frequencies over a period of time can be quite painful to listen to.

All in all, a very exciting issue from a composer who’s been working quietly and methodically for some time and he should be investigated because his music is haunting and quite unforgettable.

I assume that the performances are as good as we could ever hope for and the recorded sound is clear and very bright, oh yes, very bright indeed. There are no notes on the music, merely the names of the works and the performers, though the six sides of the “booklet” are very colourful. There are nine other CDs of Adams’s works and they are all worth investigating.

Lou Harrison called Adams "one of the few important young American composers," and he might just be right.

-- Bob Briggs, MusicWeb International

Adams, a Pulitzer-winning composer, writes music that draws much of it's inspiration from earth's primal forms and forces. These large, elemental concepts are never far below the surface of the music on Four Thousand Holes. The two works that comprise this album-constructions that grew from a blending of process and intuition-maintain a tight focus on music's inherent sensuality. The title piece, a bold, wonderfully quirky work, amasses and blends multiple tempo streams of simple triads with electro-acoustic "auras" to create a sense of beautifully suspended time. The other piece,... and bells remembered... for percussion quintet, spins forth a quiet and gently clangorous world of ringing tones. "I can't stop listening to John Luther Adams's Four Thousand Holes." [The New Yorker critic and author Alex Ross, Twitter] "John Luther Adams is a major figure and this disc-small but perfectly formed-is a notable addition to his discography." [International Record Review] "Four Thousand Holes may simply be Adams's best work to-date.... So far, 2011 has had it's lion's share of exquisite recordings, but this disc stands out as required listening... Album of the Week." [WQXR/Q2] "Despite a rather majestic climax, Four Thousand Holes unfolds at a measured pace, like a kind of contemplative walk in the woods in which the landscape changes slowly but dramatically over time. There is a spontaneous feel that belies the careful craftsmanship. Drury's piano part is made up exclusively of chords based on major and minor triads, with Deal's vibraphone and orchestra bells adding an extra sonic glitter. On top of it all, Adams generates a processed electronic 'aura,' derived from the piano lines, and it spreads out like a canopy of sound: dense, rich, and enveloping." [Josh Shea, Boston Globe] "In Four Thousand Holes... John Luther Adams explores an extended progression of radiant, overlapping triads glowing with a resigned majesty until they support a slowly ascending line leading to an ecstatic climax that caps off it's 32-minute journey. The effect is meditative and spiritual, absorbing, and probably in it's essence more overwhelming than it's modest scoring allows." [American Record Guide]

Very special music.

I have been an admirer of Hobbs’s music for some 25 years now. He is always creating music which is subversive – as do Laurence Crance, Gavin Bryars and John White – but yet speaks directly to the listener. As a performer he’s had a very busy career, performing in a piano duo, as well as founding the duo Live Batts!, with John White. He is a founder member of the Scratch Orchestra, the Promenade Theatre Orchestra and the Hartzell Hilton Band. I lost contact with Hobbs’s work after the premiere of the large-scale chamber piece No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again at the ICA in 1998. Recently I bought some CDs from him of some recent pieces, including Sudoku Music (2 CDs – EMC104). This latter is well worth tracking down. It can be bought from http://www.experimentalmusic.co.uk/Experimental_Music_Catalogue/Home.html
 
This CD single comprises an arrangement for eight pianos, multi-tracked by Pezzone, of a work which is a perfect example of Hobbs’s music. It’s hypnotic, beautiful, non-aggressive, and it just seems to hang in the air, the music filling all the space around you. Hobbs’s Second String Quartet has the same feeling to it – why isn’t this played regularly? There is a feeling of West Coast transcendentalism about this performance. That’s not a criticism, it’s simply that there is more of a “laid-back” feel to this performance than I was expecting. For me, 19 minutes isn’t enough but it’s a fabulous taster for Hobbs’s music. It is to be hoped that it will help new listeners to get to grips with one of this country’s more elusive composers, one who is quietly working away at his art and only occasionally letting it out to the public. At least that is how it seems.
 
Buy this and love it for it is very special music. It lives long in the brain after the disk has stopped playing.
 
-- Bob Briggs, MusicWeb International
 

Swirling music with wildly branching roots that touch everything from Debussy and Delius to bop to techno. Sometimes lush and enveloping, sometimes brittle and percussive; sometimes suspended and motionless, sometimes agitated. This 16-minute CD EP features clarinetist Marty Walker with string quartet and electronic keyboards. “When it comes to attempts at musical seduction, Daniel Lentz’s music is way out front.” [Kyle Gann, Village Voice] “With its slow, interlocking suspensions and white-note harmonies, Tigres brings to mind Sibelius, of all things—particularly the twilight pages of the Sixth and Seventh symphonies—with the exception of a contrasting section about six minutes in where the rhythmic intensity gets cranked up and the piece breaks into a manic Michael Nymanesque jitterbug…. But the jitterbug ends just a quickly as it began, ceding to a much more lyrical style that gives a prominent, concerto-like roll to the clarinet. If Lentz talked about some of his earlier cascading echo pieces as ‘spiralling forms of becoming,’ Tigres traces—with its expressive grand pauses—a more improvisational line of fragmentation…. By intriguing his listeners at the same time he wreathes them in smiles, Lentz always comes up with something listenable and worthwhile. That’s certainly true of this new release.” [Gramophone magazine]

“Houses of the Wind” is a haunting, five-movement electro-acoustic piece that critically acclaimed composer Adams created from his field recording of an aeolian harp (wind harp) played by the Arctic winds 30 years ago. Over the years since he made this field recording, both the concept and the sound of the aeolian harp have inspired many of his celebrated instrumental works—including his six string quartets. In 2021 he went back to his original aeolian harp recording and sculpted each movement (or variation) of “Houses of the Wind” from the sounds on that tape, using voice layering, time stretching, and pitch manipulation as his primary compositional tools.

John Luther Adams’ music has won both a Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy Award and has been performed by such prominent ensembles as the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Seattle Symphony, the International Contemporary Ensemble, and the JACK Quartet. Cold Blue Music has released nine recordings of his work, including “Arctic Dreams,” “Lines Made by Walking,” “Everything That Rises,” and “The Wind in High Places.” His memoir, “Silences So Deep,” was published in 2020.

Review

I’m not going to beat about the bush: I love this recording!

I have been an enthusiastic admirer of the American composer, John Luther Adams, for some years now and, whilst I am not naïve enough to assume his music will be to everyone’s taste, I think this must rank amongst his very best. Years of living in extreme isolation in the North American Arctic have pared down JLA’s music to its simplest and most fundamental qualities and this latest project is no exception. In a very real sense, Houses of the Wind should have a co-composer credit for the wind itself as it is shaped out of field recordings made by the composer of the sound of an aeolian harp in 1989. In the process of transferring the tapes of his old field recordings, Adams became captivated by the sound of a ten and a half minute long tape which provided both the inspiration and the basis for the present composition.

All five movements use that ten and half minute recording as their source material with Adams stretching out the sound, layering and transposing it to evoke what I presume are the characters of different types of arctic wind.

Just about every piece by John Luther Adams deploys some kind of natural acoustic effect to generate music and he directly relates this to his passionate concern for the Earth’s environment. These natural sounds used in this way also tend to have a far reaching psychological effect on the listener. In the case of this piece, that effect goes well beyond some pleasant noises produced by an aeolian harp and tunes into a place where man and nature meet or perhaps it might be better to speak of where man can realise his place within nature that he tends to neglect and abuse.

There is a risk that Houses of the Wind will sound, on the basis of this description, like the kind of music encountered at a spa wellness hotel. Such an idea should be banished forthwith! JLA’s experience of working with overtone series on string instruments in his wonderful string quartets means his musical imagination hears in what must be a really wonderful original recording all sorts of aural miracles whether it be vast, limitless landscapes in the bass register or angelic singing voices like the ghosts of violins in the treble. There is a profound absence of hurry which despite each piece only lasting the ten and half minutes of the field recording produces the effect of something genuinely timeless. The timeframe is set by things like the gradual, patient unfurling of an overtone sequence. JLA has contrived to create music that makes us feel we are eavesdropping on the music making of nature herself. What is particularly impressive is that a distinct voice is heard through the music even though in no way does it resemble a human voice. Or rather it is the voice upon which all human voices rest since it is the foundation of all sound. Of course, this is sleight of hand because this is after all a composition by a human being - but a human being wonderfully in tune with the world around him. Thankfully for us a human who can translate that attunement into music in which even our dull ears can hear something of what he hears.

John Luther Adams’ genius lies in taking ideas that often look dry or uninspiring and allowing the most vivid kind of life to shine from them. I have often found that after listening to his music, my experience of all other music seems cleansed and revitalised. I have this experience listening to Houses of the Wind.

The composer has written of how many of his pieces for more traditional instruments were inspired by listening to aeolian harps during his years resident in the Arctic and there is a moving sense in this composition of Luther Adams paying back for that inspiration.

--MusicWeb International (David McDade)

“Three” collects three shimmering new works by composer-performer-instrument builder Chas Smith, a musician who has created his own musical world--complete with its own unique instruments--a world of expansive musical tapestries and carefully sculpted textures. This beautifully ringing music, which displays his dualistic fascination with the scientific and the sensual, is both invitingly intimate and darkly brooding as explores the unique timbres of Smith’s sculptural metallophones and his steel guitars. “With Smith’s music, the sounds are as compelling as his concepts and instruments.” (The Wire) “Smith’s pieces are music of experiment and discovery: a way of enabling the physical world to ‘speak’ by investigating…its sonic properties.” (Int’l Record Review) As a performer, Smith has been heard playing both steel guitar and his unique metallophones on feature film scores by Thomas Newman, Christopher Young, Charlie Clouser, Mark Mothersbaugh, Jeff Danna, and John Williams and on recordings by composer Harold Budd.

Ever wonder what two centuries colliding sounds like? “Separation Songs” is a haunting album-length work for two string quartets. It juxtaposes and weaves together an array of 18th-century composer William Billings’s hymn tunes, altering them via real-time-generated variations as the piece unfolds. Both quartet parts are performed via overdubbing by the noted new-music-championing Eclipse Quartet. “The Eclipse [Quartet] is LA’s answer to 20th-century and present-day music.” (“HuffPost”). Composer Matt Sargent’s music has been described by critics as “a powerfully organic experience” (“Sequenza21”) that “uses bare resources to establish a bounded and essential space” (“The Wire”)