Acclaimed by the New York Times as "an alluring, mystical new work" when it premiered outdoors at the city's Lincoln Center in July 2014, John Luther Adams' Sila: the Breath of the World is so carefully orchestrated that the recording itself pushes the limits of how to capture multiple ensembles of musicians in one setting. Thanks to modern technology and the magic of multi-tracking (with producers Doug Perkins and Nathaniel Reichman at the controls), Sila maintains the composer's vision as a grand invitation to the listener "to stop and listen more deeply." Put simply, like Inuksuit (2009), widely known as Adams' large ensemble piece for percussion, no two performances of Sila are ever the same, due in part to the freedom that is given to the musicians, each of whom plays or sings a unique part at his or her own pace. But on a macro level, Sila can also be described as an intelligent entity all its own — a living, breathing organism that takes on the collective intent of its performers, and its composer, to transcend the forces of nature and become, in a sense, a "breath of the world."

Cellist Inbal Segev’s inspirational commissioning project, 20 for 2020, originally released as four digital EPs, brings all 20 compositions together in a 2-album deluxe digipack, capped by the premiere of Inbal’s own work, Behold for cello quartet. The convergence of cataclysmic events of 2020 spurred cellist Inbal Segev to conceive an ambitious and inspirational commissioning project, 20 for 2020, for which she asked 20 composers to document in music their responses to the challenges posed by the pandemic and social unrest. The result is an utterly moving and immensely varied palette of strong and distinctive compositional voices spanning a range of ages, genders and cultures. Originally released over time as four digital EPs, all 20 compositions come together for the first time in a 2-album deluxe digipack, and are capped by the premiere of Inbal’s own work, Behold for cello quartet. When Inbal conceived 20 for 2020, she could not have foreseen the scope of musical imagination from the 20 composers she asked to write works for her. Further pronouncing her passion for promoting new works for her instrument: “Art needs to move forward, otherwise it will die.” Collectively these compositions celebrate a stunning array of music for the soulful sound of the cello in the 21st century.

Arctic Dreams is critically celebrated composer John Luther Adams's uniquely beautiful and magical seven-movement work for a quartet of voices and a quartet of strings, with layers of digital delay that create 32-part canonic textures. It is dedicated to the composers friend the late writer Barry Lopez, and titled after one of Lopez's greatest books. The work, like most of Adamss works, reflects the composers passion for natures elemental forces. Adams writes about the piece: As in several of my later string quartets, all the string sounds are produced by natural harmonics and open strings. The sung text is composed of the names of Arctic places, plants, birds, weather, and the seasons, in the languages of the Iñupiat and Gwichin peoples of Alaska. John Luther Adams's music has won both a Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy Award and has been performed by such prominent ensembles as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Seattle Symphony, JACK Quartet, and the International Contemporary Ensemble. Cold Blue Music has released eight recordings devoted to his work, including Lines Made by Walking, Everything That Rises, and The Wind in High Places. The performers: Synergy Vocals is a critically acclaimed vocal ensemble that has recorded music by Steve Reich, Louis Andriessen, David Lang, Luciano Berio, John Adams, Arvo Pärt, and many others and performed with the Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco Symphonies and the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics. Their performances and recordings have been deemed amazing (New York Times); beautiful, haunting (Gramophone); and dazzling (The Observer). With Synergy is a quartet of notable string players: violinist Robin Lorentz, violist Ron Lawrence, cellist Michael Finckel, and bassist Robert Black.

"Waves and Particles" is Pulitzer- and Grammy-winning composer John Luther Adams’s beautifully shimmery, virtuosic string quartet, performed by the incredible, illustrious JACK Quartet. Adams’s music has been performed by such prominent ensembles as the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Seattle Symphony, and the International Contemporary Ensemble. JACK Quartet has been deemed “superheroes of the new music world” (Boston Globe) and “the go-to quartet for contemporary music, tying impeccable musicianship to intellectual ferocity” (The Washington Post).

“Everything That Rises” is a uniquely beautiful and magical hour of music for string quartet, performed by the celebrated, award-winning JACK Quartet. The composer writes about the piece: “Each musician is a soloist, playing throughout. Time floats and the lines spin out, always rising, in acoustically perfect intervals that grow progressively smaller as they spiral upward…until the music dissolves into the soft noise of the bows, sighing.” “‘Everything That Rises’ is art without artifice, and its beauty transports the listener.” (New York Classical Review) “‘Everything That Rises” finds Mr. Adams exploring dissonance and just-intonation tuning, in the gentlest of ways.” (The New York Times) "JACK Quartet, superheroes of the new music world.” (Boston Globe) John Luther Adams, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Music and the 2015 Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition, has been described by The New Yorker’s Alex Ross as “one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century.” Adams, whose music is deeply rooted in the natural world, has worked with many prominent performers and venues.

J. L. ADAMS Inuksuit & • Thad Anderson, Noam Bierstone, Omar Camenartes, Michael Compitello, Nathan Davis, Christopher Demetriou, Rob Esler, Matt Evans, Diego Espinosa, Tim Feeney, Benjamin Fraley, Amy Garapic, Russell Greenberg, Nathaniel Hartman, Phil Hermans, Ayano Kataoka, Kelli Kathman, Danny Lichtenfeld, Ryan Maguire, Shard Mamoun, Krystina Marcoux, Murray Mast, Annie Laurie Mauhs-Pugh, Carson Moody, Benjamin Reimer, Jessica Schmitz, Jeff Stern, Bill Solomon, Christopher Swist, Lisa Tolentino, Alessandro Valiante, Owen Weaver (perc) • CANTALOUPE 21096 (CD: 59: 54, DVD 1:23:00)


& Strange and Sacred Noise video directed by Len Kamerling


This is an event. Inuksuit was written in 2009, and has become John Luther Adams’s signature piece. It is designed to be performed in an open, outdoor space, with a range of performers from nine to 99 (this recording uses 32). It is loose in its construction, with a flow of events that is similar from one performance to another, but whose details and ensemble will vary, depending on choices made in performance, and the characteristics of the environment chosen. Its title comes from the abstract stone structures made across Alaska by the Inuit over the centuries. It uses mostly unpitched percussion (or more precisely instruments of relative pitch) such as drums, cymbals, and gongs, but it also uses harmonic “whirly tubes,” conches, sirens, and glockenspiels and piccolos near the end. But Adams’s primary focus on less pitched, more “noisy” sound sources is a savvy one, as it allows great density and complexity of texture without all the additional harmonic complications that would result from using traditional orchestral instruments (for the record, lessons he’s learned from Inuksuit are being applied in a new work for outdoor wind ensembles).


I heard the piece a couple of years ago in New York at the Park Avenue Armory, a performance whose very venue of course contradicted the original premises of the piece, but was nonetheless magnificently executed. But this recording, made in the forest abutting Vermont’s Guilford Sound, captures better the sense of how the piece interacts with the natural environment (especially its birds, who seem quite unintimidated by all the racket). It also gives us a sense of the space that the piece creates and occupies.


The aspect of the work that impresses me the most is its pacing. Sounds are given their natural time to assert themselves before they are overlapped with others that naturally grow from the earlier ones’ timbres and envelopes. Thus “whirly tubes” eventually transform to conches, and are interrupted by drums whose seemingly random attacks become increasingly dense and patterned, which are joined by cymbals and then gongs, with sirens emerging out of the shimmering soup of upper partials, while the drums grow higher in register and more patterned … until it all crests like a tsunami and we are left with the twittering of birds, both musical and real.


The piece lasts roughly an hour (though the literature on it suggests a longer span, c.75–90 minutes), but with each repeat listening I never find it long. Rather, it is like the weather; one sees a storm front approaching and is mesmerized by the growing darkness, the rising wind, the smell of coming rain. It’s a tribute to Adams’s instinctive feel for the natural that he can pull this off; that it feels so open and spacious, and resists judgment.


The headnote may be a little confusing, but this release is the sort of hybrid to which we’re becoming more used today, and yet it also is presented a little confusingly. There is a standard CD of the piece. But there is also a DVD, which includes 1) the same recording, but with multi-track surround sound ( as well as straight DVD stereo) and a video of a different piece, Strange and Sacred Noise (1997). This work is a sort of prelude to Inuksuit , for percussion quartet in several different monotimbral scorings, and using many of the same process-driven techniques (you can read my review of the Mode 53 release in Fanfare 29:5). It’s led by the amazing Steven Schick, and Adams provides succinct commentaries between each of the eight movements. I particularly love the long third one, inspired by the overlapping accelerandos and decelerandos of Nancarrow and Adams’s contemporary Peter Garland. The performance is filmed in the Alaskan tundra, and is stark and dramatic in the juxtaposition of the players with the vast landscape.


I can’t fully review the surround-sound version because I do not have that configuration. But I can certainly testify that the DVD recording is more detailed, and has more presence and depth. (You also get about a dozen nice slides of the stone sentinels and the Alaskan landscape, that cycle endlessly through the piece.) But the CD sound is just dandy as well.


OK, I must briefly carp: While the piece is divided into five tracks for access-convenience (in both audio versions), Cantaloupe nowhere tells you the timings (even on the page for the disc on their web page). It also takes a bit to realize that the video on the DVD is under “extras.” It would have been nice if the contents had been presented just a little less elliptically. This is a minor kvetch; it’s just a little irritating in what feels to me like the label’s slightly cavalier attitude toward the listener.


But I don’t want this to color my overall enthusiasm for this release. This is a visionary work, in the tradition of Ives, Cage, Harrison, and Tenney—all acknowledged ancestor-mentors of the composer. Adams is deeply tuned into the eco-sensibility of the era in a humane, unpretentious, yet grand way. Indeed, I could express it more simply by saying that his art is grand but not grandiose. Want List for the coming year.


FANFARE: Robert Carl

Classical Music

Includes 1 CD & 1 DVD

Awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music, John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean was commissioned and premiered by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and Ludovic Morlot in June 2013. In May 2014 the orchestra and Morlot took Become Ocean to Carnegie Hall for the annual Spring for Music festival.

Become Ocean is a 45-minute-long work for full orchestra. Adams borrowed the title from a verse by composer John Cage, written in honor of fellow composer Lou Harrison’s birthday. Describing Harrison’s music, Cage wrote, “Listening to it / we become / ocean.” A visionary whose life and work are deeply rooted in the natural world, Adams inscribed the following statement on the score of Become Ocean, “Life on this earth first emerged from the sea. As the polar ice melts and sea level rises, we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean.”

R E V I E W:

With their first collaboration, Ludovic Morlot, the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and composer John Luther Adams have struck gold. Become Ocean, Morlot's first large-scale commission as music director of the SSO, is a symphonic work that feels even vaster than its forty-two-minute span. By dividing the large ensemble into three interlocking orchestras, Adams created a score that works on multiple levels: it's an abstract sonic experience at one extreme and, at the other, an evocation of nature and its irresistible force.

-- Thomas May, Listen Magazine

No one inhabits a Steinway quite like Australian pianist Lisa Moore, which is probably why so many modern composers have invited her to interpret their music. Known for her “beautiful and impassioned” approach, as The New York Times described one of her performances, Moore brings a fully charged sense of rhythm, mysticism and adventure to The Stone People, her first full-length recording for Cantaloupe Music. It follows in the footsteps of Moore’s three-part series of acclaimed EPs for the label: Seven (2009), Lightning Slingers and Dead Ringers (2011) and Stainless Staining (2012).

As Pulitzer-winning composer and Bang on a Can cofounder David Lang reveals in the album’s liner notes, the project takes its name from the opening piece by another Pultizer winner, John Luther Adams. “John’s music is ruggedly elemental,” Lang writes, “using very restrained materials as a way of probing some of our most fundamental human truths. Who we are. Where we are. How we relate to each other. How we relate to the natural world. His pieces are stark explorations of humankind in its most elemental state, and this CD brings together, for the first time, his complete acoustic music for solo piano.”

Among other firsts, the disc includes two works for piano by Julia Wolfe (2015’s Pulitzer winner), as well as newly recorded pieces by Martin Bresnick, Missy Mazzoli and Kate Moore. By turns meditative, mysterious, tumultuous and tender, The Stone People presents Lisa Moore at the height of her transformative powers.

“Darkness and Scattered Light” presents celebrated Pulitzer- and Grammy-winning composer John Luther Adams’s mesmerizing; elegant; virtuosic music for double bass—two solos and a work for five basses—written for and all performed by bassist extraordinaire Robert Black. “This is one of the most beautiful albums I have heard in years.... It would be hard to imagine a better match of composer and performer than John Luther Adams and Robert Black.”(David Lang; Pulitzer-winning composer); John Luther Adams’s music has been performed by such prominent ensembles as the New York Philharmonic; the Chicago Symphony; the Los Angeles Philharmonic; the Seattle Symphony; the and the JACK?Quartet. Cold Blue Music has released ten recordings of his work; including Houses of the Wind; Arctic Dreams; Lines Made by Walking; Everything That Rises; and The Wind in High Places. “John Luther Adams ... one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century.” (Alex Ross; The New Yorker) “His music . . . is an elemental experience.” (The Guardian). Robert Black tours the world collaborating with composers; musicians; and other artists. A founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars; his recent collaborations have been with Philip Glass; Eve Beglarian; and Joan Tower. “No one on the planet can make the double bass sing; dance; sound like a drum; spin like a top; like Robert Black. Robert has single-handedly reinvented the technique and repertoire of the Double Bass; bringing it bursting into the 21st century.” (Michael Gordon)

Percussionist Steve Schick [an origianl member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars] releases his first full-length CD on Cantaloupe Music in conjunction with his first book - which promises to be the definitive volume about percussion in the 20th-21st Century. A former percussionist himself, John Luther Adams finds music from the earth and brings it to life in composition - expect an unadulterated ambient soundscape that takes a journey through different sonic textures and environments, aided by a beautiful production and Schick's breathtaking performance.

Lauded by the New York Times as a "...hypnotic and ethereally beautiful invocation of wind, sky and birdsong," John Luther Adams's Canticles of the Holy Wind, performed by the renowned chamber choir The Crossing, is quite possibly his most technically challenging choral work, and yet the music's mesmerizing aura of stillness encourages listening at its most elemental. The piece was composed for four choirs of eight singers each, and moves through spaces that are as fantastical ("Sky with Four Suns") as they are peaceful ("The Hour of the Doves"), always with a connection to the inner world within us, as well as the world around us. "John allows us to interrupt our otherwise endlessly forward-tumbling lives," notes Donald Nally, The Crossing's conductor, "and experience these sounds as if we were sitting in the woods for an hour. An hour of wind and of sky and of birds. We are drawn to this music, not just for the beauty of its shimmering harmonies and the overwhelming climactic moments, but also for way it inspires a ‘hearing’ of nature, in real time, as we sing it."

-----

REVIEW:

There are 34 singers listed in The Crossing, a professional chamber choir founded about a decade ago. The singing, always controlled and disciplined, also has the ring of uninhibited spontaneity to it. It’s as if, for a little more than an hour, the singers cease to be humans and transform themselves into the skies, the birds, and winds, and the Earth itself.

It might be a little too intense for some listeners, like a good storm, but Canticles of the Holy Winds is one of the most impressive things I’ve heard so far in 2017. This disc will be on my Want List for sure.

– Fanfare (R. Tuttle)

When an Italian pianist falls in love with the American Southwest, he or she is apt to respond in some grand, expansive and colorful way to the space, light, and culture of the region. This at least was the case with Emanuele Arciuli, international concert artist and keyboard virtuoso, who started collecting artwork and piano pieces connected to the area. Walk in Beauty is a double album of fourteen of those works, many commissioned and premiered by him. Together they form an intimate love letter as well as a tribute as toweringly magical as the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. Early attempts to use American Indian themes in Western art music, while sincere, often betrayed the composers' lack of cultural understanding. This collection, however, includes works by indigenous composers alongside those of Anglo heritage; those who have spent serious time and energy researching their subjects and incorporating what they have learned deeply into their compositional method. The Native composers here include a wide range of approaches and styles; Connor Chee's fantasy on a Navajo theme, Raven Chacon's exploration of noise and feedback from the piano mechanism, Brent michael Davids' sultry jazz miniature, and ballet transcriptions by inspirational forebear Dr. Louis Ballard. The other composers pay homage to particular themes, such as John Luther Adams' stone figures, Michael Daugherty's bison dance, Peter Garland's peyote rituals, Kyle Gann's chant to save the earth and Martin Bresnick's homage to Ishi, the last of his tribe. The program is rounded out with complementary works by Jennifer Higdon, Carl Ruggles, Peter Gilbert, and Sufi convert Talib Rasul Hakim.

Tippet Rise Opus 2017 is the second compilation album to emerge from the summer music season at Montana’s Tippet Rise Arts Center, which features performance spaces of acoustic perfection amidst a sculpture-laden terrain of awe-inspiring beauty, nestled against a backdrop of the Beartooth Mountains near Yellowstone National Park. From the Pentatone Oxingale Series, Tippet Rise OPUS 2017 inhabits the sphere of Daydreams, a sculpture by Patrick Dougherty where natural saplings organically emerge out of an eroding schoolhouse. In this whimsical, imaginary world, composers open a visionary portal to the past and future. In the jazz-infused First Club Date, a world premiere by Aaron Jay Kernis and a Tippet Rise commission, cellist Matt Haimovitz and pianist Andrea Lam illuminate the musical playground of a boy on the cusp of manhood. The new work is dedicated to Haimovitz and the composer’s cellist-son Jonah, with double-entendre movement titles like “Puppy Love” and “Matt’s Monkish Machinations.” Violinist Caroline Goulding and pianist David Fung embody the youthful spirit of George Enescu’s Impressions from Childhood, while a pastoral mood reigns in Eugène Bozza’s Image for solo flute, performed by Jessica Sindell. An epic expansiveness saturates Red Arc / Blue Veil by John Luther Adams, featuring electronics and a wide array of sounds from pianist Vicky Chow and percussionist Doug Perkins. Opening the album is Jeffrey Kahane’s hopeful America the Beautiful, performed on piano by the composer himself, while works by Chopin and Bach, performed by pianists Yevgeny Sudbin and Anne-Marie McDermott, anchor the program with their sheer beauty and virtuosity.

In many ways, this album represents the debut recording of ACME, American Contemporary Music Ensemble. The collection of pieces here was chosen for very pure and simple reasons; each work is a piece we love and to which we feel quite intimately connected. The performance of this music is an expression of affection and closeness, not just to each other as performers, but also to the composer who wrote it. Three of the four composers featured are also performers in ACME. It is music that feels very close. The privilege of performing this music for others has shaped each of us individually and as an ensemble, and these pieces occupy a good part of the music ACME has performed as concert music. It was also chosen for this album, to exist on recorded media, because it is work that should exist in other scenarios beyond the concert experience: a long, slow walk; a frenetic commute; a late evening at home... The American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME) is dedicated to the outstanding performance of masterworks from the 20th and 21st centuries, primarily the work of American composers. The ensemble presents music by living composers alongside the classics of the contemporary. ACME’s dedication to new music extends across genres, and has earned them a reputation among both classical and rock crowds. NPR calls them “contemporary music dynamos,” and The New York Times describes ACME’s performances as “vital,” “brilliant,” and “electrifying.” Time Out New York reports, “Jensen has earned a sterling reputation for her fresh, inclusive mix of minimalists, maximalists, eclectics and newcomers.” ACME was honored by ASCAP during its 10th anniversary season in 2015 for the “virtuosity, passion, and commitment with which it performs and champions American composers.” "This curated selection of pieces comes from different but rhyming sonic worlds and is some of the music we have grown to love the most in this varied and fast-changing world." - Clarice Jensen, ACME Cellist & Artistic Director

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]

"...48 minutes of an almost violent but passionate performance. The one-man percussion orchestra was sonically heightened by the digital delays that blasted through the speakers. Though we were underground, Ilimaq seemed to seep into the New York City streets." - Baeble Music (Review of the Carnegie Hall performance of Ilimaq at the 2014 Ecstatic Music Festival, New York.)

Grammy-winning composer John Luther Adams always speaks with reverence about capturing “the tone within the noise,” and if any of his recent work can be said to take that mission directly to heart, it’s Ilimaq. A true electro-acoustic recording that channels the energy, passion and precision of Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche, Ilimaq (which loosely translates from the native Alaskan Inupiaq language as “spirit journeys”) maps a vivid, phantasmagorical progression through liquid cascades of percussion, otherworldly ambient soundscapes, harmonic dissonance, melodic convergence and almost everything that’s musically—and sonically—possible in between.

Of course, as the old adage goes, the “map” is not necessarily the territory—but in the right hands, it can come pretty close. Although they both live and work in different, almost diametrically opposed worlds of music, Adams and Kotche didn’t just choose to collaborate on a whim. Back in 2008, while Wilco was on tour in Alaska, Kotche personally emailed Adams and asked to meet. It soon came to light that he had been following Adams’ work for years; by the same token, Adams’ own background as a rock drummer gave him a uniquely informed glimpse of what Kotche had in mind. (As Adams says in the liner notes to Ilimaq, “...in Glenn Kotche, I’ve found the drummer I always imagined I could be.”) - Cantaloupe Music