Reprinted excerpt from Boring Like a Drill
Ben Harper-Monday 23 September 2024
What are the sounds of nature? You think that’s an easy one but then you remember you’ve spent your whole life trying to see what’s in front of your eyes before forgetting to look and replacing what you see with what you’ve learned should be there. It’s harder still for us urbanised folk for whom all contact with nature is mediated in one way or another, before or after the fact. The term “nature” immediately calls up images of pastorals or writhing, quasi-organic forms as seen on the front cover of composer Amy Brandon’s album Lysis (New Focus Recordings). There are eight pieces collected here, mostly short, written between 2018 and 2023, which employ a variety of esoteric techniques to produce music that sounds more excavated than constructed. The album shocks with the opening flute solo microchimerisms, a fleeting vignette in which flautist Sara Constant implausibly hocks up deep aqueous rumbles that evoke the discovery of organisms in a soil sample. The Chartreuse String Trio make threads sound larger than it is, the three instruments drawing upon a wide range of timbres and registers in a piece which exemplifies Brandon’s strange but sophisticated approach to composition. She makes use of microtonality, geometry and rhythmic modulation purely as a means to an end, forgoing any impulse to demonstrate these principles to the listener to focus on producing music that resembles natural phenomena in their manner of operation. Thus threads weaves a counterpoint of irregular, unpitched sounds and complex noises finely differentiated by density and texture, while in the title piece Quatuor Bozzini begin with faint, voiceless string sounds that transform into thick harmonies made of tunings that sound arrived at in the process, rather than decided in advance. Some works definitely use electronics (Intermountainous pits ominous whooshes against Julian Bertino’s retuned 10-string guitar) while others sound like they do, such as the Bozzini’s pairing with Paramirabo and returned keyboards on Tsiyr. Dynamics and intonation are used to ferocious effect, making the music advance and retreat, snapping in and out of focus as though under a zoom lens. The odd one out in this set is the longer and larger Simulacra for cello and orchestra, with soloist Jeffrey Zeigler and Symphony Nova Scotia conducted by Karl Hirzer. The larger forces allow for more dramatic gestures and overt lyricism, but these outbursts are made more effective by sudden, striking gestures whose abruptness and inventiveness make any poignancy feel earned. Brandon’s talent for cutting such moments short also shows her awareness of nature’s indifference in practice