Music Review: David Bird – ‘Hinterlands’

When music and metal mix, people take notice. Just look at how metal, or the idea of metal, spawned an entire music genre, along with the names of bands seeking hard-edged glamor (Metallica, Iron Maiden, Alice in Chains, etc.) Some of the connection is symbolic, of course. But in the music on Hinterlands, the new album from composer David Bird, the hardness and coldness of metal seem almost literally audible.

Interestingly, Bird achieves that effect mostly with acoustic instruments, many of them made of wood. The Mivos Quartet (also heard on Lei Liang’s recent live string quartets album) performs the three movements of American City on their usual cello, viola, and two violins. It’s the most organic-sounding piece on the album, yet its first movement revels in dissonant harshness.

The second movement rides on repeated-note obbligatos that suggest electronic wave oscillations, until the strings merge into what sounds like a bath of actual electronics. The finale, titled “The First Trees Were All Metal,” is a longer study in transmuting acoustic sounds away from their native warmth and toward the cold.

Bird’s specific inspiration was the Soviet Union’s Stalin Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Complex, which, he explains, ironically earned the moniker “American City” because it was modeled after U.S. Steel’s plant in Gary, Indiana. That final movement is a hard-hitting but dreary end to an album that’s very “chill” – and not in the popular sense of relaxation.

‘Hinterlands’

The title track, performed by the French ensemble lovemusic on woodwinds, viola, electric guitar and electronics, proceeds episodically. The first two segments paint airy flute breaths and clarinet harmonies atop dissonant, coldly ambient washes of sound. A quiet third segment sees the flute and clarinet speaking softly, harmonically – but quickly intruded upon by ghostly, breathless gestures from the ensemble.

Harmonic development worms its way out of the morass, but never in settled or logical form. An effect like a slowed-down siren develops. Individual voices then emerge in swirling chromatic figures. A compelling momentum builds via slow, dissonant oscillations.

As if in surrender, the harmonies that return in a final segment have grown dissonant. A hypnotic wave of electronics slowly envelops them. The whole piece creates a tension between the instruments’ organic sounds and the collective coldness of the composer’s vision for what the ensemble can sound like.

By contrast, such tension is mostly absent in “Ambient Machine.” Here bassoon and cello evoke machinery grinding away. The piece dispenses almost entirely with common notions of musicality. Bassoonist Ben Roidl-Ward and cellist Isidora Nojkovic commissioned the work and perform it with gladiatorial intensity.

“Chroma” looks back at first to “Hinterlands,” with bubbling sheets of sound. But the attacking presence of piano and percussion among the musicians of the Grossman Ensemble help build a more explicitly communicative, even verbal atmosphere. Extended techniques and dissonances sustain the metallic, industrial atmosphere that characterizes the whole album, here with more complexity and drama. Undulations create blurry rhythms in various registers. Synthesizer-like effects evoke Expressionist visions (think R.U.R.).

But a gentle coda’s softer harmonies suggest a core of fleshy humanity amid the sterility of metal. And that’s the magic of music. However artificial or nonbiological the devices we construct to produce it, we can always detect the spirit of the composers and musicians making it. How we decipher that spirit is up to us. The “metal” on this album isn’t the heavy kind. But it feels weighty with meaning.

Hinterlands from David Bird is out now on New Focus Recordings and available at Bandcamp.