Music Review: loadbang – ‘A Garden Adorned’

Behold loadbang. Ever at the forefront.

The chamber quartet’s unique instrumentation – trumpet, trombone, bass clarinet, and baritone voice – has elicited from prominent composers fruitful explorations of the many ways to smash Western music’s traditional harmonies and timbres. But loadbang also performs music that takes those traditions into the present, in innovative ways.

The group’s new album A Garden Adorned harvests the creativity of five composers, each marshaling in their own style loadbang’s unique sound world.

A Garden Adorned

Oscar Bettison builds his 20-minute “I Am a Garden Adorned” around scraps of “slipshod and extemporized” translations of a poem by Ibn Zamrak, the 14th-century “Poet of the Alhambra,” whose verses are found carved into the walls of that Granada landmark and other places.

Those adjectives from the liner notes, “slipshod” and “extemporized,” don’t apply to the music – though at times, as when the horns interject staccato stabs, it can feel improvisatory.

In fact the slow-moving, spacious structure establishes a contemplative mood and enables the listener to grow comfortable with the sighing motives, plainspoken portamentos, and breathy hisses. Vocal and instrumental ululations evoke the Arabic origins of the source material, while the leisurely pace suggests a garden that has persisted for centuries.

“Reckoning” by Raven Chacon is a much more grab-you-by-the-throat production. As vocals and instruments revel in their most gravelly sonorities, you can almost feel the dryness of the Chihuahuan Desert where the piece was rehearsed. No words emerge; there are only the heaving of the sands, the wailing of the winds, and the unnameable spirits of nature, until a snatch of distant birdsong flutters in. It’s a grim but weirdly entrancing trip.

The Many Ways of Water

For “In a Rug of Water” Yotam Haber set to music the titular poem by 20th-century Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard in a translation by James Reidel. Scored for quadruple quartet, the piece is a compelling collage of chorale, snatches of big-band-style music, and metallic dissonance. While in one sense it’s the album’s shortest piece, it has the biggest sound. (See the video clip below.)

Five postmodern lieder comprise Christina J. George’s “liminal songs.” Four are settings of quirky poems by the composer, while the fifth uses the voice – extending baritone Ty Bouque’s range into tenor heights and beyond – as a wordless companion to the instruments.

The first song, “This delicious rain,” places an observer amid calmly developing harmonies. The lyrics abruptly shift metaphors from the naturalistic (relating to the albums’s horticultural theme – “This delicious rain is like / treefrog fingers”) to the coldly medical (“like contrast dye / that overstays its welcome / in the veins,” a phrase meant perhaps to recall T.S. Eliot’s famous metaphor of a patient etherized upon a table).

George goes on to draw from a wide stylistic palette, from the panicky abruptness of “ancient history” to the playful minimalism of “Not Quite.” “(dis)illusionment” closes the set with vaguely jazzy, quietly pastoral harmonies that return to those of “This delicious rain,” but with the speaker now observing himself. The imagery here harks back to the contrast dye of “This delicious rain,” as anyone who has had an MRI with contrast dye will recognize the icy tingle when the dye enters the vein. “The ice on my fingers / is melting / but the skin is not. / Perhaps I am solid after all.”

Farewell to the Garden

The slow build of “breath of cinder, depth of moss” by Laura Cetilia begins with a soft, low electronic tone that’s actually, maybe self-referentially, akin to what one could image a bass clarinet producing. It is, as the composer’s notes say, a sine wave tone, and pure sine tones are normally troublesome to the ear. But this one is so low and shrouded it instead sets a peaceful mood. Instruments and voice join, a slowly gathering ensemble of wordless harmonies. Brief washes of toneless sound are actually slowed-down crackles of a vinyl record, though you couldn’t know that if you didn’t read it in the liner notes.

The subtle, uncertain development of Cetilia’s 10-minute piece culminates in a harmonious chord that repeats, like breathing, until the hum that started the piece off returns and fades slowly to nothingness. It’s a soothing conclusion to an album that vitally expands the repertoire of one of our most interesting small new-music ensembles.

A Garden Adorned from loadbang is available now on New Focus Recordings.