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The Atlas, from pianist-composer Richard Carrick and the ensemble Either/Or, is a concert suite for “extended piano” and string quartet. “Extended piano” means (more or less) what’s more typically called “prepared piano” – a piano with objects or obstructions placed inside the mechanism to modify the sounds produced when a musician strikes the keys or otherwise impacts the instrument.
A scale that suggests an Eastern or Arabic inspiration defines the opening movement, “Compass.” Modified to produce a metallic, percussive sound, the piano plunks out a limited set of notes, colored by swells from the strings. The piece establishes a sense of rhythm that comes and goes throughout the suite.
Rhythm vanishes in the second movement, “SeaGliss,” a semi-improvised tone poem of squiggles, eerie long-held chords, and the swooping glissandos suggested by the title.
Eastern Echoes
The Eastern flavor returns in the dark “Penumbra,” a piece that references Carrick’s maternal ancestral land of Algeria. Its relentless rhythm and limited harmonic palette give it a wordless Velvet Underground or Nick Cave vibe, perhaps filtered through the quirky sensibility of The Residents. Muffled bass notes from the piano undergird snaky folk-dance riffs from the strings, sometimes doubled by the piano in its upper range. Within a consistent minor-key mode the figures have an improvisatory flavor.
“Expanse,” the longest track at eight minutes, sets billowing questions from the strings against harpsichord-like tones and harmonics produced by flickering figures played on the muted piano. An understated beauty emerges as the partnership deepens and the sound fills out. “Expanse” is the right title for this evocative depiction of (in my interpretation) a humble being communing with a wider world.
Next up is a heaving, rather distressing “Interlude” full of scratches from the strings and low-note resonances from the piano. The ruckus subsides for the acidic rhythms of “la terre,” based on a Carrick improvisation. Here he uses only the interior of the piano, not the keys. It’s a difficult listen that resulted in something of a stomach-churn for me, as if meant to represent the ugly underworld of the suite’s “map.”
Mapping a Sound World
A brief, inquisitive piano solo suffused in reverb relieves the disquiet and leads into a spacious, improvisatory movement titled “Cartographers.” Here the string players deploy a variety of techniques to create an abstract world of animal-ish sounds, whistles, pizzicato stutters, and arpeggios built of harmonics. The sound builds and coalesces cinematically, tension mounting, before the music fades back into hesitant tonelessness.
The final piece, “Journey Through the Spheres,” brings back the kind of quick, repeating prepared-piano runs we heard in earlier movements before deepening into resonant lower-range atmospherics. Suggestions of Eastern modes populate the string parts. It’s a kind of summation of all that came before, but giving us no easy resolution. The plinking piano ends the album like that sole wanderer traversing the globe, drawing a map as they go.
If we don’t really have an atlas in the end, we have an idea for one – a set of maps drawn in the shifting sands of sound.
The Atlas from Richard Carrick is out now on New Focus Recordings.
