Tag Archives: New Focus

In the music on composer David Bird's new album, the hardness and coldness of actual metal seem almost literally audible.

Four composers combine in an appealing work promoting "a shared community between us and the other living creatures that make us possible."

Let your mind create its own pictures...

A work like this asks us to exercise our patience, something in short supply these days – to listen closely to a spread of sound over time without imposing expectations on it.

Works that incorporate organic sounds from outside the piano make some of the deepest impressions.

The man-machine duality of a soloist performing alongside a recording has what in the pre-robotic, pre-AI age we might have called a futuristic quality. Today it touches on the "uncanny valley" effect.

Sometimes musicians create an atypical instrument combination simply because they have similar tastes or just like working together. Not so here – there's no sense of anything forced, or absent.

The placement of the different instruments in the listener's ears creates a sense of surrounding space; the bleed of one tone's decay into the attack of the next seems to smooth over the passage of time.

In this music Liang raises the process of creation to such an esoteric level that the substance thins out almost to the vanishing point.

It's quite possible to enjoy (or disdain) the music without thinking or knowing anything about music theory. A little bit Charles Ives, a little bit Raymond Scott, a little bit Looney Tunes, it conjures a fusion – really a plurality of fusions – all its own, and all with tongue in cheek.