Having documented contemporary music in New York for the better part of two decades, I’ve had a front row seat to the evolution of several well-known musicians as they developed their own distinctive voice. We all grew up together, in a sense: as their music evolved, so did my listening and ability to say something about it. (NB: I’m still working on it.)
So, with the excitement and slight unease of a high school reunion, I found myself over the past week attending shows by a pair of old friends whom I haven’t seen in years. Life happens: people start families, take on other work, take a mental health (or COVID) break. But, even if they weren’t always out performing, it’s clear that they’ve never stopped making music.
For two decades now, composer and sound artist Tristan Perich has been exploring the intersection of acoustic and electronic music. As I wrote after a nigh at The Kitchen back in 2017:
“This is the core of his music’s appeal: it brings together human and machine, past and present, asking us to leave behind the duality of instrument and electronics and allow them to come together to create something new.”
Tristan has focused his recent output on a series of “concertos” (my word, not his) for solo instruments and 1-bit electronics, such as Infinity Gradient (2021) for pipe organ and 100 speakers (written for James McVinnie), Drift Multiply for 50 violins and 50 speakers, and Surface Image (2013) for piano (played by Vicky Chow) and 40 speakers. As Tristan explained in a program note for the LA Phil, he equates the sounds created by 1-bit electronics with the tones of acoustic instruments:
“The simplest electronic tones can be created by sending on and off pulses of electricity to a speaker, creating an oscillation at the desired pitch. These pulses are represented digitally in binary as 1-bit information, where a 1 or 0 signifies the corresponding electrical state. When working with 1-bit waveforms, data is equivalent to sound; no higher-level translation is needed.”
At Issue Project Room last Thursday, Tristan debuted The Density of Air for bass clarinet – played by Katie Porter – and 1-bit electronics broadcast from a tangle of tiny speakers spread all over the floor. (It wasn’t clear exactly how many there were, but I would estimate well over 100.) Quieter and more spatial than most of his music, the hour-long piece mostly look consisted of Katie playing isolated figures while the speakers rattled underneath like a swarm of crickets. Performed in near-darkness in the cavernous stone space, my attention ebbed and flowed throughout the hour-long piece, though it snapped back when the rattling vibrations suddenly transitioned to organ-like chimes before quickly falling back again.
It’s also been nearly twenty years since I first discovered David’s Moore music through his band Bing and Ruth, which most cataloguers categorize as “ambient” but was always something much deeper than that. Following forays as a touring musician playing keyboard for Langhorne Slim and other ventures, David went back to the woodshed, putting out EP’s with an ever-smaller lineup of musicians until eventually it was just him at the piano.
Six years after his last LP with Bing and Ruth, those efforts have resulted in David’s first full-length solo effort, Graze a Bell, which he performed in New York for the first time last night at Roulette. Sitting at an amplified Steinway grand with the lid off, David played without pause in a near-trancelike state, bent low over the keyboard while lavender spotlights circled around him. (I couldn’t help but think of Bill Evans playing “Peace Piece.“) It was immediately clear that there has been an evolution in David’s music since I last saw him however many years ago: despite it’s open-endedness, the music is clear and concise, overflowing with ideas; Pitchfork said it came from a mind “in conversation with itself.”
David’s music is unapologetically tonal and melodic, but never saccharine: just when you are lulled into submission by an extended period of calm, the music erupts into a violent storm, as in “All This Has to Give.”
The emotional center of Graze a Bell has to be “Rush Creek.” Emerging from a strange, unsettling dissonance, the arpeggios soon meld into a melodic sequence that develops over the next five minutes into a rapturous, ecstatic flow. With near-constant pedal creating a hazy, otherworldly texture, this sounded like music that had emerged from some unexplained sadness into an irrepressible joy. Which was just how I felt seeing David onstage again after far too long.
