ALBUM REVIEW: The Perfect Nothing Catalog by Conrad Winslow

by Brendan Howe

Photo by Kim Winslow.

Growing up in Homer, Alaska, Conrad Winslow watched his parents build their log cabin in the woods from scratch—little did he know, those building blocks would shape and inspire his future as a composer.

As with building a log cabin that is to become a home, the world Winslow creates in his debut album The Perfect Nothing Catalog is significantly more emotionally involved than rendering walls of sound from various materials. The technical choices made in orchestrating the album are perhaps less relevant than the sensitivity with which the Cadillac Moon Ensemble and producer Aaron Roche execute them. Foot stomps and sawtooth waves interspersed with cello and flute are all well and good, but Winslow and Roche’s attention to detail—along with the ensemble’s agility—give them gravity, fire, adrenaline, and airy bliss.

Winslow originally composed The Perfect Nothing Catalog as an acoustic score in 2014, but says that he “always imagined it like an abstract radio play.” He recorded an acoustic version and asked Roche to “riff on these aural objects, process them in myriad ways.” Roche did just that with distortions and elements of musique concrète, lending the piece a subtle sense of narrative.

The title work is made up of 50 miniatures, each less than a minute long and cataloged by compositional approach: “tunes” are melodic lines, modulating and harmonizing themselves, “materials” are simply musical textures, “devices” are rhythmic vignettes, “controls” explore variations on a single parameter, and “code” layers the movements together in new ways.

Though a piece as meticulously organized as this may be expected to sound clinical, the end result is full of surprises. It is music of simultaneous—rather than reflective or whimsical—experience.

The other pieces on the album, Abiding Shapes, Ellipsis Rules, and Benediction, reveal the composer’s consistency in his craft. The entire album may be enjoyed either while sitting back in an armchair with a glass of wine or while painting a giant canvas on the living room floor.


The Perfect Nothing Catalog is available for pre-order through Innova.mu. It will be released on November 17, 2017.

LIVE BROADCAST: PROJECT Trio Plays Peter and the Wolf, Brooklyn-Style

by Maggie Molloy

You may have heard Prokofiev’s symphonic fairy tale Peter and the Wolf, but you have never heard it like this before. Tune in Wednesday at 7:30pm for a Second Inversion live broadcast of PROJECT Trio performing Peter and the Wolf—Brooklyn style.

Comprised of three classically-trained musicians with an ear for eclecticism, PROJECT Trio brings humor, charisma, technical prowess, and clever arrangements to classical repertoire and pop music alike. Expect jazzy basslines, beatboxing flute riffs, and plenty of personality.

For this concert, PROJECT Trio takes the classic tale of Peter and the Wolf out of Russia and into Brooklyn, turning the animals into other kids and the wolf-chase into a parkside showdown.

Catch their performance live this Wednesday at Town Hall as part of Joshua Roman’s Town Music series. And if you can’t make it to the show, tune in to Second Inversion’s live broadcast from anywhere in the world! Download our app or click here to listen to the broadcast online, streaming live on Wednesday, April 19 at 7:30pm PST.

Until then, here’s a sneak peek of the gang performing their rendition of another classical music staple:


PROJECT Trio performs Wednesday, April 19 at 7:30pm at Town Hall. Click here for more information, or click here to tune in to Second Inversion’s live broadcast.

STAFF PICKS: Friday Faves

Second Inversion hosts share a favorite selection from this Friday’s playlist. Tune in during the indicated hours below on Friday, September 2 to hear these pieces. In the meantime, you’ll hear other great new and unusual music from all corners of the classical genre 24/7!

westside+industrialM.O.T.H.: “him” from Westside Industrial on slashsound

Growth, development, and change are inevitable parts of life, right? Sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re unavoidable, sometimes they’re guided by motivation and hope, and sometimes they’re completely frustrating and disheartening. This ambient, electronic work by M.O.T.H. tells the story of “disillusionment, reassessing, and ultimately optimism after endeavor” from the perspective from “him” and “her” in a rapidly changing culture in a place once guided by arts and bohemian values. Gentrification, commodification, and commercialization have taken over to turn lifestyles into brands and shiny new thises and thats. Having this narrative in mind helps to give the relatively sparse texture of this work some deep meaning. Personally it resonates with me, as the city of Seattle continues to change in some of these ways, rendering certain neighborhoods unrecognizable from just 7 or 8 years ago. Westside Industrial is a reminder that we’re not alone in this change, and through our relationships with one another and with art, we can persevere. – Maggie Stapleton

Tune in to Second Inversion in the 12pm hour today to hear an excerpt from this piece.


a3222330692_16Daníel Bjarnason: Bow to String (Saeunn Thorsteinsdottir, cello; Valgeir Sigurosson, programming) on Bedroom Community

I don’t know what it is about cellists – shredding, rocking out, whatever you want to call it, they have some innate desire for it. Think of all the head-banging cello groups: 2cellos, Cello Fury, Uccello…everywhere there are cellists plugging into amps and tearing it up. They must have some sort of deep inner angst. Bow to String by Daníel Bjarnason definitely taps into that angst with the driving rhythms of the beginning, but relaxes to an almost haunting conclusion. It’s partially electrifying (no pun intended), partially cathartic, and a perfect SI selection. – Geoffrey Larson

Tune in to Second Inversion in the 4pm hour today to hear an excerpt from this piece.


gordon_vangogh_cover_1400pxMichael Gordon: Van Gogh (Alarm Will Sound) on Cantaloupe Music

Vincent van Gogh painted over 30 self-portraits in his short lifetime. Notoriously impoverished, he didn’t have the money to pay models to pose, nor the patronage to pay for the portraits—so, he painted himself.

Just imagine how much time he must have spent looking at his reflection, studying himself, painting his own image. Composer Michael Gordon explores that staggering sense of introspection in Van Gogh, an opera which takes the heartbreaking letters Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo as its libretto.

Performed here by the chamber orchestra Alarm Will Sound, the opera traces the tragic reality of Van Gogh’s life: his adolescent anxieties and rejections, his professional shortcomings and personal failures, his crippling loneliness and eventual institutionalization.

Van Gogh’s brutal honesty and raw emotions sprawl out amidst a strident ensemble of voice, clarinet, strings, piano, percussion, and electric guitar—each melodic line as thickly textured and brazenly colored as the brush strokes of Van Gogh’s famous canvases. It’s a powerful tribute to one of history’s greatest artists—a creative visionary who changed the face of art without ever making a cent.

“Theo, if you can, write soon,” he pleads. “And of course, the sooner you can send the money the better it would be for me. I spent my last penny on this stamp.” – Maggie Molloy

Tune in to Second Inversion in the 6pm hour today to hear an excerpt from this piece.


Brooklyn-coverSergei Prokofiev: Peter and the Wolf, Op. 67 (arr. Project Trio)

If you’ve never heard someone beatbox on a flute you won’t want to miss Project Trio’s performance of “Peter and the Wolf.”  Greg Pattillo’s flute effects are out of this world and this funky, theatrical, exuberant take on a childhood classic is overflowing with humor and joy.  These are three musicians having a blast with their craft and the fun is contagious.  Highly recommended! – Rachele Hales

Tune in to Second Inversion in the 9pm hour today to hear an excerpt from this piece.

 

SECOND INVERSION PRESENTS: Gabriel Kahane & Brooklyn Rider at the Tractor Tavern

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Join Second Inversion and KING FM at The Tractor Tavern on Monday, February 1 at 8pm for a concert with Gabriel Kahane and Brooklyn Rider!

This show is in celebration of their new collaborative album, The Fiction Issue (also featuring Shara Worden) and will feature Kahane’s song cycle for string quartet and voice, Come On All You Ghosts. They will also perform works from The Brooklyn Rider Almanac, The Ambassador (both have been featured as Second Inversion Albums of the Week!), and Schubert’s Rosamunde, a Brooklyn Rider favorite.

Get your tickets, RSVP to the Facebook event, and invite your friends!

Not in Seattle?  Check the tour schedules for both Gabriel Kahane and Brooklyn Rider to find out where they’ll be, together and separate, in city near you.

And to whet your appetite,  a special preview of The Fiction Issueavailable February 5:

ALBUM REVIEW: Preamble by Qasim Naqvi

by Maggie Molloy

Standard Western music notation is made up of five lines, four spaces, and a whole lot of dots and symbols. But contemporary composer and drummer Qasim Naqvi was looking to make classical music that was a little less traditional.

Qasim Naqvi PicPerhaps best known as the drummer for the Brooklyn-based modern acoustic trio Dawn of Midi, Naqvi is also an accomplished composer in his own right. In his new album, titled “Preamble,” he combines graphic notation and traditional notational forms to inject a little aleatory into his compositions. Expanding upon the musical innovations of composers like Ligeti and Xenakis, these aleatoric components allow for the musicians to make spontaneous choices within a structured framework.

“Some of the graphic components deal with dynamics and expression, while others deal with duration and rhythm or ranges that are unique to the particular instruments in the ensemble,” Naqvi said. “This symbolic language is fused into a more conventional style of notation.”

“Preamble” is comprised of a series of short works for mixed acoustic instruments. Released this fall on NNA Tapes, the album features the Contemporary Music Ensemble of NYU and Naqvi himself as the conductor. The work was originally commissioned by the media artist Mariam Ghani, the choreographer Erin Ellen Kelly, and the St. Louis Art Museum as a score to a film installation loosely based on China Miéville’s sci-fi noir novel “The City & the City.”

“One aspect of the book involves two cities that essentially inhabit the same space, but because of the mindset of the citizenry and the threat of a Big Brother-type power known as the Breach, they are perceived as two separate geographic spaces,” Naqvi said. “Even though both cities are intertwined, in a sense, the citizens must unsee the people, buildings, and events of the other city. This, among many other plot elements from Miéville’s book, was used as a conceptual framework that was then mapped onto the real places and histories of St. Louis.”

The result is a suite of seven short pieces weaving in and out of time to explore the principles of chance and intention—in both music and history. Clocking in at just over 30 minutes, the scope of Naqvi’s album is nothing if not ambitious. But without a minute wasted, Naqvi manages to explore the power of music in all of its complexity, with special concern taken to St. Louis’s cultural, geographical, and political histories.

“It’s very much about the city’s history and as well the tragic and fracturing events of Ferguson, sort of raising the question of what a city chooses to see and unsee in times of tragedy,” he said.

The first piece on the album is the title track, which immediately introduces Naqvi’s unusual timbral palette: flute, clarinet, strings, vibraphone and piano. Metallic dissonances and abstracted harmonies ebb and flow in a fascinating textural landscape that seems to exist outside of time and space altogether.

It’s followed by the resonant plucking, sparse harmonies, and hollow textures of “Meg Erase Meta,” a piece inspired by St. Louis’s complex network of underground caves—a city beneath a city, so to speak. With modest forces of strings and piano, Naqvi explores these hidden places and the musical magic to be found within them.

But Naqvi also explores the city’s more somber mysteries. The duality and disjointed melodic fragments of “Children of the Drawer” give way to the sharp and, at times, jarring woodwinds of “Imagined Garages,” wherein long pauses punctuate metallic clamor and fragmented melodic flutters.

“Beyond Stars” takes on a more meditative atmosphere, with sliding strings in the lower registers swaying fluidly back and forth across a softly shimmering harmonic backdrop. A more frantic and unsettling “Aero” builds into the drama of the closing piece: “Esc.” Flute, clarinet, and strings swell into different colors and shapes, transforming and shifting across the soundscape until we are left with an unexpected silence.

Throughout “Preamble,” Naqvi colors outside the lines—he takes his bold textural and timbral palette and smears the rules of time, space, and traditional composition. He explores the notion of chance and intention throughout music and throughout history—and ultimately, by leaving some of the musical elements up to the performers, he ensures that this tale of two cities is never told the same way twice.

“What happens as a result is that you have these moments of the music being in control, and then you have moments where the music starts to fall over onto itself,” Naqvi said. “Those types of moments really interest me because they’re inexplicable. You can’t transcribe or write those moments down or recreate them. And there’s something kind of amazing about that.”

PS – for a special bonus, here’s a recent installment of The Takeover, hosted by Qasim Naqvi, introducing all of the tracks on Preamble: