Wayne Horvitz has a lot of recordings under his belt — as band leader, as band member, as producer, as solo artist.
And while “composer” is another title on which he can lay claim, only one recording documents that aspect of his ouevre.
But if Otis Spann and Other Compositions is any indication, there really ought to be more. (I always wondered what “Yuba City”, his commission for Kronos Quartet which he recorded with the President, sounds like.)
Horvitz is something of a technological artist — he can elicit strange timbres from synthesizers but still manage to infuse humanity into them.
So it’s little surprise that when real people playing non-electronic instruments tackle his music, it’s even more striking.
The five-movement title piece possesses Horvitz’s signature melodic and harmonic sense, but aspects of his electronic work that seemed mechanical reveal themselves to be deliberate and effective in an acoustic setting.
Horvitz is fond of drones, and in the final measures of “Coda”, a violin plays a vibrato-less high note. It’s nearly imperceptable, but it’s presence is forceful.
The insistent pulse of “9/8” demonstrates Horvitz’s economy with material. In an electronic setting, such repetition would come across as mechanical, but here, it’s slightly closer to minimalism.
And it’s easy to imagine “Love, Love, Love” tricked out with Tucker Martine’s percussive samples in an imaginary 4+1 Ensemble arrangement.
To fill out the rest of the disc, Horvitz composed additional pieces for the Seattle Chamber Players.
“After a Time” and “Ann Arbor, 1971” pit acoustic instruments against Horvitz’s ethereal programming, but the pieces without electronics — “Fanfare” and “Thursday, At Dusk, In Spokane, Washington” — stand out more.
“Thursday, At Dusk” is introspective and beautifully performed by clarinetist Laura Deluca and Horvitz on the piano. “Fanfare”, a solo piece for cello, gets an expressive reading by David Sabee.
But Horvitz can’t leave his electronics alone, so each of these additional pieces are accompanied by remixes. “Remix” is an understatement — in the case of “Fanfare” and “After a Time”, they’re almost entirely different pieces.
Still, hearing Horvitz’s compositional sense in a setting devoid of electronics casts a different light on his studio work. He may be a great improviser able to make random events sound like fate, but there’s an inherent attention to detail that expresses itself in very warm, affecting music.
It’s easy to fall into the perceptual trap that Robin Holcomb and Wayne Horvitz are a single creative entity.
They are married to each other, after all, and they work on each other’s albums often — Horvitz as producer for his wife’s singer-songwriter albums, Holcomb as singer when his projects require a voice.
But Solos marks the first time both share billing on an album, and the original idea was for each to perform the music of the other.
In piecing the album together, they decided the performances of their own pieces worked better, so the album is divded between Holcomb doing her own material, and Horvitz doing his.
And while the two make astounding music together, what is striking is just how different they are as composers and performers.
Horvitz is the more melodic and perhaps more conventional performer of the two. He gives a playful reading of Wayne Shorter’s “Armageddon”, perhaps the most straight-forward track on this album of contrasting styles.
Holcomb follows right after with the concise “The Pleasure of Motion”, in which she gets downright violent with her instrument. And in another zag to her zig, Horvitz’s “Joanna’s Solo” is simple and poignant.
Although Horvitz, who is a prolific writer, occupies most of the tracks on this album, the most expansive piece is Holcomb’s “Before the Comet Comes”, written for a theater production of the same title. Like the other pieces on her 1996 solo piano album, Little Three, “Before the Comet Comes” explores a wide dynamic range, starting out introspectively but building momentum over the course of 13 minutes.
As the album progresses, the two players start reflecting each other’s style. Horvitz admits to ripping off Holcomb’s arrangement for the traditional song, “Buttermilk Hill”, and it’s easy to mistake his playing for hers.
On “Up Do”, Holcomb sounds like Horvitz at his more whimsical, but she retains just enough grit in her performance to remind listeners who’s at the keyboard.
Personally, I prefer Holcomb’s dynamic, often abusive playing, even though Horvitz’s sense of melody does a fine job of grounding the album.
It takes a while to suss out the nuances of the two performers, given the shared credentials of both as noted improvisers. But when the differences make themselves known, Solos comes across as a striking collection of distinct styles.
Spitz will release a promo clip DVD titled, Sora to Video 4, on Aug. 3, the band’s web site announced. The collection covers the last five years of work, spread over four albums. Hit songs such as “Haruka”, “Sawatte Kawatte”, “Hanemono”, “Mizuiro no Machi”, “Stargazer”, “Masayume”, “Haru no Uta” and “Tekuteku” are expected to be included.
Yamanaka Sawao (the pillows), Jiro (Glay) and Nakayama Shinpei (Straightener) have formed a new band called the Predators. The band announced on its official web site it would release its first mini-album, titled Hunting!!!, on July 6. No information is yet available about live dates.
Yuki releases a new single, titled “Dramatic”, on June 29. The song will be featured as the opening theme for the anime, “Hachimitsu to Crowbar”. The single includes live versions of “Joy” and “Hello Goodbye” from her Sweet Home Rock ‘n’ Roll Tour. Yuki’s previous single, “Nagai Yume”, reached No. 4 on the Oricon Chart.
Dragon Ash releases a new single on July 13. The yet-to-be titled single quickly follows the June release of “crush the window”, which is being offerend in trial listening on the band’s website. Dragon Ash is scheduled to appearing in a number of festivals this summer, including Set Stock ’05 on July 24 and the Rock in Japan Festival ’05 on Aug. 5.
m-flo releases a new single with singers Emyli and Yoshika on July 13. The single will also feature “Hey!”, the duo’s collaboration with Wada Akiko, which served as the theme for a TV program. The Emyli and Yoshika track has been described as featuring m-flo’s signature sound, but for its collaboration with Wada, the band sampled one of her own tunes. m-flo also released a limited edition vinyl single, “A.D.D.P.”, with singer Monday Michiru.
Tokyo Jihen releases a live DVD, tenatively titled Dynamite In!, on July 13. The DVD documents the band’s tour from January to February of 2005. Two new songs are featured — “Toomei Ningen” and an oldies cover, “Koi no Urikomi”. The band has also scheduled Aug. 17 for a second DVD covering its Feb. 9 concert in Nagoya.
The planned outage for the website didn’t really have to happen, but the back-end changes to the site are now installed.
The discography section has been reorganized to seperate individual formats on to different pages. It should also be easier to list different pressings of a single album, such as limited editions. I’ve also signed up to be an iTunes affiliate, and to start with, I’ve linked to the four releases Bonnie Pink has made available on iTunes.
The new changes also fixed a problem with the Audiobin. A combination of scripting error and database misconfiguration rendered the free Audiobin levels — Preview and Streaming — inoperative. This problem wasn’t brought to my attention till this past week, since the interface doesn’t seem give the impression that such behavior was incorrect.
It’s an embarrassing error, and one for which I’m truly sorry.
Hopefully now this latest round of development will fix whatever tinkering I did a month ago. Now I can get back to writing for the site! Thank you for your patience.
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