BEST CONTEMPORARY CLASSICAL
The Best Contemporary Classical Music on Bandcamp, October 2024

By

Peter Margasak

·
November 07, 2024

The taxonomy of contemporary classical music—new music, contemporary music, whatever you want to call it—is a thorny issue. But every month, we’ll take a look at some of the best composer-driven music to surface here on Bandcamp—that which makes room for electronic experimentation, improvisation, and powerful takes on old classics.

Stefan Prins
Inhabit



Composers have been blending electronics with acoustic ensembles for nearly as long as the former were at their disposal, both allowing the two elements to exist in opposition, or seeking to seamlessly blend them. On this new double-CD, the Belgian composer Stefan Prins opts for the latter—although the fusion of the electronic and acoustic is murkier in more ways than one. Prins turns to feedback as a generative principle, embracing the raw process of amplified sound replicating itself into infinity. The feedback signals that ripple through the acoustic instrumentation create a cause-effect situation, where when one source goes silent the other comes to life. Three of these four pieces are part of Prins’s Inhabit series, where the musicians struggle to tame the feedback, harnessing it into an almost sculptural material. It’s interwoven with their acoustic output, creating a potent metaphor for the elaborate ecosystems that have been increasingly degraded and thrown out of whack by climate change. These three works—ranging from a four-person lineup of Ensemble Mosaik on “Inhabit Inhibition Space #1” and four spatialized instrumental quartets and six feedback soloists from EnsembleKollektiv Berlin on “inhabit_inhibit”—are all abstract; there are varied balances of acoustic and electronic, with the former generating ominous clouds of harmony or gestural feints when they’re not sputtering viscous, unpitched noises, and the latter writhing like livewire on the floor—prodded, corralled, and influenced by the performers. The electric guitar of Yaron Deutsch takes on that electronic mantle on “under_current,” performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Ilan Volkov, slashing against, riffing atop, boiling up through, and even unleashing some old-school feedback within chunky, odd-shaped, or hefty swells from various sections of the orchestra. It ain’t easygoing, but Prinz is bringing something new to the table.

John Luther Adams
An Atlas of Deep Time



In this new work, John Luther Adams sought to explore and express the monumental size and history of the planet, summoning the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra to bring this floor-rumbling effort to life. As he writes in the liner notes, “The earth is 4 billion 570 million years old. An Atlas of Deep Time lasts roughly 42 minutes, which equates to a little under 100 million years per minute. At that tempo, the entire history of the human family is represented in the dying reverberations of the last 25 milliseconds of this music.” Obviously, our current climate crisis provides a subtext for the work—a slowly lurching, ominous sound object shaped like a symphony broken into discrete, hefty, spatialized sections. While that element can’t be conveyed by a stereo recording, the music does transmit the monolithic grandeur of Earth, as if tectonic masses are shifting through sound, as stark slabs of sound—rumbling percussion, sustained swells of bass, stentorian brass, and upper register sparkles of flutes and violins—patiently unfurl, rubbing against one another with molasses-slow movement. Adams unleashes the unmatched power of a full symphony orchestra while deftly bypassing all of its musty conventions, forging a sonic experience that somehow straddles fragility and brawn. The piece doesn’t attempt to render the planet’s existence through time, but instead it evokes its sheer magnitude through sound. Adams continues to be one the most original and thoughtful composers of our time.

Clara de Asís & Rebecca Lane
Distances Bending



For several years, sound artist Clara de Asís and flutist Rebecca Lane have been developing this project, creating pieces that are designed to be malleable vehicles for examining our sense of time and space. The work is based on the harmonic series, and as each piece moves through those tones, we experience subtle shifts that go beyond simple pitch. The endeavor began as a duo, with de Asís playing synthesizer and Lane using a variety of quarter-tone flutes; but for this newer iteration, the pair enlisted the help of two unparalleled string players: Violinist Sarah Saviet and cellist Deborah Walker. They are all experts in the art of tuning, and the way they meld their sound, inclining at the most infinitesimal increments across each piece is astonishing; the electronic tones hold steady as guides for the others in shifting combinations over time. That precision allows for the nuanced relationship between these patient sounds to open up, and as each of the six movements progress what we hear on the surface is the proverbial tip of the iceberg, as the harmonic action between these four instruments yields far more than the sum of its parts. Like several other albums included this month, de Asís and Lane quietly challenge our perceptions of time as they upend our expectations for the interplay of their assorted voices.

Ghost Ensemble
Rewild



This gorgeous longform work written by accordionist Benjamin Richter for Ghost Ensemble, of which he is a founding member, feels like a complement to the John Luther Adams composition covered above—although it doesn’t seek to evoke the entirety of our planet’s history. In fact, its title is concerned with human efforts to make repairs to ecosystems that we ourselves have threatened. But the most arresting thing about Rewild is the way it challenges our perception of time. Like Adams, Richter is inspired by a kind of earthly development that’s impossible for humans to truly comprehend. Steve Smith’s dense liner note essay details the plethora of inspirations and ideas that went into the piece, but I’ve preferred simply getting lost in the serene, slowly unfolding shapes articulated by the ensemble. Individual lines evoke a rhapsodic instability, lingering, unspooling and evading time while being flush with uncertainty. Richter assembles these elements with meticulous care, the confluence of the various elements alternately between dizzying, hypnotic, and ominous. The performance begins and ends with almost imperceptible rustles, suggesting an eternal process that we’ve just dropped into for 50 minutes.

Emilie Cecilia Lebel
Landscapes of Memory



Last year I marveled at the variety and depth of Field Studies, the first portrait album by Canadian composer Emilie Cecilia LeBel. Now comes Landscapes of Memory, which collects two austere solo piano works, each featuring a persistent electronic drone produced by e-bows gently vibrating a string inside the instrument. Despite the reduction of means and the slow progressions inherent in both pieces—each over 30 minutes long—Lebel’s music is no less impressive or vibrant. Both works were inspired by almost imperceptible shifts in the natural world. Toronto pianist Wesley Shen tackles “ghost geography,” which was evoked by the complexity of the North Saskatchewan River. A fixed electronic pitch holds steady across a subtle shifting landscape of lean chords, rolling arpeggios, and single note gestures of an almost sculptural nature, all haloed by resonant overtones which mysteriously merge with the drone. The five-movement “pale forms in uncommon light, performed by Brazilian-Canadian Luciane Cardassi, where, depending on the movement, the drone pitch feels higher and more insistent, yet many of the piano notes played have the effect of canceling it out either through volume or an overlapping pitch. The actual phrases articulated by the pianist are gorgeous on their own—reminiscent of Morton Feldman in their touch and repetition, instigated by the ever-shifting rays of light filtered by the confluence of trees in the montane ecoregion of Alberta. It’s as if the drone represents the sun, its audibility constantly in flux depending on the activity of the piano keys, like overlapping branches blocking sun rays.

India Gailey
Butterfly Lightning Shakes the Earth



While I’m often surprised that more instrumentalists don’t turn to composition, it’s no secret that the mastery of one discipline doesn’t guarantee success in another. American-Canadian cellist India Gailey has established herself as a superb, versatile interpreter, often commissioning new work that pushes against all kinds of stylistic boundaries. With this new recording, Gailey turns the table, performing music that she composed. The album opens with “Mountainweeps,” a brief triptych she composed for fellow cellist Arlen Hlusko in 2020 for a project conceived for Instagram at a time when the maximum length for video was one minute, but each miniature, reflecting different degradations of alpine environs hastened by climate change, is marked by an elusive beauty, as if the brevity is a reminder of what we are losing. The bulk of this short album is the title work, a cello concerto performed with Symphony Nova Scotia that revels in the full-bodied splendor of an orchestra, drawing upon many of its most enduring features, while somehow eschewing the bombast, sentimentality, and shallow drama that afflicts most contemporary orchestral writing. Gailey straddles a genuine ardor for orchestral music, inherent in the swelling warmth and meticulously wielded power of the arrangements, and a refusal to be stuck in the past, yielded through passages that suggest electronics and cello lines that almost sound like Asian reed instruments.

Ernst Karel/Bhob Rainey
47 Gates



Ernst Karel and Bhob Rainey are two of experimental music’s most intrepid thinkers and explorers. Both are horn players who started out playing free improvisation and have taken wider but nonetheless circuitous paths in sound over the decades. Few artists can match Karel’s work with field recordings—especially his more recent work in cinema, while Rainey was half of the influential lowercase sound duo Nmperign with trumpeter Greg Kelley. They spent nine years making this epic, pouring a mix of live instrumentation and meticulous field recordings within a chord progression tuned to a 96-note octave—it should be remembered that Rainey studied with microtonal pioneer Joe Maneri years ago. Pooling their resources, the pair have created something special—a loose series of narrative dramas that resonate with rich harmonic depth. They’re both credited with electronics and recordings, but Rainey occasionally adds slowly decaying piano chords that provide grounding and almost function like a Greek chorus. Two of the pieces deftly add an abstracted string quartet and clarinets, further enhancing the dramaturgy while helping to underline the potency of the recorded material, which is sometimes spiked with unexpected elements, like the strident blast of Indonesian pop music that suddenly pierces “Sparks an empty pool.” The album has puzzled and delighted me in equal measure, leaving questions that keep pulling me back in for another listen.

Linda Catlin Smith
Flowers of Emptiness



In five previous albums, the British label Another Timbre has helped bring the ravishing music of Canadian composer Linda Catlin Smith to a wider audience, and on Flowers of Emptiness London’s Apartment House further fleshes out her vast repertoire with beautifully measured accounts of eight pieces spanning 1986–2024. It’s remarkable how consistent her sound has remained over that span, a gorgeously measured, melancholic, slow motion beauty, marked by a warm, somber palette. Whether the decidedly sparse solo bass clarinet piece “Blackwing”—its patiently swooping lines played with delicate care by Heather Roche—or the title piece, a string trio that’s the earliest work here, the gentle serenity of which is streaked with satisfying injections of striated abrasions and acrid harmony inspired by Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging. There are exquisite miniatures, such as the violin duo “Lamento,” in which Mira Benjamin and Chihiro Ono engage in an elegant close harmony dance, or the substantial “String Quartet #6,” marked by an appealing fuzziness that elides formal perfection in favor of sonic ambiguity. As she said of the piece, “I wanted to try to get lost in the polyphonic thickets, both in terms of the independence of the lines, and the harmonic language.” It ends the collection with a bracing yet somehow narcotic mystery.

Clara Levy
Outre-Nuit



French violinist Clara Levy (Ictus Ensemble, Onceim) designed this gorgeous album as a concert program, framed with a clear sense of movement, with the sound of her instrument growing more and more focused as the collection proceeds. She opens the album with a bracing meditation she wrote to set the tone, the raw grain of the violin submerged in ambient noise. Our ears acclimated, she moves on to Giacinto Scelsi’s three-movement “Xnoybis,” a rigorous, occasionally strident exploration of a single pitch from countless microtonal perspectives, swerving, wobbling, and vibrating with glorious, richly textured detail. Following another Levy piece, where the violin exerts only a ghostly presence, as striated harmonics tangle with ambient noise, she tackles Kaija Saariaho’s “Nocturne,” a study for what became her monumental violin concerto Graal théâtre, that’s marked by a wide range of timbral investigations; lurching, curving, and tangling. “Allégorie,” by the young Mexican composer Erika Vega, delves rigorously into delicate overtones emanating from pin-drop bowing distinguished by sparkling vibrato, punctuated by pizz plucks. The piece feels lighter than air, but hits hard with its spectral harmonic action. The album concludes with “Listening Into Silence,” a lengthy piece by the phenomenal German composer Eva-Maria Houben—a leading member of the Wandelweiser Collective—that’s filled with rests whose lengths are determined by the performer in an effort to bring the listener into the piece itself, occupying those theoretical silences as an act of calibration for more detailed engagement. The last piece is a kind of a guide to the whole experience, which can erase time as we inhabit these rarefied spaces.

Intermodulation
Connections (1970–1974)



Four years ago, Paradigm Discs released a previously unissued trove of recordings by Gentle Fire, a crucial presence in England’s underground experimental music scene, playing its own work as well as the work of Stockhausen, Cage, and Wolff, among others. Now the label rounds out its invaluable excavation of inventive material of that era with this new four-CD set of recordings by Intermodulation. Like Gentle Fire, the ensemble performed music that rarely got a hearing in the UK at the time alongside bracing works from its own members. I’ve been knocked out by much of the collection, which includes psychedelic accounts of two classic Terry Riley works—“Dorian Mix” and “Keyboard Study No. 2”—that endure as minimalist landmarks. The performances bristle with a kind of raw, livewire energy that suggests an alternative to the more academic side of experimental work from the time. Intermodulation excelled with live electronics, and one of the most gripping pieces here is “Performants,” a collective composition exploring overtones. Although the group appeared on a single Stockhausen recording— Sternklang—alongside the members of Gentle Fire, none of this material has ever been issued before apart from a single excerpt released on a collection curated by David Toop, Not Necessarily ‘English Music.’ The set includes some live recordings as well as sessions conducted for British and German radio, and it concludes with “World Music,” an audacious extended work by ensemble member Tim Souster for four musicians and four-track tape.



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