When do 12 hands + 12 eyes = boundless creativity? When you start by gathering up the six New York-based composers of the highly heralded Sleeping Giant collective, and letting them loose in the contemporary art collection of the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art in the Detroit suburbs. Next, you invite each collective member to find inspiration in one of the collection's artworks, and transform wherever they're led into compositions for the four-time Grammy-winning Chicago new-music sextet, Eighth Blackbird. Then you put it all together, and end up with Hand Eye, a recording of six works so of the moment, so vital, and so provocative that it could very well turn the way you listen to music on your ear.
Like the best of contemporary music, be it pop or classical, Hand Eye reflects the culture, issues, and obsessions of our day. Sometimes it does so literally, as when Ted Hearne focuses on Robert Arneson's By- By Huey, a portrait of the 24-year old murder of Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton. Pondering Arneson's response to the assassination of one revolutionary black man by another, Hearne hones in on the self-destructive aspects of humanity, and creates 10-minute work whose sometimes sinister tone derives from a muzzled piano that forces the other instruments of the ensemble to either follow or be left behind.
Curiously, Andrew Norman's three-part Mine, Mime, Meme uses very different musical means to explore other aspects of the same top dog/bottom dog phenomenon. Norman's starting point is rAndom International's kinetic installation, Audience, in which a field of small, mirrored machines rotates to follow the movements of a viewer who steps into their little arena. Thus is Eighth Blackbird cellist Nicholas Photinos' every musical move followed and mimicked by the ensemble's five other instrumentalists. Soon the game evolves/devolves into a fight for supremacy. What we hear starts out very slowly and mysteriously, and grows positively stealth-like before dying out.
The music that stunned me the most, perhaps because fabled sound engineer Michael Bishop (working with producer Elaine Martone, another member of the former Grammy-winning Telarc team) captures the contrasting instrumental timbres and wide-ranging dynamics of Eighth Blackbird so well, is Jacob Cooper's Cast. Cooper evokes "the sense of absence" evoked by Leonardo Drew's paper casts of everyday objects such as dolls, trinkets, and kitchenware by building a "cast" of various instrumental gestures around a central "object"—a gentle vibraphone line—and then gradually removing the vibraphone until only the sonic encasement remains.
If that concept sounds pretty heady, Cooper's music is anything but. From its first phrases, Cast seems to revolve around some great, all-immersive mystery. Into this unnamable universe instruments make some rather humorous entrances into a gorgeous score that sounds like nothing else. Eventually, the music seems intent on fading out until it throws you for a loop as it plays with you. The sounds are extraordinary, the visceral impact immense.
"Wow" was my immediate response as Robert Hornstein's Conduit, inspired by an interactive sculpture, began with the interplay of chimes and percussion. In this distinctly computer age take of the centuries old struggle of man vs machine, Hornstein explores how we relate to our devices. The music starts out fast, with mysterious and mystical overtones reminiscent of the sad music of Philip Glass. As the textures grow increasingly energized, the presentation becomes virtually three-dimensional. Imagine the members of a '60s era garage band growing increasingly primitive and unhinged as they take the lid off their sound and throw all caution to the winds.
Hand Eye, which appears today on iTunes, and on CD and as a 24/96 hi-res download from cedillerecords.org on April 8, opens the ear, eye, and mind simultaneously. Its music transports you to landscapes all their own, but with resonances that speak directly to our time. If you crave music that stimulates and provokes, you have to hear it.
Photo: SaverioTruglia
