Imagine almost 86 minutes of superbly recorded percussion in which the traditional notions of steady beat, driving rhythms, and attention-catching melody rarely take center stage. Welcome to Beyond, a mind-bending /time-distorting three-disc percussion tour de force from Sono Luminus on which the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet plays a dazzling array of percussion as it explores the eloquence and beauty of color, texture, sustain and decay.
Recorded in DXD (24/352.8k), Beyond is available as either a hi-rez download in multiple formats, including DSD, or as a three-disc album that includes two Red Book CDs and a Pure Audio Blu-ray disc capable of delivering 5.1 and 9.1 Auro 3-D. Auditioned in stereo in its original DXD format, the album offers convincing evidence that recording, mixing & mastering engineer Daniel Shores deserves a Grammy nomination for engineering. If you have ever heard recordings with more convincing depictions of sustained sounds forming, blooming, and decaying in space, I want to know about them.
An international assemblage of contemporary composers—Iceland's Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Daniel Bjarnason, Brooklyn-based Christopher Cerrone, LA-based Andrew McIntosh, and New York/LA-based Ellen Reid—produces music unlike that available on most jazz recordings, let alone the three percussion classics Michael Fremer highlighted on AnalogPlanet earlier this year. (Note: Digital versions of the Smoke & Mirrors Percussion Ensemble album include compositions that did not fit on the LP.) Bjarnason's Qui Tolis begins with extremely delicate sustained rings and chimes. Save for occasional punctuations by low-pitched drums, it offers almost 10 minutes of gorgeous, high excursions whose spectral sound world will stay with you long after the track concludes.
If you keep waiting for the big bang in Thorvaldsdottir's 6:13 Aura, you will be sorely disappointed. This is music of wonder, filled with sustained, consoling sounds that have lots of space between them. Totally magical in its multi-dimensionality, Aura virtually glows from within. Far too wondrous to be pigeonholed as "meditative," Aura is one of those compositions in which you'll discover new things—new worlds, even—with repeated listening.
The second-longest work on the program, Cerrone's Memory Palace, is composed of five movements whose names reflect composer-specific references. Taken as a whole, it's a trip. "Harriman," to me, brought up reminiscences of crickets or cicadas buzzing away in the woods. In fact, at one point, I imagined a heterosexual couple embracing tenderly in a cabin before the man walked out and vanished into the dark of the forest. (Hackneyed image, I know, but that's what came up.)
Switching locales entirely, there are lots of marimba explosions in "Power Lines," but they are light years apart from those encountered in African drumming. If you thrive on resonant overtones and buckets of color, you'll likely really take to this one.
The emphasis in the third movement, "Foxhurst," is on the contrasting sounds of bells, chimes, and gongs. As the music intensifies, subsides, and then grows bigger still, the emotional impact of each collection of sounds may very well product multiple "wows." Finally, a sole "boom" leads us into "L.I.E." This is a different world again, one of wood, bamboo, and percussion, and even more intense than what preceded it. The final movement of Memory Place, "Claremont," offers a surprising semblance of melody as its windy focus consoles. Gorgeous stuff, and impossible to categorize.
Reid's Fear-Release sounds, in one sense, exactly like its title. Soft and loud, tease and disrupt are the names of the game here. Last comes the shock of McIntosh's I Hold the Lion's Paw, which actually includes what sounds like a drum kit. A nine-movement work that lasts almost 40-minutes, I found it the most conventional of the lot. But in a collection as unusual as Beyond, anything that includes instruments that sound even remotely familiar would still come across as beyond avant-garde in most compilations.
If you're game for exploring aural architecture more far poetic and profound than anything encountered in mundane reality—imagine starting with the sonic equivalent of a construction by Brazilian artist Lygia Pape (see below), which I caught at the Met Breuer Museum in New York in June thanks to a tip from Herb Reichert, and moving on from there—check out Beyond. It's also one of the most convincing arguments for hi-rez sound I know.
