The Absolute Sound

By Andrew Quint

Don’t think you’ve got the discipline and concentration to tackle new, cutting-edge music? Let eighth blackbird be your guide. There’s nothing sterile or forbidding about any of the selections on this CD. Yes, some of the music is “difficult.” But each of the six works, by five American/Canadian composers no older than 50, should be immediately engaging to any open-minded listener.

By Andrew Quint
The Absolute Sound

eighth blackbird strange imaginary animals

Judith Sherman, Gordon Fitzell, and Dennis DeSantis, producers; Judith Sherman engineer. Cedille 094

Don’t think you’ve got the discipline and concentration to tackle new, cutting-edge music? Let eighth blackbird be your guide. There’s nothing sterile or forbidding about any of the selections on this CD. Yes, some of the music is “difficult.” But each of the six works, by five American/Canadian composers no older than 50, should be immediately engaging to any open-minded listener.

strange imaginary animals (a production missing as many capital letters as an e e cummings poem) is an extraordinary journey that begins with Jennifer Higdon’s down-to-earth, if frantic, Zaka, and progresses to the distant-galaxy vibe of Gordon Fitzell’s evanescence. Along the way is the whimsical microtonality that defies Steven Mackey’s Indigenous Instruments, exquisitely abstracted textures of Fitzell’s violence, and the radical soundscape eighth blackbird produces with David M. Gordon’s Friction Systems. To close the disc, the chamber group—heir apparent in the hipness department to Kronos Quartet—brings us home from the electronically manipulated, other-worldly sonorities of evanescence with the toe-tapping futuristic funk that is strange imaginary remix, complete with synth bass and a strong backbeat.

The material is varied and well chosen but it’s the collective virtuosity of eighth blackbird—six musicians who first collaborated as Oberlin undergraduates over a decade ago—that makes this program irresistible. Its spirited, never-too-serious outlaw-artistry extends to the CD’s insert, which includes line drawings by four of the five composers and some pretty inscrutable liner notes. The sound, mostly courtesy of the esteemed veteran engineer/producer Judith Sherman, has immediacy and rich detail. You hear everything, yet the recording does not strike one as aggressive. Bells have a crystalline purity and the nontraditional prepared piano sounds are striking. The quieter end of the dynamic scale is produced with great subtlety—eb’s clarinetist, Michael J. Maccaferri, can play very softly, and the recording lets us know it.

Copyright © 2007 The Absolute Sound