By Paul Riley
BBC Music Magazine

High-flying quality

Paul Riley relishes a refreshing recital of contemporary music

For a group whose accomplishments include a cabaret staging of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire performed from memory,  eighth blackbird is an ensemble one would never describe as risk-averse! And in the linguistic Babel that is the contemporary music scene they thrive on celebrating diversity. Inventing it sometimes. Steve Mackey's Indigenous Instruments (1989, the only piece on the disc composed last century) is described as 'vernacular music from a culture that doesn't exist'. For the rest be prepared to embrace anything from Cageian prepared piano to electronica in a sequence both cunningly contrived and (thanks to Dennis DeSantis' 'strange imaginary remix') capped with a funky meditation on what's gone before.

Five of the six pieces here are world premiere recordings; the exception is Mackey's — accorded senior status and not just by virtue of its age. Preceded by the high-octane larks of Jennifer Higdon's Zaka (2003) and Gordon Fitzell's atmospherically internalised violence (2001), the fractured world of Indigenous Instruments then segues neatly into the rebarbative re-imaginings of Balinese gamelan in David M Gordon's Friction Systems (2002, revised 2005).

eighth blackbird play like musicians possessed; excited by the new, determined that their CD audiences will be too, they take wing, soaring on an upthrust of precision-tooled virtuousity.

Performance *****
Sound *****

Copyright © 2007 BBC Music Magazine