By Ken Smith
Gramophone Magazine

New music stars find a groove they like and stick to it

Strange Imaginary Animals - eighth blackbird

The new-music group eighth blackbird (the lower-case spelling apparently an ee cummings take on Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways …”) have clearly become one of the stars of contemporary composition. Like the Kronos Quartet, the Bang on a Can All-Stars or, more recently, the string quartet Ethel, they’re among the few ensembles who remain instantly identifiable in whatever they’re playing, almost like a rock band that’s developed a distinctive sound and stuck with it.

This is all the more remarkable given the range of the composers here and what they require in their music. Jennifer Higdon’s Zaka (2003) is by turns rhythmically ear-catching and momentarily reflective. Gordon Fitzell’s violence (2001), true to its title, offers edgier timbres, paving the way brilliantly for Steve Mackey’s three movement Indigenous Instruments (1989), an evocative blanket of jagged rhythms and alternative tunings that the composer likens to “vernacular music from a culture that doesn’t exist”.

The toy pianos, break drums and prepared keyboards of David M Gordon’s Friction Systems (2002, rev 2005), on the other hand, come from a culture that very much exists, namely New York’s Downtown avant-garde. Much like their names, Gordon’s piece segues smoothly into Fitzell’s evanescence (2006), an equally fearless soundscape of timbres tempered with electronics. The techno bent continues with Dennis DeSantis’s strange imaginary remix (2006), which culls sounds from the earlier pieces on the disc and spins them into a thoroughly satisfying ending.

This collection is one of those rare programmes where the pieces come together into something larger than its parts. Surely the ensemble deserve the bulk of the credit, although other than Mackey’s piece, which clearly predates the ensemble, I’m not sure how much the composers have taken the particular players themselves into account. However this disc came into play, let’s hope that the forces involved remember how they did it.

Copyright © 2007 The Gramophone