Second Inversion’s Top 5 Videos of 2016

Second Inversion is proud to produce video sessions in our studios and in beautiful venues around Seattle. You can peruse them all on our video page, but here are the top 5 viewed in 2016!

#5: Andy Akiho: in/exchange for string quartet and steel pan (featuring Friction Quartet)

#4: John Cage: Living Room Music (featuring So Percussion)

#3: Steve Reich: Cello Counterpoint (featuring Rose Bellini, cello)

#2: Gabriel Kahane: Bradbury (304 Broadway) from “The Ambassador” (featuring Gabriel Kahane and Brooklyn Rider)

#1: Steve Reich: New York Counterpoint (featuring Rachel Yoder, clarinet)

Stay tuned for more great videos to come in 2017!

ON SALE NOW: Second Inversion and The Triple Door presents Gabriel Kahane

Wednesday, March 8, 2017, join us at The Triple Door for a journey of art songs through the ages, from Schumann’s Dichterliebe to Kahane’s Craigslistlieder as well as other original works from this composer, song-writer, and multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire. Tickets are on sale now

gabrielkevent

A Brooklyn-based pianist, and composer; singer/songwriter, Gabriel Kahane is a musical polymath equally at home in classical, theater, jazz, and indie pop settings. He has written large-scale orchestral works, piano sonatas, string quartets, and song cycles. He has collaborated with everyone from Elvis Costello and Rufus Wainwright to the Kronos Quartet, and Los Angeles Philharmonic.

A trip down memory lane…live in our studios, from Kahane’s last visit to Seattle with Brooklyn Rider:

See you there!

ALBUM REVIEW: Balter/Saunier by Deerhoof and Ensemble Dal Niente

by Jill Kimball

baltersaunier

We live in a world where musical groups of every genre often craft signature sounds in order to make themselves more marketable. That’s all well and good for those who find one band’s sound and fall in love with it. But for those of us who prefer unpredictable music, it gets monotonous.

If you fall into the latter group, you probably appreciate the rare but always exciting cross-genre partnership—that glorious moment when two musical groups from different realms team up and produce something truly original. Sometimes it happens with Sufjan Stevens and yMusic. Other times, genres cross within the same family, as has happened with classical pianist Jeffrey Kahane and his more indie-inclined son, Gabriel.

This time around, the collaboration is a jointly-produced full album by the Chicago-based chamber collective Ensemble Dal Niente and the San Francisco avant-rock band Deerhoof. The two groups had an unlikely meeting in 2012 and found common musical ground immediately…so together they set to work on a recording project with Brazilian-American composer Marcos Balter. The result is an album that is by turns ambient and avant-garde, rocking and bebop-ing, lilting and crazed…in a good way.

deerhoof

Deerhoof.

The centerpiece of the album is Balter’s “MeltDown Upshot,” an incredible mashup of musical genres from across the globe. In other hands, this piece might sound overwhelming, but Deerhoof and Dal Niente are just chill enough to make it work.

The first two movements of “MeltDown Upshot” could be classified as ambient, but don’t mistake the word “ambient” for “boring.” The dreamy opening, “Credo,” spills seamlessly into “Parallel Spaces,” still floaty but with a tinge of sinister foreshadowing. “Ready,” with its frenetic Chick Corea-like jazziness, erratic meter and hazy lyrics (“I dream of sound in color / I dream of light in sounds”) is a sonic outlier in this piece and seems to represent the meltdown at its manic climax. A more organized mania comes in “True-False,” a fast-paced, string-plucking homage to Philip Glass-style repetition. The piece calms down again with “Home,” a delightfully indie take on João Gilberto’s Brazilian bossa nova. The last two movements take us back to the strange, dreamy vibes of the beginning. The sixth movement, “Cherubim,” is the clear highlight of the piece, somehow gathering all of Balter’s jazz, pop, rock and avant-garde influences together into three minutes of pure indie-rock bliss. With its driving percussion, earnest and unpolished vocals and wholly unique instrumentation, I have no doubt university radio hosts all over the country will be clamoring to get their hands on the single.

Ensemble Dal Niente.

Ensemble Dal Niente.

Balter’s other piece on the album, “Pois Que Nada Que Dure, Ou Que Durando,” is set to text by Ricardo Reis (one of the many pseudonyms of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa). It’s a simultaneously gloomy and carefree ode to the transience of life, a proclamation that it’s worthless to focus on the uncertain future and much better to live in the moment. In this piece, we’re transported back to the creepy ambience that bookends “MeltDown Upshot” with despondent, ghostly vocals and minimal instrumentation.

The album closes with a 20-minute suite called “Deerhoof Chamber Variations” by the band’s drummer, Greg Saunier. It seems to pull together a few elements of Balter’s major piece—there are some repeated pizzicato sections and moments of sinister dissonance—while also referencing melodic themes from Deerhoof’s more well-known songs. It’s really fun to hear their music reworked with harp, brass and strings; it lends the music a whole different, albeit mellower and more ethereal than usual, edge.

It’s such a treat to hear two very different musical groups jam together and take rare sonic risks. Based on the quality and depth of the music heard on Balter/Saunier, I don’t think this will be the last we hear of the Deerhoof/Dal Niente collective.

NEW VIDEOS: Gabriel Kahane and Brooklyn Rider

by Maggie Stapleton

Prior to their performance at the Tractor Tavern last week, Gabriel Kahane and Brooklyn Rider stopped by our studios to film a few pieces from their new collaborative album, The Fiction Issue!

If you missed them while they were out on tour recently, keep an eye on their schedules for a performance near you: Gabriel Kahane and Brooklyn Rider

Brooklyn Rider + Gabriel Kahane 02-01-16 1-resized

CONCERT REVIEW: Brooklyn Rider and Gabriel Kahane at the Tractor Tavern

by Christophe Chagnard

2016-02-02 09.03.04

Last night, I went to the Second Inversion’s presentation of Gabriel Kahane and Brooklyn Rider in concert. It was a stunning display of boundless creativity, artistic commitment, freedom and virtuosity that was deeply inspiring. Kahane’s singular melodic style is captivating, always taking unexpected turns, colored by sophisticated and beautiful harmonies. Just when you think that you have grasped his musical intentions, he takes you to a whole different sonic universe. In the end, you feel that you have been on a fantastic journey with a purpose that reveals itself once you’ve arrived. His voice is always soulful and completely committed to the true meaning of each word. I don’t use the word lightly but those were the creations of a natural and honest musical genius. His sense of pitch was astounding and “Ambassador Hotel” is a perfect song in my book.

Brooklyn Rider, with Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen on violin, Nicholas Cords on viola and Eric Jacobsen on cello, was a wonder of refinement, precision, with a huge expressive range and more colors than I have ever heard from a string quartet. The quality and care of each attack, the complete mastery of the many “sound-effects,” the vibrato matching, the rhythmic drive and transcendence of the bar lines, the intelligence of the rubato were all in full display. It was obvious that their understanding of Kahane’s compositions was very personal, like the expression of a deep friendship. The drama and poetry in Schubert’s “Rosamunde” quartet provided a delightful anachronism but it’s in Kahane’s own Quartet that Brooklyn Rider displayed the full range of its musical might. The symbiosis between Kahane’s relentless creative assault and the quartet’s sheer virtuosity and passion was a wonder to behold and the highlight of the concert. The Tractor Tavern was packed with many young and fewer old, and a great assortment of personalities from professional colleagues to fans. It was exactly the sort of musical evening that we need a lot more of and a tribute to Second Inversion’s leading role and impact. It was one of those rare treats when great art unfolds before us as the unapologetic and intelligent reflection of our time.

Brooklyn Rider + Gabriel Kahane 02-01-16 1-resized

Stay tuned for a couple of in-studio videos of music by Gabriel Kahane, filmed yesterday afternoon in our studios!