ALBUM REVIEW: “you of all things” by Jodie Landau & wild Up

Posted on October 26, 2015 by maestrobeats

download (17) Most 23-year-old classical musicians are just beginning their careers: they’re fresh out of college, joining their first chamber groups or small-scale symphonies, maybe playing local concerts here and there, or preparing for grad school. But composer, vocalist, and percussionist Jodie Landau is not your typical 23-year-old.

He works with the acclaimed Los Angeles-based modern music collective, wild Up, as a performer, composer, and production manager. He’s toured and performed around the world, has collaborated with renowned classical and jazz groups alike, and recently even traveled to Iceland to collaborate on a concert and recording with Graduale Nobili (you know, the Icelandic choir that recorded and toured with Bjork for three years). As a solo performer, he sings while playing vibraphone and marimba.
Just consider that for a moment. How many vibraphonists or marimba players do you know? Probably not very many. And of them, how many sing while playing, compose their own music, collaborate with multimedia artists, and tour the world? Probably even fewer.

Did I mention Landau also recently released a new album with wild Up?

It’s called “you of all things,” and it features six vocal works by Landau, as well as works by Ellen Reid, Marc Lowenstein, and Andrew Tholl. In addition to composing over half of the works on the album, Landau also sings and plays vibraphone, crotales, bass drum, and piano on the recordings.

Of course, having an adventurous chamber orchestra to collaborate with certainly doesn’t hurt. Led by artistic director and conductor Christopher Rountree, wild Up is committed to creating visceral and thought-provoking musical happenings, transforming the concert space into a place without borders—a place filled with endless possibilities to connect and create with one another. download (16)

In short, it’s the perfect group to perform Landau’s music, which merges elements of classical chamber music, rock, and jazz with multidisciplinary art forms such as live performance, film, theatre, and dance. The album features performances by Landau with wild Up and background vocals by Graduale Nobili.

And it all begins with “an invitation.” A short and sweet introduction to the album, Landau’s vocals swell with sincerity above clarinet motives and Graduale Nobili’s softly shimmering vocal harmonies.

But their voices take on quite a different role in the piece that follows: Ellen Reid’s “Orlando & Tiresias.” The piece is a striking and surreal duet between Landau and the chorus, with dynamic and textural contrasts so dramatic that the piece is at times almost reminiscent of a rock opera.

Landau’s “the taste of the room” sounds like something of a dissonant watercolor painting: strings, woodwinds, and wordless vocals blend together and sway apart to create a mesmerizing sonic landscape.

Speaking of painting, Landau incorporates a stroke or two of tone-painting in the beginning of his sweet and sincere “a ballad – for you dear.” Delicate harp ornamentation compliments his delicate lyrics as he sings of love, where “we dream and wake in heaven.” But the sweetness is short-lived, and the song transforms entirely as he encounters (and then overcomes) the greatest tragedy: heartbreak.

Marc Lowenstein’s two-part “This” is the most rhythmically adventurous piece on the album, though Landau remains in calm control of his vocals above the unrelenting, ominously dark, and at times even chaotic bed of instrumental textures.

The work is followed by a similarly ethereal piece by Andrew Tholl: “Memory Draws the Map We Follow.” A ghostly choir of vocal melodies floats above airy strings and a grim, growling bassline, drawing a meandering map of otherworldly haunts.

The album comes to a close with three more compositions by Landau. The first, “as I wait for the lion,” is a simple, swelling, and poignant piece that pulls on the listener’s heart strings with each and every pluck of the sparkling harp, each and every knock of the delicately twinkling percussion behind Landau’s heartfelt voice.

Landau’s vocals takes on more of a pop music aesthetic in “stay going nowhere,” a piece which combines the unrelenting energy of a rock song with the intricate orchestration of a chamber work.

But he saves the best for last: the most charming piece on the album is “as we sway,” a lovely and lyrical ballad with Landau’s warm, gentle voice humming above a delicate pizzicato backdrop. By the end of the album, it’s clear that this is a young man who is feels his emotions deeply and viscerally—and who is ready to explore them through the full spectrum of musical expression.

Not bad for a 23-year-old.

ALBUM REVIEW: Rebirth of a Nation

Posted on October 19, 2015 by maestrobeats

by Maggie Molloy

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D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” was the first film in American history to be screened at the White House—and while that may seem like quite a triumph, the tale it tells is deeply tragic.

Released in 1915, the silent epic drama film is based on the novel and play “The Clansman” by Thomas Dixon, Jr. If the title didn’t already give it away, the film is three hours of racist propaganda portraying an extremely biased (and honestly, downright offensive) account of the American Civil War and Reconstruction era.

And it’s more than just a film: this movie helped lead to the creation of Hollywood—as one of the first pieces of sophisticated, mass-produced cinematic media, its message became embedded in our country’s history, art, and ethos. Its reverberations can be felt even now, 100 years later.

Electronic artist Paul D. Miller (better known as DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid) reflects on the cultural significance of this film in his large-scale multimedia performance piece, aptly titled “Rebirth of a Nation.” The ongoing interdisciplinary project includes a documentary film, site-specific performances around the world, and, most recently, a new album.

Recorded with the fearlessly experimental Kronos Quartet, “Rebirth of a Nation” is conceived as a remix and reimagination of Griffith’s original film. Miller remixed, remastered, and resynced the original score, taking a critical look at society’s racial politics and making a musical statement about it.

Kronos photographed in San Francisco, CA March 26, 2013©Jay Blakesberg

You can watch the trailer for the project here:

“We need more than ever to see the context that early cinema offers us,” Miller said. “As my old friend Saul Williams likes to say: Another World Is Possible. A remix of a film as deeply important and problematic as ‘The Birth of a Nation’ reminds us that, in the era of Trayvon Martin and Ferguson, many of these issues still linger with us at every level.”

The album itself retells the story through 19 short pieces for string quartet and electronics, creating a colorful, fractured, and fragmented collage of American History. Miller layers the classical strings with hip hop, folk, gospel, and blues elements, combines them with drum beats and electronic echoes, and resynthesizes them into a musical mashup of American history—thus expressing, without words, a history of racial (and musical) complexity that Griffith’s original film sought to suppress.

“Collage is the collective unconscious,” Miller said of his creative inspiration. “Sound is a phenomenon that’s totally open, so there are no real boundaries unless you make them. I like to think of all sound as just patterns, so there’s no reason to think we can’t just add patterns, subtract patterns.”

The result is a series of over a dozen unique soundscapes, each telling its own fragment of a larger story: the history of U.S. slavery and the ongoing struggle for racial equality. With ominous, grim titles like “Gettysburg Requiem,” “Ride of the Klansmen,” “Lincoln and Booth get Acquainted,” and “Ghost of a Smile,” Miller’s music tackles many of our country’s most challenging and emotionally-charged political issues. The pieces are haunting, often even hypnotic—but they certainly get you thinking.

Musically, Miller portrays Civil War and Reconstruction era America as a desolate electronic wasteland—but as he travels through this metallic and industrial landscape, he discovers and explores a number of hidden treasures: a soulful blues melody here, a folky harmonica riff there, an infectious hip hop beat beneath him or a trancelike drone just around the corner.

“From almost every angle, this kind of creativity celebrates collage, a willful breakdown of boundaries, and a playfulness that would aggravate almost anyone,” Miller said of his compositional process. “That’s kind of the point. That’s where I looked for inspiration.”

And it extends beyond music, too: the film and site-specific performances recreate the project again and again, making full use of the artistic possibilities of today’s digital age.

“Multi-disciplinary art is crucial these days,” Miller said. “It’s the way we live now. The year 2015 is science fiction for me, but we are still using the imagination of a different era to describe a cultural milieu that has evolved more rapidly than anyone anticipated. That’s kind of like using an old bicycle to race an F-34 Joint Strike Force fighter jet. It’s apples and oranges; it doesn’t make sense. That’s the paradox at the heart of my ‘Rebirth of a Nation’ film project.”

And in exploring this paradox, in critically examining that deep, dark part of American history that “The Birth of a Nation” portrays, Miller is able ultimately to offer a message of hope: We do have the power to reexamine and remix our past—and we likewise have the power to reform our present and our future.

“The realm of the possible is always greater than the realm of the real,” Miller said. “I try to navigate between the two: that’s art.”

NEW VIDEOS: yMusic

Posted on October 14, 2015 by maestrobeats

We’ll just let the audio and visuals speak for themselves. Enjoy these two brand new videos from our studios from yMusic!

ALBUM REVIEW: Nostalgic Synchronic by Dan Trueman

Posted on October 12, 2015 by maestrobeats

by Maggie Molloy

The avant-garde and always-iconoclastic composer John Cage shocked and intrigued audiences around the world when he invented the prepared piano in 1940. Presented with the challenge of writing dance music for a small stage with no room for a percussion group, Cage discovered it was possible to create an entire percussion orchestra with just a single instrument: a grand piano.

His creation was the prepared piano: a piano that has had its sound altered by placing everyday objects such as screws, bolts, and pieces of rubber on or between the strings.

“With just one just one musician, you can really do an unlimited number of things on the inside of the piano if you have at your disposal an exploded keyboard,” he famously stated.

And it was precisely this notion of an exploded keyboard that inspired composer, fiddler, and electronic musician Dan Trueman to create a 21^st century version of the instrument: the prepared digital piano.

“Like the prepared piano, the prepared digital piano feels like a piano under the hands and often sounds like one,” Trueman said. “But it is full of surprises; instead of bolts and screws stuck between the piano strings, virtual machines of various sorts adorn the virtual strings, transforming this new piano into an instrument that pushes back, sometimes like a metronome, other times like a recording played backwards. The virtual strings also tighten and loosen on the fly, dynamically tuning in response to what is played.”

His new album, “Nostalgic Synchronic,” explores the vast possibilities of the instrument through a series of eight etudes performed by percussionist and pianist Adam Sliwinski of Sō Percussion.

“My set of etudes, called ‘Nostalgic Synchronic,’ are inspired by the tradition of etudes by composers like Ligeti, Bach, Chopin,” Trueman said, “In that they’re meant to demonstrate the technical range of the instrument and the player, but also to stand on their own as compositions.” download5

The etudes make use of three major types of preparations designed by Trueman: synchronic, nostalgic, and tuning. And in true 21^st-century fashion, Trueman has made these preparations available as an app (or as standalone software) for listeners to download and use on their own digital keyboards at home.

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In the synchronic preparations, any notes struck within a given chord are gathered and automatically struck on every tick of the keyboard’s digital metronome—until the player strikes a new chord, then the keyboard resets its metronome to that new time and new chord. The entire keyboard can function this way, or particular keys may be selected to be “synchronic,” allowing for an infinite number of accent patterns, melodies, beats, and chord combinations.

The nostalgic preparation is a reverse delay that is shaped and constrained by the prevailing metronome pulse: essentially, when a pitch is struck and released, the keyboard samples the note and plays it backwards so that it reaches its mirrored attack in sync with the next click of the metronome.

Last is the tuning preparation, which allows the player to switch freely between three different types of tunings during performance: standard equal temperament, just-intonation temperament, and what Trueman calls “partial tuning,” which is based in part on intervals drawn from the overtone series.

Sound complicated? Here’s a video with some simple examples:

Dan Trueman – The Prepared Digital Piano from Troy Herion on Vimeo.

As you can imagine, these preparations allow for infinite musical possibilities—many of which are demonstrated in Trueman’s collection of etudes. From the persistent rhythm and the spacey, sliding sonic structures of “Prelude” to the repetitive melodic figures and jagged chord clusters of “Song,” each piece explores the breadth of textural and timbral possibilities on the instrument.

In fact, “Undertow” sounds almost as though the pianist is exploring the instrument for the first time—with fingers curious and gentle, listening intently to each note as the tunings echo and shift. By contrast, “Marbles” is a glitchy, jittery little jig that sounds almost like a toy piano or a vintage video game—that is, until the growling bass rolls in.

“Wallumrød” mixes jazzy riffs with the sonic sway and reverse fade-attack of the nostalgic preparations, while “Systerslått” takes its mysterious tunings, wobbly groove, and folky ornamentation from a Norwegian fiddle tune. The album ends with “It is Enough!” a slow and gentle tune that twinkles like a music box—you know, if that music box was filled with echoes of electronically-manipulated melodic fragments.

So forget what you know about classical harmonic progressions—you’ll find no reassuring V-I on “Nostalgic Synchronic.” But what you will find is someone willing to start all over, to rediscover a tried-and-true instrument and create something entirely new. After all, who says piano keys have to be just black and white?

ALBUM REVIEW: Max Richter’s “From Sleep”

Posted on September 22, 2015 by maestrobeats

by Rachele Hales

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From Sleep is an offshoot of Richter’s durational album Sleep, which clocks in at 8 hours – about the amount of sleeping time scientists recommend for adults. While Sleep is intended as “a personal lullaby for a frenetic world” and meant to be listened while one is counting sheep and through the duration of the sleep cycle, From Sleep is a more modest 60-minute ambient daydream. It’s a warm blanket of hazy, cozy sound. Richter calls it his “manifesto for a slower pace of existence.” The two albums share a common landscape, but with a much shorter run-time From Sleep is less of a political statement.

The album contains seven selections that sound different enough to be their own pieces but flow seamlessly together, enough so that it’s difficult to tell when one piece has ended and the next begins. Richter has composed a delicate musical cocoon with no sharp edges. From Sleep opens with “Dream 3 (In the Midst of My Life).” The gentle, pulsing piano feels like a lone boat bobbing up and down in a vast ocean. The vaguely aqueous feel continues into the next selection, “Path 5 (Delta),” which offers up synthesized vocals from soprano Grace Davidson that sound like they could have been recorded underwater. As the song goes on her voice even begins to sound less human and more like a beautiful, sorrowful, looping whale song.

“Space 11 (Invisible Pages Over)” is a simple drone that serves as a bridge to “Dream 13 (Minus Even),” where we are again treated to Richter’s tranquil piano. This time the piano is less pulsing and more like a lullaby with the cello taking its time to join in like a tranquil foghorn. The fog begins to lift at about the halfway mark and you can almost feel the warm sun dappling the aural scenery.

The looping structure of the album mirrors the looping within the songs as we move from “Dream 13 (Minus Even)” to another bridging drone (“Space 21 (Petrichor)”), to more slow, precious, circular piano in “Path 19 (Yet Frailest)”, and finally return in “Dream 8 (Late & Soon)” to silky strings, moody organ, and Davidson’s lamenting vocals floating in and out like a zephyr.

Given its graceful serenity, From Sleep could be used as ambient background music for students, a meditative companion for yogis, or the soundtrack to a relaxing evening walk. And yes, you can also use it as a sleep aid. Hit play on this dulcet album in any situation where the end goal is to relax, open up the mind, and disengage from the busy whirring of everyday life.