Photo credit: Alex Stoddard
Cistern is Jherek Bischoff’s anticipated follow-up to his debut album Composed, which featured a quirky, orchestral pop sound. On Composed, Bischoff recorded orchestral instruments separately and layered the sounds to create a full ensemble. With Cistern, he gets help from the excellent NYC-based ensemble Contemporaneous, who provide the orchestral sounds that have become the touchstone of his work. It’s been called “headphone music,” and it is experienced best when enveloped in large headphones. Audiences in Times Square were given just this opportunity, listening to a late-night “Silent Orchestra” performance of Cistern on wireless headphones, accompanied by visuals displayed on massive video screens (a Midnight Moment presented by Times Square Arts).
Times Square presentation. Photo credit: Jim Batt.
Serenity – that’s the feeling that pervades the music on this album. It’s music that isn’t meant to really excite or engage you in a particular way, but seeks to bring you to a contemplative place. For Bischoff, that place was a massive cistern underneath Fort Worden on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, where he improvised inside a space with a 45-second reverb. This is no place for fast, complex music, and it’s easy to hear the inspiration of this cavernous space in the music of the album, which uses simple, slow motives and a lot of repetition to convey its ideas.
The experience of playing in a massive darkened echo chamber is possibly the most closely portrayed by Lemon, the album’s shortest track, and the evocative closing track The Sea’s Son, which use silence to the fullest extent. Interesting orchestration abounds on Cistern from the start of the album, with a toy piano and militaristic percussion entering the mix on the track Automatism. Strings sliding and bending pitch create an interesting atmosphere on the title track, a straight-up passacaglia. The one track to create a bit of tension is The Wolf, playing low instruments off the rest of the ensemble in a hunt-like dance of sound, but it stands apart from the all-encompassing introspection of this album.
Photo credit: Alex Stoddard
Though music that is relentlessly inward-looking and meditative rarely suits my taste, the melodies and harmonies of Closer to Capture, together with the stop-start of this music’s rhythm makes it the star for me on this new release. It’s also hard not to be swept away by the nostalgia of The Sea’s Son; Bischoff says that as he composed in this album’s slower, almost back-to-basics style, he was reminded of the simpler times of his childhood, growing up on a sailboat in Seattle. As the final track’s unresolved harmony hangs in the air, it’s easy to visualize a human figure standing on the prow of a boat, gazing across the bay. I find that I actually enjoy the music of Cistern much more in film soundtrack form; Bischoff has done a small amount of scoring (i.e. Netflix’s Wet Hot American Summer), and I hope we can look forward to more film-related projects from this busy composer.
For more videos featuring Jherek Bischoff, visit our video page for 3 tracks from Cistern recorded right here in our studios with a quartet of the Seattle-based string ensemble, SCRAPE.
This week, I chose a piece that reminds me that I’m just a sucker for certain things. Two of those things are the majestic landscapes of the American West and good brass writing, both of which are present in ample measure in Mason Bates’s Desert Transport. Inspired by a helicopter ride over the Arizona desert, this is a well-balanced exploration of the beauty and complexity of the American Southwest that operates on multiple levels. It has the charmingly indulgent and innocently sincere moments of musical Americana that you might expected of a large-scale orchestra work about the Western landscape, but those are balanced with inward-looking moments that suggest a less nationalistic, more humbling consideration of the landscape at hand. Listen especially for a field recording of Pima tribal musicians, which is expertly interwoven with the live performance via offstage speakers. – 
It’s no secret that I love pretty much everything that the New Amsterdam record label produces. I’m prone to gushing about them in my commentary on the Second Inversion stream and to my friends – particularly those who don’t have a clear understanding what “contemporary classical and cross-genre music” really means – because New Amsterdam constantly hits the nail on the head with releasing music that truly rethinks classical. One of the most recent releases is The Two Halves, a geographically-inspired song cycle from 22-year-old Finnegan Shanahan and the ensemble Contemporaneous. The 6 songs are based on a map of the Hudson River Railroad ~1852 and moves along the Hudson River to the Catskills and across the country to the Jemez Mountains and beyond. The Great Sunstroke captures this intersection of deft composition with popular song and folk music. It’s not quite classical, it’s not quite pop, and it falls in that beautiful in-between place with constant energy that keeps me excited about the evolution of music in the 21st century. – 
Daníel Bjarnason’s 2013 album Over Light Earth opens with two pieces commissioned by the LA Philharmonic, which respond to paintings by abstract expressionists Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. The Icelandic composer delivered in magnificently ominous terms, capturing the early Cold War anxieties expressed by both painters in their starkly divergent styles.