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THEATER SCENE
MILLER THEATRE 2016

THE SOUND PROJECTOR
DIS UN IL IM IR 2015

CHICAGO READER
RAANNA JEDAKU 2014

NEW YORK CLASSICAL REVIEW
ALVIN LUCIER/KLAUS LANG 2013

VITAL WEEKLY
RAANNA JEDAKU 2012

PARIS TRANSATLANTIC
RAANNA JEDAKU 2012

NY MUSIC DAILY
UNCANNY VALLEY 2011

THE BIG CITY
MATA FESTIVAL 2010

THE BIG CITY
LUC FERRARI 2010

CHARLESTON CITY PAPER
BLOCKS 2009

members

ENSEMBLE PAMPLEMOUSSE: RA AN NA JE DA KU : CARRIER RECORDS

The album title isn't some odd haiku, but simply the first two letters of the first names of the five featured performer / composers – Rama Gottfried, Andrew Greenwald, Natacha Diels, Jessie Marino, David Broome – plus violinist Kiku Enomoto, who's also responsible for the artwork (wait a sec, shouldn't that be a "KI" instead of a "KU", then? Maybe it is some kind of poem after all..). The booklet accompanying the two discs, with its imaginary dictionary definitions of "pamplemousse" (French for grapefruit, not that it makes any difference) and photo of the musicians standing by a gravestone in a cemetery, is as amusing as it is informative: the music itself makes few concessions, but that doesn't mean it can't be fun. The ensemble line-up is quite light and bright – Diels plays flutes and piccolo, Enomoto violin, Marino cello and Broome piano and melodica, along with Russell Greenberg on percussion on three of the seven pieces and vocalist Maria Stankova on Diels's Pulse Compression. Andrew Greenwald's On Structure requires flute, violin, cello and piano to "make sense of a rapidly descending concentric circle of contradictory input. Signification, once held in lock-step with narrative continuity, is recontextualized, subverted and distorted." And if that sounds difficult, you should see the score (I see Brian Ferneyhough gets a hug and thank you – that figures), but its gasps and rasps are sequenced and spaced with great finesse. Gottfried's Nest, constructed out of nested repeating units as its title suggests, is busier and, with the toy piano and electronics (who's on electronics?), colourful proof that post-Lachenmann "extended techniques" can be as accessible and enjoyable as playing it straight. Diels's Symbiosis explores similar territory, but is a sparser, more jittery affair, the strings making extensive use of scattery spiccato bowing. Her Pulse Compression in which "phrases of consistent duration are chopped, cancatonated [sic], sliced, smashed vertically and squished horizontally" is a tougher nut to crack, but as the material "torturously" undergoes its "continuous process of simplification" it soon makes sense. The recording's a tad dry, though – a touch of reverb might have added a little depth. Broome's Effective Temperature: from the Herzsprung-Russell Project, based on a grid illustrating the relationship between temperature, size, mass and luminosity of stars (reminds me of Boulez's famous line about moving out of the world of Newton and into that of Einstein), is, despite the presumably forbidding maths that went into its construction, a more melodic and linear affair, unravelling clusters into Ligeti-like (at times) micro-ostinati. Violinist Enomoto really has a ball on Greenwald's Sofrut, scrunching and skittering her way through what sounds like a ferociously difficult tussle with Diels's piccolo, a terse, thorny dialogue punctuated by occasional taps on an adjacent snare drum. Thankfully, things finally quieten down with Jessie Marino's closing Gnomon, based on a limited number of pitches played by three music boxes, which are picked up and picked apart by violin, melodica and bass flute. To quote those liners again, it's juicy and sweet and tender and tart, and another great outing on the ever-impressive Carrier label.–DW

April 5 2012