Which brings me to the music. Percussive, gristly attacks blend seamlessly with soaring melodies and electronic noise in in a piece by Kojiro Umezaki, "(Cycles) what falls must rise," written for quartet, electronics and the Japanese bamboo flute, the shakuhachi. If you think you're not a fan of "new" music, just close your eyes and give this a chance to tell its story. Me? I hear the persistent drone of cicadas, steam rising from the ground early on a humid morning... but there's something industrial about it as well, like an abandoned factory being reclaimed by nature.
Deconstruction and recreation is nature's endless cycle, and it's a common thread throughout this entire CD. Claude Debussy's String Quartet uses various permutations of the same melodic theme in each of its four movements. In turn, Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky pulls a fragment of Debussy's theme, deconstructs it and rebuilds it in "...al niente."
One of Debussy's given names was Achille--"Achilles"-- which was the inspiration for Brooklyn Rider's Colin Jacobsen to write "Achille's Heel," a testament to the boundless creative inspiration one can find in a circle of friends.
At the heart of the CD is this: everything we create is actually a synthesis of everything we've ever heard and read and seen and smelled and felt... deconstructed and rebuilt through the filter of our own individual, unique experience.
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About New Classical Tracks®
Host Julie Amacher provides an in-depth exploration of a new classical music release each week.
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