 |
|
Reviews: Tokafi.com, Tobias Fischer In a still fairly recent interview, Ned Rorem complained about the fact that most contemporary composers care all about sound and arrangement and nothing about developing melodies and harmonic progressions. Well, Mr. Rorem, here’s a composer for you: Hailing from Austin, Texas, Michael Vernusky is an artist with deep interests in both of the aforementioned aspects of his trade, as well as in a simultaneous exloration of classical orchestral means and up-to-date electronic technques. “Blood that sees the light” is the beginner’s guide compendium to his repertoire. It is not hard to see why. While Michael has been around for quite some time, composing and scoring the music to films such as “Means and Meditations”, this is actually his first and only offical release. With contributions recorded as far back as 2002 and as recently as 2005, it also constitutes a sort of sampler with highlights from his steadily growing catalogue and offers a glimpse at a style between the chairs, marked by a string of fine nuances differentiating him from the fold: He loves to work with sound, but he is not so head-over-heels in love with it to prefer it above structure. As a guitarist, he enjoys the instrumental performance aspects of his works, but never allows them to be an end in themselves. He writes “serious”, daring and adventurous pieces, but isn’t afraid to occasionally dab his feet into catchy and accesible waters. And finally, he loves to work with intuitive mechanisms, but has a knack for using them as a counterpoint to dense, highly “composed” passages of harmonies scraping the border between the tonal and “atonal”. On the three tracks of “Blood...” he has recorded singlehandedly (or at least without any external assistance), this approach leads to intense, occasionaly disturbing soundscapes of flexible and changing moods, which never lose their organic surface despite the sometimes severe amount of processing involved in their creation. As he points out himself, though, collaborations have also been an important part of his art and it is quite possibly easier on “Blood that sees the light” to discern his own voice when it is juxtaposed with the input of others – the romantic flute figures of Karmen Suter or the luscious string arrangements on the grand finale “Drawn Inward”, for example. Even when he is not even physically present, such as on “Arc” for solo piano, Vernusky is never far away, first splitting the music up in short islands of interrupted themes, before jumping on the train of a hypnotic groove. He is by no means afraid of “entertaining” his audience and the diverse nature of the material on the album marks him as a composer who wants to be heard by a public which isn’t exclusively made up of colleagues or professors. There is, however, something else going on here, which extends beyond these terms of limited value. Throughout this CD, I had the strong impression that Vernusky is using different instrumental settings to illuminate certain fundamental principles from various angles and with different means, as if he were trying to get across the same wordless message with each track (whatever it may be). It is this combination of inward coherence and outward versatility which makes him a recommendation to more than just Ned Rorem.
Perry Bathous, Chain D.L.K. Let's face it, it's extremely hard these days to make palatable "experimental" music in any genre, or even develop a unique style. Under the aegis of the award-winning Michael Vernusky, however, there just may emerge a perfect variant in the realm of "serious" music. This young and accomplished classical/noise-collage artist has turned in an ambitious and impressive array of drone-and-klang-accompanied chamber pieces -- a side of rusty razor wire with your filet mignon, if you will. In fact, let's imagine that this is one such dinner party, at which the first thing everyone hears is the title track, a swelling barrage of ambient menace, bringing to mind (for those of us with Industrial leanings) Reptilicus and maybe some of Laibach's Macbeth. But then track two, "Tanah," surprises us with a hissing alien demon who leads the way through a futuristic chamber piece for "flutes and electronic sound." "Arc," an intensely moody, brooding piano solo, has intricate and interesting modern phrasings in six movements, which means we've made it to the main course without too much wine and hors d'oeuvres. For the next course, "Means and Meditations," we've now left the chamber and stumbled out into the aliens' subway system, with snapping, spitting third rails and groaning vehicles howling electronically by -- and then on our way back in, we stop only to listen to a solo classical guitarist playing a somber prayer ("Selah") amid the sound of the otherworldly metropolis thrumming in the background. Now we've come to dessert, the live orchestral "Drawn Inward." There unfortunately is some dissonance in this last track, but kudos must be given to Vernusky for not copping out and doing it all on synth. In any case, by that time you and your dinner guests should all be in a catatonic stupor of pleasurable, drunken angst. I'm putting in my RSVP for the maestro's next soirée, which should be sensational, if this foray is any indication
|
Tracks:
|
