Scott L. Miller, Coincident, featuring Zeitgeist with Joseph Horton and No Exit

 

Composer Scott L. Miller has in the past few years done some of the most interesting Modern music out there. It is not capitulating, nor is it a rehash of earlier ways so much as a new offering that sounds like the future again, promisingly. (Type his name in the search box for previous reviews.)  So today there is his latest, COINCIDENT (New Focus Recordings CD FCR 337).

The objective on these eight movements for electronic synthesizer and chamber ensemble is to do something in furtherance of telematic music, or in other words in this case multipart music with live chamber ensemble and the composer on remotely constructed electronic synthesizer part with the software program Kyma.

The opening "Coincident Episode 5" has a nice part for intelligently poetic and punky vocal that sets the stage for the other seven heady movements that follow. It is all a specially sonic inventiveness and nicely co-occurring whole that piques the aural imagination and satisfies the wish to plummet ahead to the musical future. Very recommended.

It is yet another feather in the Miller cap, showing us decisively that he is one of our leading voices in  High Modern expansion.