Jenny Beck, Up to the Surface, New and Very Personal Electronic Music

 

In an era that culminated perhaps in the interjection of electronics into every avenue of Pop music, we see a continued, healthful response from the New Music worlds, not the least which is the Electronic, New Music work out soon as an EP, Up to the Surface (New Focus Recordings Digital Release) by composer/sound artist Jenny Beck. This is an integrated four movement work that achieves a true individuation as a soundscape, a continuous coloration envelope of distinction. It does not seek to beguile the senses with repetitive sonic mantras so much as to prevail with continuous walls of presence, a flight into the realm of pure musical re-imagination perhaps, and the mellifluous ability to create a shifting ground of sound spatial animation, wellsprings of aesthetically pleasing continuance.

A thorough grounding I think constantly in this work is the idea that repeated listens are critical to grasp intuitively the structure of the music as a whole. Accordingly I have listened many times before reviewing.

The title of each movement, not surprisingly gives as good idea as anything as to the contentful motion of the work and its unfolding meaning. So starting with the first movement we encounter "Some Place Sacred and Submerged," then on to 2: "Radiant Currents," then "In the Ether" and on to the final "Wake." Combine all that with the overall title Up to the Surface and so perhaps we get a kind of allegorical trip through to a kind of enlightenment, a special knowledge imparted via sound. It is suspension in ordinary spacetime and perhaps the sort of sounds denoting traveling through liquid, or even becoming a sounding liquid itself? You listen for yourself and decide.

And so it is a sonic journey and in the end did we get to where we wanted to go? Probably so the less we let the hereafter words pin us as to a literal meaning. The Bandcamp notes give us a little from their end, that is, that they go on to tell us that such timbral ambience is not run-of-the-mill thing (it isn't) and that we should listen as the dynamic soundscape evolves and changes them to so many "teenage electro-werewolves," to a unique and potentially newly paradigmatic musical soundscape.

The music is somewhat modest, unassuming, subtle. It does not speak in a loud manner or with a hint of anger or arrogance. It exerts, perhaps, the composer's personality, whimsical yet cosmic. I keep listening and it feels increasingly unique, timbrally distinct and personal. Bravo. The totalized world is electronic and a combo of relatively clean tones without being pure sine waves but also colored in ways that add a bit of pleasing granular texture if you will.

Stream the first movement or total album once released:  https://newfocusrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/up-to-the-surface