Samuel Andreyev, Music with No Edges

By now we have to a greater or lesser extent had access to High Modernist music for around 100 years, if you start with Ives (say 1910) or Schoenberg (say 1920). It may not for the moment dominate the way it might have in the classic Darmstadt world of post WWII, but this no longer seems to matter for no one thing dominates any more. I like that.

Nonetheless the High style continues to flourish and grow. Composer Samuel Andreyev gives us his take on it all with a nicely turned series of six chamber compositions on his recent Music with No Edges (Kairos 0015025KAJ). All enter into a rarified and abstracted world of rhythmically and harmonic-melodic further-leaning advancement. Nothing sounds folksy or strophic, then, and if there is a key center it is not an obvious one. And very happily, Maestro Andreyev excels wonderfully well in creating an ecstatic pointillistic counterpoint and extending it, the sort of thing you can hear iconically on "Le Marteau Sans Maitre" by Boulez, only brought forward into a different furtherance today.

The liners to the album inform us that Andreyev is a poet as well as a composer and a You Tube channel host with more that 17,000 subscribers, and all the better for I do believe that one can only gain from stretching oneself in unlimited creative zones wherever possible so long as the focus remains in place.

The works are of our time, literally, since they were written between 2004 and 2015. All have very contentful concentric girth. That is they show a thoughtful demeanor always. Nothing is casual so much as striving to encapsule the everyday if only to pierce through it to a deeper beyond?

The works that feature four, five and six instrumentalists are to me the most fascinating and enthralling (comprising three of the six works here), partly because they are the most capable of the octopus-ian multi-strandedness that is what I most love about this music. And so if one wanted to get an immediate impression about what one will hear, one might start with the "Verifications" for piccolo, musette, A-flat piccolo clarinet, Casio SK-1, percussion and cello; the "Music with No Edges" for clarinet, percussion, viola, cello and double bass; and the "Strasbourg Quartet" for flute, clarinet, percussion and cello.

Yet there is nothing lacking in the more intimate chamber works either.  Samuel Andreyev shows his highly creative and inventive self throughout. This is New Music of true worth, in performances one can hail as paradigmatic.

It is music that brings us into the future-present tense in happy ways. I strongly recommend this one.

Guy Barash, Facts About Water

Out there these days there is music that is modern in an unmarked, all-encompassing way. And then there is modern-modern, or music that has a certain edge, an acerbic quality to it. Guy Barash and his album Facts About Water (Innova 893) fits into the latter category. It was produced by Elliott Sharp, who tends to favor edgy music.

We get two suites, "Wrong Ocean", for string quartet, and "Blind Huber", a song cycle for voices and chamber ensemble. Then we hear "Seven Testimonies", a half-sung, half-recited monologue with electro-acoustic collage sound as accompaniment. Finally there is "Proteus", a peculiar story-monologue with voice alteration via digital signal processing.

All of it has a sound, different for each work, but none the less original and subject to the musically inventive mind of Guy Barash. This is not for a lover of smooth jazz! At least not genetically, for the music can be harsh. But there is artistry there, always.

I find the combination of various worlds of outness compelling. Texts are as abstracted or extra-ordinary as the music, yet there is often narrative, Kafkaesque, Beckettian. The music comes at you like a tornado or, perhaps more appropriately since this album has water as a thematic element, like a waterspout dead-ahead.

Those devotees of uncompromising new music will find this an absorbing listen. I surely did. If you are looking for mellow music to play innocuously at a cocktail party (do people still do this?) you would do well to look elsewhere.