Hypercube: Trace

Seong Ae Kim’s we are here addresses the alarming rise in hate crimes against Asians in the United States. The work begins with an accumulating cymbal roll that explodes into a explosive flourish. Bracing unison rhythms between guitar and piano clusters are a call to attention, before diffusing into breathless figures in the saxophone, an expression of the aftershock of a traumatic incident. Mourning swells on electric guitar, rolls on Chris Graham’s pitched percussion, rumbling low register piano chords, and saxophone multiphonics characterize the subsequent inward facing section, music of alienation and despair. The cymbal crescendo from the work’s opening returns, ushering in a cathartic burst of saxophone gestures over a recall of the short guitar-piano unison outbursts. Dry, simmering plucked timbres inside Andrea Lodge’s piano are paired with terse vocalizations, capturing the aftermath of kinetic violence as it lives on in the psyche.

Korean TV soap operas provide the source inspiration for Corie Rose Soumah’s SPINNING, TOUCHED, UNDREAMT; SNOW-. Soumah mixes acoustic instrumental timbres with analog electronic sounds, and the stereo field becomes a canvas for sound painting. Timbres oscillate between instruments, as entangled emotions between characters in a drama. Soumah uses heavy distortion in the electric guitar part to conjure immovable blocks of sound, and collective, frenetic improvisatory gestures to signal instability. Soumah’s command over finding expressive potential in refined noise is evident in a passage of variegated static that crumbles, crunches, and crackles after the nine minute mark.

Composer Farzia Fallah traces the impetus for in this empty echo to the work of Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad. Describing aching imagery in her program note, Fallah conjures a soundscape that is infused with longing. Composite timbres throughout the ensemble fuse together in sustained crescendi, punctuated by tintinnabulating sonorities. Gestural contour is a guiding parameter of the work, focusing on giving each new hybrid expressive object room to come to full fruition.

The final work on the recording, Charles Rudig’s Speaker for the Dead, features an instrument from the treasure trove of obsolete music technology, the Casio SK-1 keyboard sampler, putting it at the service of the broader concept of “collecting stories for those left behind.” The Casio fulfills the role of “speaker for the dead,” storing sounds made by the rest of the ensemble. Erin Rogers’ complex saxophone multiphonics are accompanied by dense, low sonorities on the synthesizer, later enveloped by foreboding, distorted guitar chords that wash over the texture. Jay Sorce’s high partial harmonics on guitar fracture the symmetry and ascend into a taut tremolo that crossfades into tremolos in the percussion, enclosure figures in the high register of the sax, and short bursts of double stop glissandi in the guitar. A moment of pacific repose just after the five minute mark meditates on an expansive major 6/9 chord that mitigates the fatalism of the piece with a moment of timeless suspension. In the culminating ensemble passage, we hear masses of vertical, distorted sound shift between guitar, sax, and keyboard, connected by fast divisions on woodblocks. Finally, the Casio regurgitates material from the work through its transformative lens, coloring it with its own temporal timestamp. Speaker for the Dead uses exploratory sonic experimentation and legacy instruments as tools of ceremonial ritual.

– Dan Lippel