Kyle Miller: Bed of Creeks and Coils

Bed of Creeks and Coils is a project led by guitarist and composer Kyle Miller with his colleague Daniel Conant and featuring music by their mentor William Anderson, Benjamin Boretz, and Miller himself. The recording presents a broad vision of contemporary repertoire on the instrument, spanning works for classical, electric, and steel string acoustic guitars. Kyle Miller’s music is omnivorous in its influences, bringing a sense of cinematic fantasy to his inventions while drawing on classic rock styles, fantasy, and modernism. William Anderson’s works lean heavily on craft, developing motives methodically but allowing for intuitive evolution of material and off-kilter subtleties that subvert expectations. Throughout, Miller and Conant’s performances infuse the scores with personality and life.

Miller’s title track opens the collection, performed by the electric guitar quartet Bodies Electric. After a short chorale introducing the lightly overdriven timbre of the quartet, Miller introduces the prevailing texture of the piece, a steady, propulsive groove of interlocking rhythmic cycles. Expansive lead melodic lines soar over the top of the ostinato, alternating between harmonies that brighten and darken the landscape as the sun does when it recedes behind and emerges from the clouds. Midway through the work, Miller shifts to drier, muted accompaniment, ushering in a return of the long limbed melodic lines and a finale reprise of the opening chorale.

Miller is featured on electric guitar on Benjamin Boretz’ O. Spacious and broad, Boretz languishes in sustained resonances that are colored with delicate effects and interact with gentle electronic processing. Boretz explores a wide register with these verticalities, separating each phrase with thoughtful pauses. O closes with a series of ascending dyads, levitating upwards into the ether. The piece provides an effective contrast to the album’s largely motoric works.

On Miller’s Wavering Radiant, tremolando figures set up an angular dialogue between the two classical guitars, animated by scalar bursts, brisk glissandi, and gruff repeated chords. A reflective but taut middle section follows, as Miller spools out a kind of klangfarben extrapolation of harmonies across register and timbre. Energy accumulates around percolating arpeggios and a climactic haunting melody in octaves. Wavering Radiant closes with the fluttering repeated notes with which it began, bell-like harmonics aligning with chordal pillars like splashes of color on a canvas.

Composer and guitarist William Anderson has been a prominent figure on the contemporary music landscape for several decades, and Miller and Conant devote a considerable portion of this recording to his music. Conant performs on the four works for classical guitar solo, all of which highlight Anderson’s signature approach to contrapuntal writing on the instrument, embedding subtle polyrhythmic activity and modular pulse groupings into simultaneous lines. In Grüne Heinrich, bell-like harmonics establish an oscillating figure that Anderson steadily fleshes out with rich voicing and implied counterpoint, growing increasingly more dissonant before returning to the initial consonant sonorities from the opening.

Five of Anderson’s works are arranged into a mini-suite in the middle of the recording, alternating between the solo works Poema armónico I, II, and III. Poema armónico unfolds more freely, building its argument from a three note ascending motive that has an annunciatory character. Once again, Anderson uses harmonics elegantly to animate the texture, punctuating them with accented polytonal chords. Poema armónico II makes creative use of a microtonal alternate tuning, with one of the strings tuned a quarter tone apart, generating exotic sonorities both with vertical chords and linear figures that alternate between strings. To highlight tuning as a central concern of the piece, Anderson opens the short work with a series of string bends. Poema armónico III is mercurial and brief, as embellished figures adorn lush harmonies and Anderson develops motivic ideas in a loose context. Bodies Electric returns for Epicurean Song, their electric guitars enveloped in a haze of a chorus effects as they float through independent, willowy contrapuntal lines that outline oblique chords before a new notes is introduced and the harmonic function is transformed. Simple Composition is scored for steel string acoustic guitar and classical guitar, a surprisingly rare combination in through composed music that highlights their complementary characteristics, the sonorous clarity of the steel string and the rich warmth of the nylon. Anderson interweaves lyrical, arpeggiated lines between the two instruments, sometimes in counterpoint and at other times in intricately coordinated composite lines.

The final work on the recording is Kyle Miller’s Ven for four electric guitars, a three movement work that explores a wide timbral and expressive range. “Emanation” begins with a heroic, contrapuntal passage that is interrupted by stuttering repeated rhythms, a truncated hiccup gesture borrowed from heavy metal guitar picking but lifted into a new context. “Flux” evolves through an evocative murky opening, through a prog rock solo over ascending e-bow slide, to full blown neo-classical metal riffs, replete with harmonic minor licks, power chords, and athletic glissandi. In “Fulmination,” an arpeggiated accompaniment in triple meter supports a sinewy, chorus-laden melodic line, later joined by a second overdriven guitar while the accompaniment is muted like a quickly ticking clock. Dense power chords lay the foundation for a geometric figure comprised of repeated pitches, splinters into a complex hocket, and ends suddenly, the churning ensemble machine cut off mid progression as if the plug was pulled on the amplifiers.

– Dan Lippel

Sound engineer: Kyle Miller
Editing, mixing and mastering: Kyle Miller

Cover image: Kyle Miller and Daniel Conant
Design & layout: Marc Wolf, marcjwolf.com