Composer Per Bloland newest release, Shadows of the Electric Moon, highlights his reliance on fiction as an impetus for compositional inspiration as well as his integration of custom designed electronic software into his work. Featuring Unheard-of//Ensemble, Wild Rumpus, pianist Keith Kirchoff, percussionist Bill Solomon, and cellist Stephen Marotto, Bloland's music captures his inventive spirit and keen ear for highlighting subtletlies of instrumental characteristics and developing them within the narrative of a composition.
| # | Audio | Title/Composer(s) | Performer(s) | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Time | 58:46 | |||
| 01 | Los murmullos | Los murmullos | Keith Kirchoff, piano | 13:52 |
| 02 | Points of Light in Shadow | Points of Light in Shadow | Stephen Marotto, cello | 12:36 |
| 03 | Displacement Pressure | Displacement Pressure | Unheard-of/Ensemble | 8:55 |
| 04 | Shadows of the Electric Moon | Shadows of the Electric Moon | Bill Solomon, percussion | 13:52 |
| 05 | Solis Overture | Solis Overture | Wild Rumpus, Nathaniel Berman, conductor | 9:31 |
Per Bloland cites two key threads behind the music on Shadows of the Electric Moon: fiction as a source of inspiration and his use of custom-built software that gives him a high level of control over how he integrates electronics into his work. The intersection between these two results in music that is highly inventive in its subtle modulation of both instrumental and electronic textures, while unfolding within narrative, dramatic structures.
Los murmullos for piano and electronics, commissioned by and written for Keith Kirchoff, merges both strains. Based on a dystopian 1950s novel by the Mexican author Juan Rulfo about a decaying city, the piece is arranged around four different types of material, framed by four forces in the novel, the past, present, living, and dead. The electronics in the piece were generated using a physical model of the Electro-Magnetically Prepared Piano — a device Bloland designed where a computer sends signals to electro-magnets that vibrate the strings of the keyboard. The work opens with a lengthy tremolo on a low register pitch on the piano (which re-emerges later in a higher register), and proceeds through insistent repeated chords, devilishly virtuosic figures, and accumulating, oscillating trills. The electronics create a halo of sound around the piano’s acoustic material, sometimes eerily sounding like a chorus of ghosts, other times reminiscent of video game effects, or walls of distorted guitars.
Bloland brings his creative approach to transforming acoustic sound to the cello in Points of Light in Shadow. Two sound exciters are strapped to the cello and fed sounds from a program called MaxOrch (a front-end application of an orchestration simulator Orchidea), which uses samples to emulate sounds. Bloland recorded bassoon and bass clarinet multiphonics as source material for the electronics. The source samples add an element of breath to the cello, as if it is an augmented bowed-wind instrument. The cello writing focuses on harmonics, trills, tremolos, and fragile sonorities, leaving room for a cohesion with the electronics that creates the work’s timbral vocabulary.
Displacement Pressure, written for Unheard-of//Ensemble, is Bloland’s abstract reflection on the affordable housing crisis that afflicts so many cities in the United States. Recorded sounds from construction sites in the Cincinnati neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine are heard in the electronic part (after digital alteration), along with instrumental sounds that imitate work sites (via MaxOrch and Orchidea, as in Points of Light and Shadow). The ensemble writing leans into non-pitched extended techniques that evoke the mechanistic, strident character of urban development. A reflective passage midway through the work is grounded by regular pizzicati in the cello as the other instruments fuse together in short, hybrid melodic fragments.
Shadows of the Electric Moon is for snare drum and sound exciter, and explores various ways of altering its otherwise limited timbral palette. The piece is performed with the drum upside down, snares exposed, and a medium cymbal and crotale are used as quasi-preparations, brought into contact with the drumhead and snares to modulate the sound. A sound exciter rests on the snare for most of the piece, receiving a frequency from a computer that it transfers to the drum. The resultant music unfolds like a cyclical collage, drawing on the new, significantly expanded sonic vocabulary. Subverting expectations, the piece has a distinctly melodic quality to it, even when the material is non-pitched, all of the phrases are very clear and discrete. The sound exciter produces pitch frequencies that create pitched gestures that dovetail with the work’s rhythmic vocabulary. The piece is based on a novel by Norwegian author Pedr Solis titled Den Elektriske Månen (The Electric Moon) that is set in the barren, northern most county of Norway.
Solis Overture is also inspired by Pedr Solis, and in fact serves as the overture to Bloland’s opera based on his life, though it exists as an independent concert piece as well. Written for the Wild Rumpus quintet (percussion, piano, electric guitar, violin, cello) with electronics, the piece revels in the rich colorful possibilities of its instrumentation, augmenting them with an immersive sound palette in the electronics. Angular, overlapping ensemble gestures give way later in the piece to a cathartic drone loop in the electronics out of which a mournful, elastic melody emerges in violin and cello. Solis Overture closes with a glitchy, distorted passage that evokes a system malfunction alarm in an industrial facility. It is a fitting close to this collection of electro-acoustic music, highly technical in its applications and deeply musical in their realization, reflecting Per Bloland’s ambitious aesthetic vision.
– Dan Lippel
Los murmullos and Displacement Pressure were recorded by Shawn Fenton at Miami University
Points of Light in Shadow was recorded by Per Bloland and Stephen Marotto
Shadows of the Electric Moon was recorded by Per Bloland and Bill Solomon
Solis Overture was recorded by Alberto Hernandez at Fantasy Studios, Berkeley, CA
Mixing: Per Bloland, Jeff Kolhede (5)
Mastering: Ryan Streber, Oktaven Audio
Commission for Displacement Pressure supported by the Johnstone Fund for New Music
Solis Overture ℗ 2021 Pinna Records. Used by permission
Music published by BabelScores, babelscores.com/PerBloland
Artwork: Andrew Au
Composer photo: Andrew Au
Design: Marc Wolf, marcjwolf.com
Support for this project was provided by the Committee on Faculty Research, and the College of Creative Arts, Miami University, Oxford OH
Per Bloland is a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music whose works have been praised by the New York Times as “lush, caustic,” and “irresistible.” His compositions range from short intimate solo pieces to works for large orchestra, incorporate video, dance, and custom electronics, and often draw on various other art forms.
Bloland has received awards and recognition from numerous organizations, national and international, and commissions from a whole bunch of amazing ensembles. Performers of Bloland’s music include even more terrific ensembles and performers, some of whom perform on this album! His first opera, Pedr Solis, was commissioned and premiered by Guerilla Opera in 2015, and received rave reviews from the Boston Globe and the Boston Classical Review. His music can be heard on the TauKay (Italy), Capstone, Spektral, SEAMUS, and Pinna labels, on the 2015 ICMC DVD, and through the MIT Press. His first portrait CD, Chamber Industrial, was performed by Ecce Ensemble and is available on Tzadik.
Bloland is an Associate Professor and head of Composition and Music Technology at Miami University, Ohio. He is also a founding composition faculty member at the SPLICE Institute. He was previously a Visiting Assistant Professor of Computer Music at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he founded the Oberlin Improvisation and Newmusic Collective (OINC). He received his D.M.A. from Stanford University and his M.M. from the University of Texas at Austin.
Bloland has participated in two research residencies at IRCAM, both involving the Electromagnetically-Prepared Piano, of which he is the co-creator and primary composer. In addition to giving numerous lecture/demonstrations, he wrote a paper about the device (“The Electromagnetically-Prepared Piano and its Compositional Implications”), and developed the website magneticpiano.com. His second IRCAM residency marked the launch of the CAPSICUM project, focused on implementing an active control system with electromagnets to widen the timbral possibilities of the piano. CAPSICUM is a joint venture across multiple institutions, including IRCAM, Mines Paris – PSL, and Cambridge University.
Bloland’s previous research focused on literature and modernism — in particular the relatively obscure work of the Norwegian author Pedr Solis. Bloland has used his own analyses of the author’s poetry and prose to inform a number of pieces. His opera, titled Pedr Solis, was based loosely on the author’s life and ideas. His article, “On Composition and Literature—Pedr Solis, the Author and the Opera,” was included in Arcana VIII: Musicians on Music — Ten Year Anniversary Edition, published by John Zorn’s Tzadik Books.
Bloland often performs on the lap steel feedback banjo, an instrument of his invention. On this instrument he makes up half of Chainsaw Fugue, an audio-visual noise improv duo based in Cincinnati. As a trumpet player Bloland performed in various jazz bands and orchestras in San Francisco and Austin. He was a core member of the Bay Area Guided Improv Ensemble and performed in OINC while at Oberlin. Bloland was awarded an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for 2014.
Described as a “virtuosic tour de force” whose playing is “energetic, precise, (and) sensitive,” pianist and composer Keith Kirchoff has performed throughout North America, Europe, and the Pacific Southwest. A strong advocate for living composers, Kirchoff is committed to fostering new audiences for contemporary music and giving a voice to emerging composers, and to that end has commissioned dozens of compositions and premiered hundreds of new works. He is the co-founder and President of SPLICE Music: one of the United States’ largest programs dedicated to the performance, creation, and development of music for performers and electronics. Kirchoff is active as both a soloist and chamber musician, and is a member of both Hinge Quartet and SPLICE Ensemble. Kirchoff has won awards from the Steinway Society, MetLife Meet the Composer, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Chamber Music America, and was named the 2011 Distinguished Scholar by the Seabee Memorial Scholarship Association. He has recorded on the New World, Kairos, New Focus, Tantara, Ravello, Thinking outLOUD, Zerx, and SEAMUS labels.
A native of Norwalk, Connecticut, Stephen Marotto has received a Bachelor’s degree with honors from the University of Connecticut, and Master’s and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees from Boston University. Stephen’s formative teachers include Michael Reynolds, Kangho Lee, Marc Johnson, and Rhonda Rider. A passionate advocate for contemporary music, Stephen plays regularly with groups such as Sound Icon, Callithumpian Consort, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and also performs on various new music concert series in the Boston area and beyond. Stephen has attended music festivals at the Banff Centre, Cortona Sessions for New Music and SoundSCAPE festival in Italy, and the Summer Course for New Music in Darmstadt, Germany. Stephen has a wide range of musical interests that include contemporary chamber music, improvisatory music, and electroacoustic music. As a soloist, Stephen has commissioned several new works for the instrument, and is concerned with expanding and augmenting the tonal pallet of his instrument both with and without technology. Stephen can be heard as a featured artist on Mode Records. In his spare time, Stephen is an avid hiker and outdoorsman.
Ford Fourqurean (clarinet), Matheus Souza (violin), Iva Casian-Lakoš (cello), and Daniel Anastasio (piano) are Unheard-of//Ensemble, a Brooklyn-based clarinet, violin, cello, and piano quartet dedicated to connecting new music to communities in New York and across the United States through the development and performance of adventurous programs using technology and interactive multimedia. Unheard-of is committed to the idea that new music belongs in every community, and implements this mission through concerts and educational workshops throughout New York as well as on tour. Unheard-of originally started as a commissioning project by Ford and Daniel in 2014 to expand the chamber music repertoire for clarinet and piano. The group formed as a quartet in 2018 and has since grown into a nationwide community across multiple artistic genres. With an approach that is open and welcoming of all voices, Unheard-of strives to be a vehicle for development and growth for voices novel and experienced, experimental and traditional, uncomfortable and accessible.
Dr. Bill Solomon is a musician, writer, and educator from New York City. His chapter “Queering Musical Chrononormativity: percussion works of the West Coast group” is included in the collection Queer Ear: Remaking Music Theory published by Oxford University Press. He has presented and performed at American Musicological Society, Black Sound Symposium, LGBTQ+ Music Study Group, Transplanted Roots Percussion Symposium, and Dance Studies Association. He is a member of Bent Duo, a queer performance ensemble that creates original site specific sound and performance installations and collaborates with composers and artists including Matthew Westerby Dance, Sarah Hennies, Aine Nakamura and Casey Anderson. He is a co-founder of the Queer Percussion Research Group and has edited a collection of zines on queer percussion that are currently in the zine collection of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg. As a performer, he has appeared at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, BAM, Disney Hall, Lucerne Hall, Donaueschingen Festival, Outsider Festival, and other festivals performing with ensembles including Talea Ensemble, Ensemble Signal, Yarn/Wire, Talujon Percussion and others working with major composers. He is currently co-chair of music at the Dalton School.
Wild Rumpus was a contemporary chamber music ensemble dedicated to performing the music of the present. Founded in San Francisco by composer Jen Wang in 2011, the ensemble brought together stellar musicians who share a passion for risk-taking, collaboration, and working with living composers. During its eight-year existence the group commissioned over thirty new works, showcasing premieres alongside new music highlighting shared threads of influence and inspiration. In 2019, Wild Rumpus and Composers, Inc. merged to form a new ensemble, Ninth Planet, comprising most of the performers heard on the Pinna release Vestige. Ninth Planet continues the traditions of both organizations by commissioning new works and performing existing, innovative pieces that stretch the genre’s limits.
Composer Per Bloland is known for devising new ways to electronically generate sound from acoustic instruments. His inventions include the electromagnetically prepared piano and the MaxOrch app, which works with computer-assisted orchestration software. He applies these methods to music often inspired by literary works.
Understanding how the devices work can be thorny for the layperson. And which sounds the equipment is producing or processing is not always clear from listening to the music.
That could very well be part of the idea.
The thematic inspirations aren’t straightforward either. Exactly how the title track’s buzzings and clickings reflect or comment on the experimental prose of Norwegian writer Pedr Solis, for example, is something listeners so inclined can try to work out for themselves.
The average listener will be more likely to keep Bloland’s literary inspirations in mind as a kind of backdrop, if at all.
Regardless, the music offers solid rewards for a fan of experimental contemporary music.
The first piece, “Los Murmullos,” is a piano-and-electronics assault that uses a physical model of the electromagnetically prepared piano. Its industrial sound palette and aggressive score seem to contradict the eerie quiet of its inspiration: the town of the dead where Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo is set. (I admit I haven’t read the book; I’m going off my impressions of the movie version, which I have seen.)
There is a demonic quality to the music, though, that might suggest an underworld, or the nightmarish idea of dead souls unable to escape their earthly environs.
The piano, played by Keith Kirchoff, is mostly percussive. The electronics intrude with effects: fuzz, overtones, wails, glaring synthesizer sounds. Hushed interludes are no less menacing. The piece ends with a sustained vibration on what could almost be a violin or cello string, with a persistent high overtone.
One of Bloland’s music’s most interesting characteristics is a seamless fusion of acoustic and electronic sounds. He mostly eschews melody and harmony. Rhythm emerges subtly, as in “Solis Overture,” or unexpectedly, as in “Displacement Pressure.”
For the latter Bloland uses electronically processed sound recordings of construction sites. But he also has the musicians of Unheardof//Ensemble (violin, cello, clarinet, and piano) imitate some of those sounds on their instruments. From those elements he threads together nine minutes of eccentricity that feel as if they carry an obscure internal logic.
“Points of Light in Shadow” and “Shadows of the Electric Moon” employ sound exciters, devices placed in contact with an acoustic instrument (cello and snare drum respectively). These gadgets do their best to acoustically reproduce, by vibrating the instrument, audio signals they receive from a computer. Obviously the limitations of the physical instrument ensure that this can succeed only up to a point. It pays to keep this technique in mind as you listen. The sounds fed to the cello through the exciters in “Points of Light” derive ultimately from recordings of a bass clarinet and a bassoon. The cello thus functions as both instrument and speaker.
The results are bracing and also at times bewildering. The same is true of “Shadows of the Electric Moon,” which applies the same techniques to a snare drum. A computer feeds a signal to an exciter. A cymbal and a crotale join the parade as Bloland riffs what he describes as variations on a theme that’s first established by snare strikes and static-y scrapes and whines initiated by the exciter.
The sounds feel mechanical, the music seemingly random. A drum is a speaker, of course, like an acoustic string instrument. But it’s harder to get your mind around this more repetitious and limited platter of bits and pieces than around the similarly generated work for the cello with that instrument’s inherent tonality and harmonics.
“Solis Overture” returns to the industrial vocabulary of “Los Murmullos,” this time derived from the instrument most associated with that genre, the electric guitar. Guitarist Dan VanHassel is accompanied by the other members of the group Wild Rumpus who play piano, percussion, violin, and cello, all conducted by Nathaniel Berman.
The piece was written as an overture for Bloland’s opera Pedr Solis, which is loosely based on the life of that author. It’s a harsh listen, tough to parse. What comes to mind for me is actually Neil Young and Crazy Horse in their prime, creating storms of feedback and dissonance as extended postludes to actual songs.
— Jon Sobel, 8.12.2025
New Focus Recordings is an artist-led collective label featuring releases in contemporary creative music of many stripes, as well as new approaches to older repertoire. The label was founded by guitarist Dan Lippel, composer Peter Gilbert in 2004, and composer/engineer Ryan Streber in 2004, formed …Read More …
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