Per Bloland: Shadows of the Electric Moon

Per Bloland’s latest album Shadows of the Electric Moon, on New Focus Recordings, contains five instrumental and electroacoustic works. Composed between 2013 and 2021, the music on this album is based upon two through lines: fictional narratives and the composer’s software programming, used to process sound and integrate the electronics parts into the overall work. According to the liner notes, the interaction between these two through lines “is highly inventive in its subtle modulation of both instrumental and electronic textures, while unfolding within narrative, dramatic structures.” The composer’s custom made processing software largely serves to foreground subtle or idiosyncratic instrumental timbres, which he does a fine job developing.

The composer has written that he is drawn to “the idea of diving into a piece of literature and extracting specific qualities, concepts, or structures to use as musical guides.” He ties this idea into what scholar Siglind Bruhn has called “musical ekphrasis,” a method of translation from a non-musical medium into music. Much of Bloland’s recent work is inspired by, or based upon, the writings or life of Norwegian author Pedr Solis.

The first piece on this album, “Los murmullos” for piano and electronics, is based upon a dystopian novel written by Juan Rulfo between 1953 and 1954. The electronics part was produced “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.” Partly, his intent is to create a device that is able to transform the acoustic piano into a synthesizer. Bloland calls his physical modeling device the Induction Connection, which is now widely available in IRCAM’s Modalys software.

“Los murmullos” opens with the sounding out of powerful and resonant low octave piano tremolos or pulsations. Different overtones pop out, depending on the type of attack or dynamic. We hear a repetitive right hand part against the previously introduced, low octave material. From the beginning it seems clear that the composer is going to explore the friction between highly repetitive and dissonant materials.

The use of electronic processing is, at first, subtle and mostly impacts our hearing of resonance. This is described in the liner notes as “a halo of sound.” The piano part oscillates back and forth between abrupt spasms of repetition and virtuosic, atonal, linear, almost free jazz elements that in combination make for some edgy listening. Some reference points include piano works such as “Lemma-Icon-Epigram” by Brian Ferneyhough, and others by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, and Cecil Taylor.

In this piece, the listener encounters a wide variety of sounds including:

split and detuned electronic sounds, scream-like vocal sounds, and noise elements that, at times, threaten to mask everything else. At times Bloland’s processing techniques make the piano resemble a distorted guitar. The cumulative distortion is periodically cut off, leaving silence or reverb trails in its wake.

The tight coordination between the piano part and electronics reminds me of the “Synchronisms” series for instruments and tape by Mario Davidovsky. A significant distinction between the two is that Davidovsky employs his electronic parts to fortify his pitch-centric material, whereas Bloland’s approach is focused much more on texture, and occasionally refers to industrial noise music and current video game sounds.

I would also argue that Bloland’s use of electronics is better integrated into the composition as a whole. For example, it doesn’t dominate the acoustic, instrumental parts, but neither is it innocuous. This all adds up to an unstable sonification of dystopian elements. This composition’s successful integration of sound, processing, and raw energy makes it one of the best works on the album, but it is not for the faint of heart.

“Points of Light in Shadow,” the title of the second piece, is taken from a novel by Pedr Solis. This piece uses two sound exciters strapped to a cello, which are fed sounds from Bloland’s program called MaxOrch. This program utilizes samples to emulate sounds, instruments, or specific instrumental techniques. In the case of “Points of Light in Shadow,” the composer’s source material for the electronics consisted of recordings of bass clarinet and bassoon multiphonics. This material adds “an element of breath to the cello, as if it is an augmented bowed-wind instrument.” Different from the first piece, these small devices cause the body of the cello to vibrate, as opposed to the strings of a piano. The cello part focuses on delicate sounds and techniques such as harmonics, trills, and tremolos.

The third work, “Displacement Pressure,” for clarinet, violin, violoncello, piano, and electronics was written as a reflection on the issue of the lack of affordable housing. The title refers to the ‘pressure’ to gentrify an area of a city, etc. This inevitably causes parts of the population to be displaced. The sounds used in this piece were extracted from construction site recordings from Cincinnati, and are, at times, sonically imitated by the quartet. About this piece, Jon Sobel writes in the liner notes that Bloland “threads together nine minutes of eccentricity that feel as if they carry an obscure internal logic.” To the extent that Bloland’s program notes point to a common problem in city planning, perhaps listeners will contemplate worthy solutions to the unintended consequences of ‘revitalization’ efforts. But, otherwise, it is difficult to imagine that the act of listening to this piece will spur someone on to fight the power. Interestingly, this piece contains more musically conventional trappings than some of the other works from this collection.

Based on a novel by Bloland’s favorite Norwegian writer, Pedr Solis, “Shadows of the Electric Moon” for snare drum and sound exciter “explores various ways of altering its otherwise limited timbral palette.” The snare drum itself is played in an unconventional manner, upside down with the snares exposed, and ‘prepared’ with a crotale and cymbal. The sound exciter is connected to the drum and receives frequencies from a computer. This process produces a variety of sounds and suggested spaces. Some are humorous. Others remind one of mechanical, construction noises such as sawing, hammering, or drilling. Overall, we encounter a fast shifting kaleidoscope of sonic fragments and gestures. About half way through the piece we hear vocal timbres, amplified via the drum membrane, which turns out too be an effective timbral modification technique. One might imagine choreographed movements to accompany these sounds, in the manner of Mark Applebaum’s fixed media piece “Aphasia.” Whatever the case, the Futurists would have greatly appreciated Bloland’s efforts in this piece.

In the program notes, Sobel states “the sounds feel mechanical, the music seemingly random.” This is generally true if we take any given slice of the piece and examine it. But as a whole, the linear formal structure, especially in a 13-minute work, becomes more and more predictable as the composition moves forward in time. All the interesting timbres may have been generated from contemplation of Solis’s novel, which takes place in a barren county in the far north of Norway.

I would have wished that Bloland had spent a little more time developing his interesting timbres. I haven’t read the novel but it seems fair to assume that someone stuck in this kind of barren landscape would have plenty of time to develop things. The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould once composed a radio documentary entitled The Idea of North, where he developed an experimental technique he called “contrapuntal radio.” This technique employed polyphonically layered voices on top of each other. Perhaps Bloland could have created something similar had he used multiple snare drums, or had he used extreme contrasts to produce a sense of virtual polyphony.

“Solis Overture,” the last work, functions as a kind of sketchpad overture for the composer’s opera Pedr Solis, which chronicles his life. It is scored for percussion, piano, electric guitar, violin, violoncello, and electronics. All of the instruments are amplified in a live performance but receive no additional processing. The electronic sounds are pre-recorded and played back by a laptop. The sounds suggest deep bass growling or whale song, multiphonics, and a feedback solo by Jimi Hendrix. We hear these sounds within a segmented formal structure, which is effective here due to the high degree of contrast between each section.

Sobel writes: “Solis Overture” returns to the industrial vocabulary of “Los Murmuloos,” this time derived from the instrument most associated with that genre, the electric guitar.” This final piece is closer to the industrial noise genre, without succumbing to that genre’s standard performance practices, such as the overuse of improvised, through-composed forms. “Solis Overture” is one of the most effective works on this album. The listener is kept guessing as to what will happen next. And the rapid pacing of events makes this element all the more poignant.

Bloland’s compositional practice on this album, including the incorporation of electronics, and the addressing of social and political issues in his work echoes aesthetic values from a younger generation of composers that don’t view atonality as a creed or imperative, but rather as a tool to achieve specific purposes, perhaps in combination with electronic processing.

Most of the pieces on this album use pauses as structural or formal markers. At times these breaks are needed to temporarily recover from an information rich texture. But their employment becomes predictable and thus, halts any kind of continuous development. Several of the endings seem to simply stop, without any sense of dissipation. The exception to this is “Shadows of the Electric Moon.” All in all, the minor weaknesses I cited do little to disturb the impression that this album is a significant contribution to current work being done with instruments and live electronics.

— Ross Feller, 12.03.2025

Not many albums display the seesaw effect as vividly as this release of compelling electroacoustic music from American composer Per Bloland (b. 1969). My attention seesawed between the elaborately described electronics and software that went into these five pieces and the impact of the music itself. In the composer’s notes, one encounters, for example, this description of a residency he spent with IRCAM in Paris. “His second 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.” Blolanad specializes in the junction weaving between acoustic instruments and synthesized sounds, and one can’t help but be intrigued to learn that he often performs on the lap steel feedback banjo, an instrument of his own invention.

Bloland has a lot of technical information to impart, because he has devised a different electronics setup for each work. As it happens, he is genuinely rare in his ability to write in a totally engaging style, and it’s a pleasure, believe it or not, to read about the evolution of the Electromagnetically-Prepared Piano, a physical device that allows any sound to be fed via a bank of electromagnets into contact with the strings of a grand piano, which then simulates that sound as best it can.

The first piece, Los murmullos (The Murmurs), is for solo piano and uses the EMPP. This might seem to be the right moment to move on to the music, but there is another thread to spin first. Bloland has a strong literary bent, with the specific intent of analyzing works of fiction to find qualities or structures that can be translated into music. In the case of Los murmullos, the literary source is a novel in Spanish from the 1950s, Pedro Páramo, by the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo. In it the protagonist returns to Comala, the town where his parents lived, finding it not only in decay but populated more by the dead than the living. The dead are the source of the murmurs and whispers that will in time overwhelm Pedro.

In the novel’s blurred twilit reality, the four elements are linked to the sounds Pedro hears, and correspondingly, Bloland employs a computer to feed four recurring types of material into the 12 electromagnets of the EMPP. The 14 minutes of Los murmullos present some obsessively repetitive patterns alternating with virtuosic passagework, expertly performed by the dedicatee, Keith Kirchoff, much of it sounding acoustic. The electronics contribution is an extension of the piano into new timbres and colors rather than being an independent voice. Surprisingly from the murmurous title, the general mood is loud and propulsive, intermittently explosive. The result is full of pyrotechnical display and riveting energy. In a word, Bloland has created something vividly arresting.

As much as I’ve abridged the background, electronic and literary, that relates to this one piece, with four more pieces to follow, it becomes obvious that a reviewer can’t hope to do justice to Bloland’s multi-dimensional mind. But in all five works there’s a fascination in listening to how he fashions loops between acoustic and electronic domains.

To pick up the literary thread again, two pieces are based on the obscure and mysterious Norwegian novelist Pedr Solis, who wrote two novels that are among the most modernist in Norwegian literature before he literally vanished, either dying or seeking isolation in the far north of Norway, perhaps both. Bloland tells us that he is obsessed with Solis, going so far as to compose an opera, Pedr Solis, loosely based on his life. A sizable ensemble score, Solis Overture, is an independent concert piece that also serves as an overture to the opera. The second Solis-inspired work, Shadows of the Electric Moon for solo percussion, is named after the writer’s first novel.

In the sequence of devising a new setup for each piece, Shadows of the Electric Moon is novelly arranged so that a snare drum, essentially the solo instrument, is placed upside down with the snares exposed. To them is attached a sound exciter that sends audio signals to the snares. As is familiar by now, the snares respond to these signals by attempting to produce the sound being transmitted. In this way, however limited compared with using the process on a grand piano, Bloland produces an amazing array of timbres from a single drum, aided occasionally by a cymbal and single crotale. My attention was only distracted when the synthesized noise sounded like a buzz saw or some other abrasive concoction.

The range of timbres that can be manipulated is far greater in Solis Overture, where the Wild Rumpus ensemble consists of violin, cello, electric guitar, piano, and percussion. This instrumentation is different from the opera, nor do they substantially share themes—Bloland calls the overture a sketch pad as the opera was gestating. Here the setup is actually a fairly familiar one in electroacoustic music. The instruments are amplified but otherwise not processed while prerecorded electronic material, played from a laptop on stage, supplies its own voice. I’d call the piece the most challenging listen on the program. The panoply of musical notes and electronic action, which is often hyperactive and features loud siren noises, seems to be a paean to chaos, which means that the underlying structures are not readily grasped by the listener.

Of the two remaining works, Points of Light in Shadow is for solo cello and Displacement Pressure for clarinet quartet wit violin, cello, and piano. Writing for solo instruments is a considerable challenge, which Bloland meets through his method of synthesizing new sounds from a familiar acoustic instrument—two sound exciters are strapped to the cello, extracting unrecognizable sounds that morph it into several exotic electronic instruments.

The title Displacement Pressure refers literally to how long-time residents of a neighborhood are displaced in the name of urban redevelopment. Bloland had a specific neighborhood north of Cincinnati in mind, and the electronic input for the piece derives from construction noises in that area. Without the composer’s notes this connection would be impossible to discern—we don’t hear identifiable construction going on. What comes across, as in the entire album, is a compelling experiment in the merging of acoustic and electronic modes. As abstract as the piece is, there is a high quotient of accessible acoustic music-making with seismic interjections of powerful electronica.

Electroacoustic music as a genre affords the general listener a smoother entry into New Music than other modes, and this program is no exception. Bloland, who holds a professorship in music at Miami University in Ohio, is a dedicated tech head absorbed in the intricacies of electronic music, but this is coupled with a desire to communicate with performers and listeners alike. It’s a fortunate combination and the key to the success of these pieces. They provide a portrait of an innovative composer very much worth paying attention to.

— Huntley Dent, 11.01.2025

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 Dead Cry Out

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.

Exciters and Shadows

“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