Per Bloland: Shadows of the Electric Moon

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

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