The album cover says “WARNING: Extreme surround sound”, which I took with some bemusement at the idea of a record company planning to blow out their customer’s speakers, the same way that Telarc used to do. So I can only take the warning in that manner, though the extreme surely refers to the greater-than-usual spatial possibilities that this disc takes advantage of. Nordheim, whom the Norwegians refer to as the “flagship” of their national music these days, is a refugee from the sixties days of the avantgarde, and I must say that I was not especially looking forward to engaging his newest material close up.
The fact that this is a percussion album mixed with electronics only heightened my anxiety. Generally speaking, I cannot stand this kind of stuff, but felt I could give it a decent review because when I was studying composition in the seventies, this type of “music” was all the rage, indeed sui generis in academia. Thank goodness those days are over, but it can still prove interesting to re-evaluate some of this kind of music from the nice distance that we now enjoy, contemporary though this disc is.
It is a mixed bag. Colorazione is the same kind of static stuff that Morton Subotnick did in Silver Apples of the Moon on an old Nonesuch LP – one revered by the aesthetic- oriented deconstructionists of the day, but Subotnick had more of a plan to get from A to B. Link is the rewritten and rescored result of Respons III, a four percussionists, organ and electronics work that the composer desired to have condensed for only two players. Again, I do not know where it is trying to go, and perhaps that is part of the plan, but otherwise the music sounds to me like a succession of events and nothing else. This is not virgin territory for me, nor am I particularly prudish about the murmurings of the extreme modernists; it’s just that I find much of this has lost its shock or even surprise value, and now sounds tired and predictable in its unpredictable-ness, with “events” consisting of sounds, bells, and noises substituting for real musical flow and understanding.
The songs (Five Kryptofonier) are the most interesting, probably for their verbal content that one can at least attempt to tie into what one hears at any given moment, though that too could be a mistake. But then, as if to prove to me and me alone that he can write extraordinarily beautiful music, I listen to the gorgeous First Butterfly and am completely enchanted. This Takemitsu/Debussy piece is simply one of the loveliest things I have ever heard, and its structure is almost as simple as that of a pop song. It was originally written for harp and soprano, but the electronic realization here is stunningly effective, and I suppose I will now have to keep this album just for this one five-minute piece, much to my chagrin. It does not save it, and I cannot recommend it to you unless you like electronics with percussion, and the sixties I suppose. But the surround sound is done very nicely, and on a particular day with your favorite abusive substance in hand you might actually appreciate it. [Thanks but at such time I’ll dig my Moody Blues SACD instead…Ed.]
— Steven Ritter
