Aaron Myers-Brooks: Oblique

The Eleventh and 6th Caves, a track that naturally extends Eddie Van Halen's virtuosic rock into microtonal realms, opens this album for guitar and electronics like a fanfare welcoming you into Myers-Brooks' unique world. Using a guitar tuned to 17 equal divisions of the octave (17 EDO) frees him to explore unusual harmonies, which he expresses through a phenomenal technique that is equally at home with delicate harmonics and lethal shredding. Triads and Arpeggios, which is for electronics only, reveals further characteristics of his compositional interests away from the guitar - colorful, dense, teeming with ideas, like a little island filled with evolutionary anomalies. Set sail.

— Jeremy Shatan, 1.02.2023

The guitarist and composer Aaron Myers-Brooks is quite versed in microtonal sounds, and across these very distinct pieces he manipulates pitch with plenty of polyrhythmic ideas.

“The 11th and 6th Caves” leads the listen with both calm and distorted guitar acrobatics that touches on classic rock riffage and soothing bouts, and “Prelude To Entity” follows with digital piano and electric guitar meeting at a place of harmonic gestures and solo friendly moments.

In the middle, “Energy Shapes No. 3” is a trio for a single performer, where electric guitar, digital processing and an FM synthesizer get a bit spacey but also don’t shy away from heavy choruses and fragmented exploration, while “Sonata for Solo 17-Tone Guitar” unfolds across 3 movements of rhythmic, angular and haunting guitar prowess.

The final track, “Eight HighC Miniatures”, provides ‘alien environments to briefly inhabit’, and it’s full of synthesized sound that’s cinematic, sonically mysterious and even otherworldly.

A very avant-garde experience that retains bits from his metal bands AutoReplicant and Monochromatic Residua and folk duo Familiar, this is an ultra-creative and eclectic peek into the mind of an artist with a truly iconoclastic vision.

— Tom Haugen, 5.02.2023

Oblique, an album by guitarist/composer Aaron Myers-Brooks (released on New Focus Recordings) explores microtonality in a unique and idiosyncratic way with the electric guitar as the primary instrument of choice. The music contained on Oblique is entirely composed and performed by Myers-Brooks, all utilizing his 17-tone division of the octave - the last piece being an exception. What I loved about this album is that it offers something for both seasoned listeners of microtonality, but could act as a very digestible early or even first experience with less common divisions of the octave. Myers-Brooks is also a highly skilled guitarist who brings a level of virtuosity to the instrument through various styles and playing techniques.

The first track on the album, The 11th and 6th Caves, gets its title from the use of 11:6 polyrhythms presented throughout the composition, as well as The Thousand Caves New York recording studio where the piece was recorded. It is composed of alternating sections that balance clean and distorted guitar tones to create formal shapes and development. Angular melodies bring out the character of the 17-tone octave structure while the rapid changes of clean tone to distortion create an engaging interplay of timbres and implied style. If you’re a fan of shredding this piece is something you’re guaranteed to enjoy.

Prelude and Fantasy is a work for electric guitar and digitally tuned piano that allows both instruments to utilize the 17-tone octave, specifically in A minor. This piece offers a more placid energy and contrasts well against the frenetic album opener. The slower unfolding allows for the inherent tone colors of the microtonal system to shine through in a more reflective way. Pairing the distorted electric guitar with the piano establishes a nice dichotomy of voices in which they can simultaneously meld together and act as unique elements within a compound texture

Tracks 3-7 make up a multi-movement composition in 5 parts titled Energy Shapes No. 3. This composition is for electric guitar and electronic sounds wherein the guitar is processed in real-time using effects in Ableton Live, along with FM synthesis in most of the movements. Each movement is distinguished by its use of live processing, presence of the synthesizer, and musical material, all of which take unique approaches to these elements. Energy Shapes focuses more on creating sonic environments through combining electronics with an often riff based approach to the guitar rather than the more angular melodic playing found in the first two works, showcasing Myers-Brooks versatility as a both a composer and performer.

In Triads and Arpeggios, Myers-Brooks extracts triads and chords from the 17-tone system, creating a familiar yet somewhat alien soundworld compared to what one might find in an equal temperament system. While similar in some ways to the A minor approach in Prelude and Entity, the overall effect and experience is different in Triads and Arpeggios. It also uses a quasi-random approach to generating the simple chords and arpeggios, resulting in a delightful kaleidoscopic microtonal soundworld, combined with noise elements and percussive attacks to create a rhythmic sound bed.

The Sonata for Solo 17-Tone Guitar was, for me, the stand-out piece on the album. Another multi-movement composed intuitively using the 17-tone system, Myers-Brooks extracts and juxtaposes what he refers to as the “pungent” melodic and harmonic possibilities of the system. He presents material consisting of disjointed rhythms and sustained chords interwoven throughout the outer movements, which have the character of mid-century modernism, while the middle movement is more akin to an improvised solo one might find in heavy metal, assisted by the use of heavy distortion and pinch harmonics. Fans of Dillenger Escape Plan and the thornier side of Omar Rodriguez-Lopez of the Mars Volta won’t be disappointed

The final composition on the album, Eight HighC Miniautures, is another multi-movement work that takes up the final 8 tracks. The movements are purely electroacoustic works that use Thomas Baudel’s HighC music drawing program, in which hand-drawn shapes generate musical material. Myers-Brooks refers in the liner notes to his interest in drawing from a young age and how this intuitive approach to music making allows him to maintain a microtonal structure without relying specifically on the 17-tone system. Each movement is a soundscape and sonic environment that explores the possibilities of the HighC program and showcases Myers-Brooks’ unique approach to sound design and his fluid compositional voice.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this album from start to finish. There is a lot of repertoire of the 20th and 21st centuries for electric guitar, and with this album I feel that Aaron Myers-Brooks has solidified a place within that canon. I firmly believe that these pieces should be studied and performed as exemplars of the intersection of electric guitar and microtonality, and otherwise it’s just a fun and varied album!

— Jon Fielder, 12.01.2022

Aaron is most well-known for being a microtonal guitarist and composer. He released many albums in the past few years, mostly as an independent, but to my surprise just released an album on New Focus Recordings! To be fair, New Focus sometimes sponsors projects that are more “out there”, such as Real Loud and Ekmeles, so it’s not that surprising. Oblique features compositions for 17-EDO guitar and virtual instruments that go from metal-adjacent (like, solo electric guitar) to decidedly classical (guitar and piano) to experimental electronic music. It’s a really impressive album that is a must for microtonal music-minded people.

— Dave Tremblay, 11.26.2022

Aaron Myers-Brooks is a guitarist and composer who seems determined, for reasons of his own, to out-Partch Partch. True, Partch divided the octave into 43 unequal tones, while Myers-Brooks uses only 17 – and divides the octave equally (hence “17 EDO tuning,” referring to 17 equal divisions of the octave). But Myers-Brooks has his own take on microtonality, and performs his works himself using guitar and electronics – instead of inventing all-new instruments with which to explore his tone system. Myers-Brooks also combines microtones with polyrhythms, creating a strange sound world that tends to be best in smaller doses – a fact of which he seems to be aware, since most pieces on a New Focus Recordings release of his music are in the one-minute range and all run less than seven minutes. Myers-Brooks is actually willing to work in systems other than 17 EDO: one work here, Eight HighC Miniatures, was created using a music-drawing program that does not use the 17 EDO approach. Interestingly, this piece, whose movements range in length from 50 seconds to two minutes, is more atmospheric than the other five works on the disc, all of which employ 17 EDO. The movement titles within Eight HighC Miniatures are actually reflected in the music: “Thunk” really sounds like something thunking, for example, and “Chitter” like recognizably insectoid sounds. As for the 17 EDO pieces on the disc, The 11th and 6th Caves sounds like a series of overdone rock-music riffs (Myers-Brooks also works in rock music). Prelude and Entity uses electric guitar plus a digital piano with 17 EDO tuning, and has a modest forward pulse along with the usual electronic sound overlays. Energy Shapes No. 3 is a five-movement work with its own rock-style elements (in “Oblique”) that contrast with a series of talking-to-themselves electronic sounds that would not be out of place as the background music for cartoons. Triads and Arpeggios is for electronics without guitar, but that turns out to matter very little in terms of the sound of the piece, which zips through the usual electronic bips, boops, skritches, scratches and a few vaguely bell-like clangs and bangs. Sonata for Solo 17-Tone Guitaris an interesting concept marred by constantly over-processed sound. The first movement, “Wistful and Halting,” is far more the latter than the former. The second, “Angular and Aggressive,” is another rock-infused sonic assault that, in this case, does reflect its title accurately. The third, “Somber and Deliberate,” is the only 17 EDO item on this disc that suggests expressive capability rather than an intellectual exercise being embodied within Myers-Brooks’ system. It is an outlier, a welcome one, among the vivid but vapid-sounding 17 EDO items elsewhere on the CD.

— Mark Estren, 12.01.2022

What is this?? (apart from a digital release, which I noticed too late, but we, in general, don't do),a solo electrical guitarist switching between Jimmy Hendrix, Loren Mazzacane, and Fred Frith - several times within one piece?

Myers-Brooks is a USAmerican composer and guitarist, active across several groups, Night Vapor and Autoreplicant, which could be rightly categorised as Post-Hard- and Grindcore. At the same time, he is a music theory teacher at the University of Pittsburgh (like practically all musicians recording on NFR seem to teach at a university somewhere ...). The question is (a) will both sides of this (somewhat split) personality stand by themselves, or (b) will one of them suffer from a lack of full immersion? From my own experience, I would say that university teaching takes over at some point, and the creative side of things begins to fade, but Myers gives the whole thing an edge. He uses his tuning system by expanding the 12-tone scale to 17 equally distanced intervals per octave. I am not sure why it's 17 or 12 or any other number. In any case, this qualifies as 'microtonal', but any reference to Fear Falls Burning and Dirk Serries seems unjustified.

Maybe my ears are too used to disharmonic music, I did not discern anything unusual about tunings, so some of the effects may have been lost on me. Track one presents what I initially said, a switch between a distorted guitar solo and clean sound picking in what could be a free-style guitar solo. The second comes closer to a 'composition' in that a programmed (or overdubbed) electric piano sound is used to complement the guitar. Actually, this works quite well. The third piece consists of 5 movements, thus closing in on a 'classical' structure. Myers-Brooks uses electronics to accompany and/or modify the guitar sounds. Sound-wise, this piece and its movements are all over the place, which makes for enjoyable listening, as digital cut-ups and distorted solos are placed against pure electronics and guitar sounds sent around the room. This might sound like Keith Emerson or 'Switched on Bach' in its weakest moments during instrument tuning. I am not quite sure what this adds to our musical universe.

One track, 'Triads and Arpeggios', sticks out as an electronics-only piece, again exploring the 17-tone system, but a little too much of a sketch and seemingly not fully developed, even at nearly six minutes long. 'Sonata for Solo 17-tone Guitar' (3 movements) and 'Eight HighC Miniatures' (well, eight movements) conclude the release. The former starts with two distorted guitar parts before succumbing to a more restrained and sparse guitar playing. The miniatures are heavily electronically treated guitar sounds, sometimes more a ring modulator, sometimes more synth-like (presumably from a guitar synth, anyway), and sometimes pure electronics. All this I found a bit 'eclectic' and constructed, not necessarily a pleasure to listen to, as my interest did fade with time.