Amy Brandon: Lysis

Lysis is the name of Canadian composer Amy Brandon‘s latest album, featuring eight works for various chamber, ensemble and electroacoustic groupings. The word ‘lysis’ is a word with several meanings, mostly biological, primarily referring to the breakdown of cells. There’s something very apt in that choice of word for Brandon’s music, as it embodies both subtlety (these processes happen on very small scales, invisibly, soundlessly) and transformation between states, with a potential connotation of violence due to the destructiveness of this mechanism. These are all qualities that permeate Brandon’s music, with extreme contrasts being one of the key features running throughout Lysis.

Not in the opening piece, microchimerisms, however. This serves as a 67-second curtain raiser, a hint of what’s to follow, and despite its brevity it’s extraordinary. You’d be hard-pushed to realise it’s a work for solo flute (superbly performed by Sara Constant), being as it is filled with wild, animalistic behaviour, all whispers, growls, chittering and other mouth and teeth sounds, just occasionally garnished with more obviously flute-like whooshes.

This miniature demonstrates the same no-holds barred approach heard everywhere else. Indeed, when the next piece, threads, starts, it’s a fluid continuation from the attitude of the flute. A work for string trio, threads is nine minutes of all-or-nothing intensity, one minute nebulous, the next unleashing explosive tremolandi. Around three minutes in, a wiry melody makes an appearance. It’s a sign of things to come, the music eventually moving beyond its initially polarised position, via tight clusters and an absolute mess of more tremolos into clear harmonic movement. Despite the foreshadowing, the extent of the contrast is so great that it’s hard to reconcile with what went before. We’ve found ourselves in an unexpected oasis of clarity, one that ultimately fades and dies, culminating in a final burst of the earlier wildness.

An even greater contrast of elements is heard in ensemble piece Affine, where the material is preoccupied with quick, somewhat forceful repeating notes. Pitted against this are loud, harsh swells, so overwhelming that, after their first appearance, all pitch is erased, and while the repetitions continue they’re subdued and nocturnalised. Being plunged into gloom only makes them more mesmerising, a demonstration of tenacity that’s tested again toward the end in the second large swell, which this time wipes everything out. The behavioural clarity in this piece is hugely effective.

Sometimes the element of contrast becomes structural to the point of rendering the music a diptych. That’s certainly the case in Caduceus, for two cellos and electronics. At first the cellos growl, snarl and snap, either at each other or at the world in general. After a couple of minutes they abruptly switch to a high quasi-unison duet, one now following the other at a slight delay. Everything has been transformed into lyricism and while it’s compelling in its own right it’s even more so coming in the wake of that gruff preceding section, with the electronics crumpling at the close, leaving the cellos still flying high.

Tsiyr, another ensemble work, also functions as a diptych, with the players initially focusing on regular, loud, detuned piano chords, while the strings skitter and develop into big tremolandi (echoes of threads). Yet, as with Caduceus, around the mid-point everything turns and changes: now the music is faint, suspended, a sporadic piano note not so much leading the way as emphasising how much things have stopped moving. They actually haven’t, though: as if being gently pulled by an unseen force, the hovering notes slowly rise and eventually crescendo. The ending is delicious, Brandon mischeivously bringing back those fierce tremolandi for a mad, final flourish (another echo of threads).

The title work is another diptych, and while it comes from a different point of inspiration (concerned, as ‘lysis’ implies, with breaking down aspects of sound), it sounds as if it’s built from similar elements to Tsiyr. A faint noise texture with emergent high pitches swells into another of Brandon’s frenzied tremolos. This process repeats until the work’s literal dead centre point, where this evaporates, replaced with sustained notes, initially in octave unison but quickly moving out of alignment, their slithering periodically punctuated by more volatile tremolando outbreaks snapping through.

One of my favourite works on the album is Intermountainous, for 10-string guitar and electronics, because it ventures a little further from the tropes and attitudes explored elsewhere as well as, despite the long distant implications of its title, introducing a palpable tone of intimacy. It’s a ruminative piece, slow and reflective, the guitar meandering through microtonal phrases, while the electronics, having emerged as a pitch-noise hybrid, become a diffuse form of accompaniment. It’s like hearing an attempt to duet with an alien, or (perhaps better) an artificial intelligence, familiar and bizarre working together in a genuinely captivating two-part invention that’s as strange as it is touchingly beautiful. Brandon increases the tension a little after halfway through, both parts abruptly becoming more forceful, the electronics especially – more expansive, as if they’re pushing harder – and during this episode the two, while not becoming disconnected as such, nonetheless seem more in parallel. But this subsides, the guitar emerges alone, closing with a quasi-recap of the opening, accompanied once again by pitch-noise.

At 12½ minutes, cello concerto Simulacra is the longest piece on the album, and in some ways it’s the most ambitious, also using the largest forces (performed by Symphony Nova Scotia with soloist Jeffrey Zeigler). To call it a synthesis of everything else heard on the album would be simplistic, but the enormous intensity demonstrated in those other works, as well as their propensity to veer between extremes, are present in abundance here. Yet there’s more besides; apropos, the opening episode, where we plunge, seemingly in medias res, into a wild tangle of elements, ends up in a roiling tutti caught in a rhythmic pattern where both the whereabouts of the cello and its role in this punchy tutti (in control? at its mercy?) is impossible to discern. Brandon breaks the pattern and tilts the music instead into lyricism; it’s one of many places throughout this album that leave us, rather breathlessly, wondering how we got here. At the instigation of the cello the piece returns to energetic, squally surging before everything suddenly collapses. What follows is lovely, low and mysterious, with the soloist continuing to sing overhead. Was this where we were always headed? Improbably the orchestra gets involved, turning Simulacra‘s peroration into a kind of strained, unstable but impressively bold melody emerging against the odds.

I’ve not said anything about Brandon’s extra-musical concerns, or her interest in alternative tunings, which feature in several of the pieces. That’s not because those aspects aren’t interesting – quite the contrary – but simply because, in my case, it’s information i took on board later, after listening (as usual), and it’s certainly not necessary when first engaging with Lysis. Taken on its own terms, this is cogent, arresting, riveting music, highly original and individual, demonstrating a consistency of approach while allowing for every piece to have its own unique identity and dialect of Brandon’s fascinating musical language.

www.wruu.org/broadcasts/52834

— Dave Lake, 8.25.2024

Released via the Canadian label New Focus Recordings on August 16th, 2k24 is Lysis which marks the sophomore longplay effort for composer x artist Amy Brandon which sees a set of eight of her compositional pieces executed and interpreted by the likes of Quatuor Bozzini, India Gailey, Chartreuse Trio, Alkali Collective and others over the course of 51 minutes with her actually being invlvd in two of them as a performing artist, contributing electronics to the 2023 piece Caduceus as well as to 2017s Intermountainous. Drawing inspiration from a rich and widely varied experience as a composer as well as her initial musical training as a jazz guitar player Brandon's approach to this album reflects exactly that, starting from a fascinating angle of solo flute treatments oftentimes rather related to electroacoustic experimentation than to anything approximately Jazz- or Modern Classical-infused, moving forward into unsettling score works and wildly intense string explosions beyond any traditional tonal boundaries performed by a corresponding triple setting of viola, violin and cello before pairing intricate, sparkling yet spars 10-string guitar movements with sparse atmospheric electronic backings in Intermountainous, a piece which suddenly, yet not out of nowhere, completely changes its dynamic range after almost five minutes of total playing time. Furthermore pieces like Tsiyr combine hammered single piano chords with periods of near silence and x or off-kilter string responses to an intriguing effect whilst flirting with echoes of eerie Minimal Music with the eerie- and otherworldliness bleeding over into the haunting Contemporary Classical piece that is Affine whilst the concluding title cut Lysis brings forth a series of electronically enhanced, warped and surely otherworldly sounding string swells just to name a few. This is more than just another showcase in Modern Composition. This a trip worth taking for a reason, even if one is not familiar with the intricacies of Contemporary Classical music or whatever the term Avantgarde might mean these days. Go check.

— baze.djunkiii, 8.27.2024

Eight years ago Amy Brandon released Scavenger, an album of her own classical guitar playing infused with jazz cadences, improvisation, and electronic treatments. The Canadian has largely put down her instrument to write for others, and on her first portrait album, her compositional voice reveals a staggering growth. Each of these eight works occupy richly varied spaces. Intermountainous, from 2017, captures an early stage of that transformation, with Brandon increasingly saturating the virtuosic 10-string guitar playing of Julian Bertino—which in itself is rich in microtonal overtones and jagged phrases—in ghostly electronics. But the subsequent pieces find her busting out of any single artistic mode. The terse opening work microchimerisms, played by flutist Sara Constant, is a texture-driven abstraction that aptly sets the tone for what follows—including threads, a bruising series of swelling gestures played by the string trio Chartreuse, which are loaded with microtonal bursts, visceral, slashing noise, and electrifying harmonies. Caduceus veers from down-tuned cello figures played by India Gailey and Leah Plave into the lush resonance of upper register gestures, haloed and enhanced by the composer’s sizzling electronics. Microtonal piano patterns played by Daniel Añez set the character for the remarkable Tsiyr, cleaved by the jittery arco lines played by Quatour Bozzini and the darting flute and clarinet of Jeffrey Stonehouse and Gwénaëlle Ratouit. Affine offers a constellation of staccato sounds which are gradually subsumed in acrid brass and reed harmonies, while Simulacra reveals Brandon’s feel for orchestral writing, with cellist Jeffrey Ziegler delivering a fierce solo amid the monumental swelling and receding melodic grandiosity of Symphony Nova Scotia. The album concludes with Bozzini tackling the title piece, a slow ascent from whispery shadows to hell-bent microtonality that leaves the listener off-balance and thirsting for more.

— Peter Margasak, 8.29.2024

Amy Brandon is a Canadian composer based in Nova Scotia. The album Lysis is a varied portrait of her musical catalogue, made up of uncompromisingly experimental scores. The sources of inspiration behind the pieces may be extra-musical, such as the caduceus of the Greco-Roman gods or the concepts of ‘door’ and ‘message’ simultaneously present in the Hebrew word Tsiyr.

However, Brandon offers little in the way of dramatic narrative, but rather music-theoretical studies in relation to technical principles of musical practice or sound expression. Take, for example, in the case of Tsiyr, Brandon explains:

…I came up with a grid of tunings, wherein the horizontal line of11th partials are the open strings of the quartet, justly-tuned to a C fundamental. From that beginning I worked vertically down and then up to fill in the ‘imaginary fundamentals’ for these 11th partials…

Obviously, the point here is not to understand these finicky notions perfectly in order to appreciate the music. But it does give you an idea of the intellectual depth that underpins Amy Brandon’s approach.

You may have gathered that her music is demanding, very demanding indeed. But if you leave aside the academic aspect of her compositional approach, you will be fascinated to hear the original sounds, dynamics and textures that this artist knows how to invent through her writing. We also appreciate the variety of formations used in this wide-ranging portrait. We move from the cello duo (Caduceus) to the ‘concerto’ with orchestra (Simulacra), with everything in between, including two works performed by the Bozzini quartet (Lysis and Tsiyr, the latter with the Paramirabo ensemble). I’ll say it again: this is music that requires your undivided attention in order to be fully savoured, but it’s well worth the effort, so often brilliantly original is the result. I enjoyed all eight tracks, with a soft spot for Intermountainous, where Julian Bertino plays 10-string guitar to a rather ambient electronic backdrop drawn by Brandon herself. Perhaps that’s because the striking change in texture brought about by the guitar and the pleasant zenitude of the writing are good to hear after or before the more edgy avant-gardism of the other pieces.

The performers are all performing with immense technical skill and precision.

Here is an album of excellent music that doesn’t pull any punches, but which will delight the most curious and daring ears.

— Frédéric Cardin, 8.29.2024