loadbang’s A Garden Adorned presents works for their unique instrumentation by Oscar Bettison, Raven Chacon, Yotam Haber, Christina J. George, and Laura Cetilia that are curated around the rich concept of gardens. The works engage with varied sources of inspiration but center their compositional integrity above all, and are given powerfully sensitive interpretations by the musicians of loadbang.
| # | Audio | Title/Composer(s) | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total Time | 61:36 | ||
| 01 | I am a Garden Adorned | I am a Garden Adorned | 20:08 |
| 02 | Reckoning | Reckoning | 10:41 |
| 03 | In a Rug of Water | In a Rug of Water | 6:09 |
>>liminal songs>>Christina J. George |
|||
| 04 | i This delicious rain | i This delicious rain | 2:54 |
| 05 | ii. ancient h i s t o r y | ii. ancient h i s t o r y | 2:14 |
| 06 | iii. A Prayer | iii. A Prayer | 2:47 |
| 07 | iv. Not Quite | iv. Not Quite | 3:05 |
| 08 | v. (dis)illusionment | v. (dis)illusionment | 2:51 |
| 09 | breath of cinder, depth of moss | breath of cinder, depth of moss | 10:47 |
In the liner notes for A Garden Adorned, loadbang vocalist Ty Bouque identifies a fascinating duality at the heart of the garden; it is an attempt at organizing and controlling nature while nevertheless being subject to the rules of the natural world. The album presents works by Oscar Bettison, Raven Chacon, Yotam Haber, Christina J. George, and Laura Cetilia that are curated around this concept. Composition engages with a similar dichotomy, fashioning sounds and silence in a temporal container whose materials are governed by fundamental principles. In the case of works for loadbang, an ensemble of baritone voice, trumpet, clarinet, and trombone, many of those governing principles relate to breath and the nature of sound production on wind instruments. Characteristic of loadbang’s recordings, A Garden Adorned covers rich and varied aesthetic territory, and prompts insights about ideas beyond the sounds themselves.
Oscar Bettison’s I am a Garden Adorned is inspired by the famous Moorish temple in Granada, Spain, the Alhambra. Struck by its enduring symbolism of an era of peaceful coexistence and fruitful progress, Bettison adapted Arabic text inscribed on the walls of the Alhambra by the 14th century Muslim poet Ibn Zamrak as the basis for the text in his piece. We hear texts in Spanish and English, creating a metaphor for the translation process of a region with a complex history as well as the filtering of musical ideas from composer to performer to listener. The piece unfolds patiently in obscure, mystical gestures and incantations, evoking the spiritual power of its site of inspiration. Extensive use of mutes on the brass instruments, a battery of vocal techniques, and developing variation of motivic material creates an extended sound vocabulary of textured reverence.
Read MoreRaven Chacon’s Reckoning opens with a chorus of growling, multi-timbral techniques across the ensemble that echo throat-singing practices, evoking the Chihuahuan Desert that was the site of its rehearsal. Chacon’s work often centers the Indigenous American experience, cultivated here through timbrally driven, ritualistic masses of sound. Chacon pushes the ensemble to the edges of conventional sound color and expression, evoking visceral, human responses to sound.
Yotam Haber sets a text by Thomas Bernhard (translated by James Reidel) in In a Rug of Water, a work for triple quartet in which the loadbang musicians are heard in a kind of musical house of mirrors. The enhanced forces facilitate voice chorales, exuberant brass fanfares, and a quantity and density of sound that is a contrast to the often delicate, tactile focus of much of the ensemble’s repertoire. Swelled figures act as connective tissue across the stereo footprint of the ensemble, as Haber grinds up against closely spaced intervals.
Christina J. George’s >>liminal songs>> is a five part setting of her own poetry, an examination of in-between states for their own unique experiential qualities. This self-reflective work takes a turn towards lyricism and more conventional text setting and expressive presentation, featuring Bouque’s baritone with the ensemble providing coloristic accompaniment and shading. “This delicious rain” revels in lush harmonies and poignant melodic phrases. “ancient h i s t o r y” is taut with inquisitive anxiety, as short fragmentary phrases explore the ineffable: “There is a pattern here, and I am in it.” “A Prayer:” is based on a lilting, meditative repeating figure that ascends and supports a plaintive wordless vocal line. Percolating ensemble figures shape “Not Quite” as the voice sings repeated fragments of texts, alternating between joining the group texture and singing from the fore. The final movement, “(dis)illusionment” is a somber, bittersweet ballad, with growing markers of liminal disorientation manifesting themselves in an arc through stasis, restlessness, and repose.
Laura Cetilia’s breath of cinder, depth of moss is the only piece on the album that includes electronics, consisting of white noise, sine tones, and manipulated samples of a vinyl record player. The environmental electronics provide the background for gentle exhalations of sonority that coalesce over the piece’s duration into luminous harmonic gems. The piece closes the album with eternal serenity.
loadbang's evolution as an ensemble represents significant contributions to the repertoire for their unique instrumentation as well as the development of new techniques in instrumental playing and ensemble hybrids. As notable and impressive however is their curatorial prowess; with each new album the ensemble demonstrates its capacity to not only commission some of the most influential composers active in contemporary music, but to do so in a manner that engages with the cutting edge of new music aesthetics while marshaling music’s unique capacity to speak to our most profound human experiences. A Garden Adorned is only the most recent fruit of the group’s efforts, and succeeds once again in its endeavor to be an album length statement in its own right alongside a documentation of several landmark new compositions.
–Dan Lippel
I am a Garden Adorned, Reckoning, >>liminal songs>>, and breath of cinder, depth of moss recorded from May 4-5, 2024 at Oktaven Studios, Mt. Vernon, NY
In a Rug of Water recorded on January 29, 2024 at Oktaven Studios, Mt. Vernon, NY
Engineering, mixing & mastering: Ryan Streber
Album cover and design: Alex Eckman-Lawn
New York City-based new music chamber group loadbang is building a new kind of music for mixed ensemble of trumpet, trombone, bass clarinet, and baritone voice. Since their founding in 2008, they have been praised as ‘cultivated’ by The New Yorker, ‘an extra-cool new music group’ and ‘exhilarating’ by the Baltimore Sun, ‘inventive’ by the New York Times and called a 'formidable new-music force' by TimeOutNY. Their unique lung-powered instrumentation has provoked diverse responses from composers, resulting in a repertoire comprising an inclusive picture of composition today. In New York City, they have been recently presented by and performed at Miller Theater, Symphony Space, MATA and the Avant Music Festival; on American tours at Da Camera of Houston, Rothko Chapel, and the Festival of New American Music at Sacramento State University; and internationally at Ostrava Days (Czech Republic), China-ASEAN Music Week (China) and Shanghai Symphony Hall (China).
loadbang has premiered more than 250 works, written by members of the ensemble, emerging artists, and today's leading composers. Their repertoire includes works by Pulitzer Prize winners David Lang and Charles Wuorinen; Rome Prize winners Andy Akiho and Paula Matthusen; and Guggenheim Fellow Alex Mincek. Not content to dwell solely in the realm of notated music, loadbang is known for its searing and unpredictable improvisations, exploring the edges of instrumental and vocal timbre and technique, and blurring the line between composed and extemporaneous music. To this end, they have embarked on a project to record improvisations and improvised works written by members of the ensemble. These recordings are designed, fabricated, and released in hand-made limited editions. loadbang can also be heard on a 2012 release of the music by John Cage on Avant Media Records, a 2013 release of the music of loadbang member Andy Kozar titled 'On the end...' on ANALOG Arts Records which was called ‘virtuosic’ by The New Yorker, a 2014 release on ANALOG Arts Records titled Monodramas, a 2015 release on New Focus Recordings titled LUNGPOWERED which was called ‘new, confident, and weird’ by I Care If You Listen and 'an album of quietly complex emotions' by The New Yorker, and a 2017 Bridge Records release titled Charles Wuorinen, Vol. 3, featuring the music of Charles Wuorinen.
loadbang is dedicated to education and cultivation of an enthusiasm for new music. They have worked with students ranging from elementary schoolers in the New York Philharmonic's Very Young Composers program and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s OrchKids Program to college aged student composers at institutions including Columbia University, Cornell University, Manhattan School of Music, New York University, Peabody Conservatory, Princeton University, University of Buffalo, and Yale University. They are in residence at the Charlotte New Music Festival, the Longy School of Music's summer program Divergent Studio, and all four members are on the instrumental and chamber music faculty of the Longy School of Music of Bard College in Boston.
http://www.loadbang.comThe chamber quartet’s unique instrumentation – trumpet, trombone, bass clarinet, and baritone voice – has elicited from prominent composers fruitful explorations of the many ways to smash Western music’s traditional harmonies and timbres. But loadbang also performs music that takes those traditions into the present, in innovative ways.
The group’s new album A Garden Adorned harvests the creativity of five composers, each marshaling in their own style loadbang’s unique sound world.
Oscar Bettison builds his 20-minute “I Am a Garden Adorned” around scraps of “slipshod and extemporized” translations of a poem by Ibn Zamrak, the 14th-century “Poet of the Alhambra,” whose verses are found carved into the walls of that Granada landmark and other places.
Those adjectives from the liner notes, “slipshod” and “extemporized,” don’t apply to the music – though at times, as when the horns interject staccato stabs, it can feel improvisatory.
In fact the slow-moving, spacious structure establishes a contemplative mood and enables the listener to grow comfortable with the sighing motives, plainspoken portamentos, and breathy hisses. Vocal and instrumental ululations evoke the Arabic origins of the source material, while the leisurely pace suggests a garden that has persisted for centuries.
“Reckoning” by Raven Chacon is a much more grab-you-by-the-throat production. As vocals and instruments revel in their most gravelly sonorities, you can almost feel the dryness of the Chihuahuan Desert where the piece was rehearsed. No words emerge; there are only the heaving of the sands, the wailing of the winds, and the unnameable spirits of nature, until a snatch of distant birdsong flutters in. It’s a grim but weirdly entrancing trip.
For “In a Rug of Water” Yotam Haber set to music the titular poem by 20th-century Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard in a translation by James Reidel. Scored for quadruple quartet, the piece is a compelling collage of chorale, snatches of big-band-style music, and metallic dissonance. While in one sense it’s the album’s shortest piece, it has the biggest sound. (See the video clip below.)
Five postmodern lieder comprise Christina J. George’s “liminal songs.” Four are settings of quirky poems by the composer, while the fifth uses the voice – extending baritone Ty Bouque’s range into tenor heights and beyond – as a wordless companion to the instruments.
The first song, “This delicious rain,” places an observer amid calmly developing harmonies. The lyrics abruptly shift metaphors from the naturalistic (relating to the albums’s horticultural theme – “This delicious rain is like / treefrog fingers”) to the coldly medical (“like contrast dye / that overstays its welcome / in the veins,” a phrase meant perhaps to recall T.S. Eliot’s famous metaphor of a patient etherized upon a table).
George goes on to draw from a wide stylistic palette, from the panicky abruptness of “ancient history” to the playful minimalism of “Not Quite.” “(dis)illusionment” closes the set with vaguely jazzy, quietly pastoral harmonies that return to those of “This delicious rain,” but with the speaker now observing himself. The imagery here harks back to the contrast dye of “This delicious rain,” as anyone who has had an MRI with contrast dye will recognize the icy tingle when the dye enters the vein. “The ice on my fingers / is melting / but the skin is not. / Perhaps I am solid after all.”
The slow build of “breath of cinder, depth of moss” by Laura Cetilia begins with a soft, low electronic tone that’s actually, maybe self-referentially, akin to what one could image a bass clarinet producing. It is, as the composer’s notes say, a sine wave tone, and pure sine tones are normally troublesome to the ear. But this one is so low and shrouded it instead sets a peaceful mood. Instruments and voice join, a slowly gathering ensemble of wordless harmonies. Brief washes of toneless sound are actually slowed-down crackles of a vinyl record, though you couldn’t know that if you didn’t read it in the liner notes.
The subtle, uncertain development of Cetilia’s 10-minute piece culminates in a harmonious chord that repeats, like breathing, until the hum that started the piece off returns and fades slowly to nothingness. It’s a soothing conclusion to an album that vitally expands the repertoire of one of our most interesting small new-music ensembles.
— Jon Sobel, 4.09.2025
New Focus Recordings is an artist-led collective label featuring releases in contemporary creative music of many stripes, as well as new approaches to older repertoire. The label was founded by guitarist Dan Lippel, composer Peter Gilbert in 2004, and composer/engineer Ryan Streber in 2004, formed …Read More …
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