loadbang: A Garden Adorned

Raven 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