loadbang releases their fourth album on New Focus, this time featuring centerpieces by Heather Stebbins and Chaya Czernowin as well as music by ensemble members Jeffrey Gavett and Andy Kozar. loadbang has amassed a voluminous repertoire for their unique instrumentation of baritone voice, trumpet, bass clarinet, and trombone.
| # | Audio | Title/Composer(s) | Performer(s) | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Time | 64:24 | |||
| 01 | Aging | Aging | 3:08 | |
| 02 | Quiver | Quiver | 11:44 | |
| 03 | Disquiet | Disquiet | 7:24 | |
| 04 | Flower | Flower | 7:22 | |
| 05 | Proverbial | Proverbial | 5:20 | |
| 06 | quis det ut | quis det ut | 10:24 | |
To Keep My Loneliness WarmAndy Kozar |
||||
| 07 | Insomnia | Insomnia | 3:35 | |
| 08 | Odd Behavior | Odd Behavior | 4:15 | |
| 09 | IRRATIONAL | IRRATIONAL | 11:12 | |
loadbang’s newest release Quiver, their fourth on New Focus, features a collection of works commissioned from composer colleagues as well as music by three members, Jeffrey Gavett, Carlos Cordeiro, and Andy Kozar. The aesthetics represented display the broad range of territory loadbang commands, from finely integrated textures that blur where one instrument begins and the other ends, to individuated passages that revel in contrapuntal symbiosis.
Opening the album is Quinn Mason’s somber Aging, a setting of a text by Adam Lefaivre that meditates on getting older. The diatonic harmonies and a noticeable absence of extended techniques start the recording with an earnest quality. The vulnerability of the text is mirrored in its straightforward presentation. The ensemble reasserts its commitment to sonic experimentation immediately afterward, in Heather Stebbins’ bracing title track. Stebbins was deeply affected by a trip to a national park in Iceland, where she experienced landscapes shaped by the powerful geologic forces of tectonic plates grinding against each other. Quiver, while not attempting to translate those ideas into sound in a direct way, mines this paradigm for its sonic vocabulary. In Stebbins’ work, as in sensitive natural ecosystems, all the elements are interrelated, a click in the trumpet triggers a pop in the trombone, a breathy articulation in the clarinet catalyzes a sighing gesture in the voice.
Read MoreThe chamber ensemble loadbang may well be unique in its instrumentation of trumpet, trombone, bass clarinet, and baritone voice. A strange combination, yes, but one capable of producing interesting timbres and textures. Accordingly, some of the most effective music on this album of eight compositions by seven composers, three of whom are members of the ensemble, involves the dramatic extensions and juxtapositions of loadbang’s instrumental and human voices.
Disquiet (2016), by loadbang’s bass clarinetist Carlos Cordeiro, is a setting of a text by Fernando Pessoa suggestive of an individual’s experience of multiple personalities; Cordeiro emphasizes the characteristic qualities of the group’s instrumentation by arranging them as separate, abutting presences within a deliberately discordant and fragmentary whole. By contrast, vocalist Jeffrey Gavett’s Proverbial (2009), a setting of three of William Blake’s Proverbs from Hell, assembles the winds into massed and dissonant long tones. Washington DC area composer Heather Stebbins’ Quiver (2014), which was inspired by a trip the composer took to Iceland, uses muted brass and extended techniques for wordless voice to craft a spluttering, choppy allusion in sound to the lurching action of geological processes.
Further along on the spectrum of extended technique, Zong Yun We’s Flower (2015/2017) is a gestural work drawing heavily on unpitched sounds; something of a polar opposite is Quinn Mason’s harmonically conventional composition Aging (2017), a somber setting of a two-line poem by Adam Lefaivre anchored by the bass clarinet. Quiver also includes trumpeter Andy Kozar’s To Keep My Loneliness Warm (2016), a two-part setting of a text by Lydia Davis built around a microtonal drone and shards of words; Chaya Czernowin’s Irrational (2019), an assemblage of pulsing patterns, unpitched timbres, and wordless vocals; and Gavett’s 2016 quis det ut, a work for just intonation based on a 15-16th century Franco-Flemish motet.
— Daniel Barbiero, 8.29.2022
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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