CoincidentScott L. Miller & Zeitgeist

Composer Scott L. Miller has in the past few years done some of the most interesting Modern music out there. It is not capitulating, nor is it a rehash of earlier ways so much as a new offering that sounds like the future again, promisingly. (Type his name in the search box for previous reviews.) So today there is his latest, COINCIDENT (New Focus Recordings CD FCR 337).

The objective on these eight movements for electronic synthesizer and chamber ensemble is to do something in furtherance of telematic music, or in other words in this case multipart music with live chamber ensemble and the composer on remotely constructed electronic synthesizer part with the software program Kyma.

The opening Coincident Episode 5 has a nice part for intelligently poetic and punky vocal that sets the stage for the other seven heady movements that follow. It is all a specially sonic inventiveness and nicely co-occurring whole that piques the aural imagination and satisfies the wish to plummet ahead to the musical future. Very recommended.

It is yet another feather in the Miller cap, showing us decisively that he is one of our leading voices in High Modern expansion.

— Grego Edwards, 2.18.2023

Miller has been a favorite ever since 2020, when I discovered his questing ways on Tak Ensemble’s marvelous recording of Ghost Layers. Since then, he’s never failed to fascinate, whether on a witty yet tangled album with UK ensemble Rarescale in 2021 or the “kicky fun and otherworldly atmospherics” of last year’s collaboration with a toy pianist and a trumpeter. As with the Rarescale album, much of Coincident was recorded telematically (i.e. online and across distances), with composer and players recognizing that not all latency issues can be solved by the current technology. Instead they embrace the overlaps and missed connections, leaving the listener to just soak up the results.

Across the album, we get a great variety, whether meditative, spaced out duos for Kyma (Miller’s electronic instrument of choice) and clarinet (Pat O’Keefe) or startling, theatrical stunners like Coincident 5, which features spoken word artist Joseph Horton alongside Miller on Kyma and Zeitgeist players Heather Barringer, Patti Cudd (percussion), O’Keefe, Nikki Melville (piano). At the end of the track, which opens the album, when Horton exclaims “Go to the fringes! Go there!” it feels like a course has been set for the album to explore the unknown and bring back these marvelous sounds.

— Jeremy Shatan, 7.17.2023

The Minneapolis composer Scott L. Miller aligns himself with the Twin Cities outfit Zeitgeist for these experimental, electroacoustic pieces that were recorded through remote technology, and it makes for a technical, aesthetically exciting 8 tracks.

“Coincident Episode 5” opens the listen and makes an immediate impression thanks to Joseph Horton’s mysterious, often wordless vocals and Pat O’Keefe’s well timed bass clarinet in the unpredictable climate, and “Exit Velocity” follows with Nikki Melville’s playful piano and Cara Tweed’s moody violin complementing the percussion acrobatics from Heather Barringer and Patti Cudd.

At the halfway point, “Coincident Episode 4” benefits much from Miller’s kyma manipulation in the droning, intimate landscape, while “Sonata II” places Melville on piano and Miller with kyma for a sometimes sparse, sometimes rumbling album highlight that focuses much on tone and mood.

Approaching the end, “Sonata III/Sonata IV” is a charming percussive track with Barringer and Cudd making much deliberate noise in an ambient versus nature-esque fashion, and “hARvest” exits with the percussion, clarinet piano and kyma spreading out over 14+ minutes of dynamic, distanced interaction.

Part avant-garde, part chamber and entirely creative and iconoclastic, Miller and company make for a captivating and unparalleled listen that explores telematic collaboration superbly.

— Tom Haugen, 7.22.2023

New Music often involves novel conceptions of how to make music, which is a key factor in this album of small-ensemble works by Scott L. Miller. Faced with the isolation of 2020, Miller devised a long-distance collaboration he calls “telematic.” The performers worked from their home studios connected over the Internet. Something similar was occurring in other places without the telematic nomenclature. But Miller’s process-centered notes make much of intergalactic distances in the genre of space opera, along with time boundaries imposed by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

Leaving some heavy conceptualization aside, in practice Miller and his far-flung collaborators in California, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio, and New Zealand worked together experimentally with strategies of synchronicity, asymmetry, latency (time delay in transmission over the internet), and graphic notation of the music. He places an emphasis on the technical challenges involved which no doubt fascinated him, as both an electronics composer and performer, but listeners are necessarily presented with the results, however interesting the process might be.

Rather than being entirely together or apart, the performers were coincident, which gives the title of the project commissioned by the Twin Cities ensemble, Zeitgeist, and the album its name. Coincident the project was released in episodes over the course of 2021; here we get Episodes 4 and 5. Zeitgeist and Miller appear in both, while voice artist Joseph Horton is prominently featured in Episode 5, singing and speaking snatches of prose, and what sounds like electronically massaged vocalizing. The music’s texture is jittery and highly refracted into individual overlapping gestures. The acoustic aspect provided by Zeitgeist consists of a clarinet, piano, and two percussionists.

For the listener, the soundscape is too complex and dense to grasp one event at a time; what is asked for is the kind of immersion required at an art installation. Ordinary aesthetic measures are irrelevant. What’s true of Coincident as a piece is also true of Coincident as an album. Unexpected sounds are mingled on their own terms, which may or may not be structured, improvised, unrepeatable, or chaotic. Extended instrumental effects are popular in current New Music, so it isn’t unexpected when the clarinet emits yips and scraping sounds.

I don’t want to give the impression that Miller’s inventiveness is one-dimensional. There are pieces like MKHP, where electronica dominates in a mesmerizing, static duo with a bass clarinet, and others, like Sonata II, scored for piano and electronics, where conventional piano notes and chords are featured. Miller’s imagination is intriguing as well as versatile, and no work here lacks interest once you enter its specific soundscape.

Two other projects, simply titled Spring 2020 and Summer 2020, give us pieces that employ graphic notation, although the listener is unlikely to distinguish by ear which these are (Piano Forte I, II, and III, Sonata II, and Sonata III/IV). Contrary to expectations, there is no piano in Piano Forte I, II, and III—it’s a duo for clarinet and electronics.

Because it set out to accomplish a tactic for collaboration in circumstances of isolation, along with the loneliness and frustration it brought, Coincident is very meaningful for the performers. Listeners need to be devotees of the experimental side of New Music, I’d say, although these works are absorbing enough to draw in general listeners with adventurous tastes. There are rewards here if you are attuned to Miller’s technological aesthetics but confused bafflement if you aren’t.

— Huntley Dent, 7.22.2023