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Ensemble neoN — Niblock / Lamb (Hubro Music)

Niblock/Lamb by Ensemble neoN

Should humanity survive, our descendants will look upon this time with many questions. Hopefully someone somewhere will take up the matter of why post-millennial new music ensembles like Ensemble neoN and a.pe.ri.od.ic chafed against standard capitalization. There’s your topic, future human, I hope you get a thesis out of it. Ensemble neoN started in 2008, when a group of players who met at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo united to cultivate and perform new works that arise from the nexus of Western popular and art music. Niblock / Lamb contains two pieces, each about 25 minutes long. The CD draws together the work of two American composers who are of different generations and who make very different music, but are united by their concern with acoustic phenomena.

Phill Niblock (b. 1933) is one of the early minimalists. His vast oeuvre is devoted to unleashing the sounds that occur when adjacent tones are played very loudly for long periods of time. Whatever pitches he has musicians play and whatever instruments they use, it’s all about the textures and microtones. Catherine Lamb (b. 1982) is a composer and musician whose music is similarly concerned with acoustic events that instigate physical and psychological states. If you need to fix a label on what she does, minimalism doesn’t quite stick. But since it does acknowledge her interest in economy of means, we’ll apply it and move on before the inconsistencies make it fall off.

Both of this album’s compositions zero in on a similar phenomenon. Niblock’s “To Two Tea Roses” requires one group of musicians to record a prescribed passage through a chord. Then, said recording is played while another ensemble negotiates a similar passage through another chord in real time. For this CD, Ensemble neoN performed both parts. In Lamb’s “Parallaxis Forms,” two singers sound the same melody while other musicians play tones that are pitched closely to the sung ones.

In each case, music arises from similar elements played in close proximity, but the resulting experiences are quite dissimilar. The Niblock piece is, by his standards, pretty active, for while the performers are essentially adding and subtracting single tones, the effect is anything but static. Their collective vibrations whip up an engulfing swirl of sound, which is evident even when played at a conversation-friendly volume far below the usual edge-of-obliteration levels required to bring Niblock’s music to life. Lost within that swirl are the original characters of the ensemble’s woodwinds and bowed strings. They melt together to create a paradoxically inviting maelstrom. If you’ve ever listened to an orchestra tune up and wished they would never start the piece, this is your music.

If “To Two Tea Roses” is less dependent than usual upon volume for its composer’s desired effect, “Parallaxis Forms” remains quite true to Lamb’s preferences. She does not overwhelm you, but would prefer that you listen closely, because the very act of attending will heighten her music’s subtle effects. The richness of this music arises from the differences in how two voices articulate the same note, or the subtle variations in how musicians execute the same bend from one note to another. Catch that moment when a cello and a rubbed wine glass or a flute and a bass clarinet shift from consonance to dissonance, and pure tones start to beat. Experience that moment’s rapid evaporation. Lean forward and try to catch the next second when simple beauty blossoms into something more complex.

Ensemble neoN brings an exquisite degree of attunement to both pieces, which is nicely captured by Lasse Marhaug’s production. He brings a dry clarity to this music that’s every bit as sympathetic to the its needs as the sonic grit he has captured in his work with Okkyung Lee.

Bill Meyer

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