Peter Knight / Aviva Endean / Erkki Veltheim / Kim Myhr / Lizzy Welsh / Jacques Emery / Tony Buck / Joe Talia

More mood than modulation, this immersive three-part suite, composed and performed by Norwegian electric 12-string guitarist Kim Myhr, with the seven-piece Australian Art Orchestra (AAO), including one ringer, evolves in a leisurely concentrated fashion. Evading for the most part the idea of foreground and background, the sequences emphasize crepuscule affiliations along with motifs as expansive as the desolate Australian outback.

A cross-genre investigator, Myhr has worked with artists such as Pierre-Yves Martel and Ingar Zach, whereas the AAO emphasized Asian and aboriginal as well improvised and notated currents in its programs. The ringer here is percussionist Tony Buck, part of the long-running The Necks trio. Adding his percussion strategies to the concentrated vibrating and battering expressed when all the orchestra members turn to percussive string plucks or idiophone thrashing means that Vesper includes more contractions and elevation than the Necks’ controlled creations.

Throughout Vesper’s three movements there are subtle realignments as Myhr’s consistent strumming sounds among a base of droning electronic oscillations while brushing against or detaching from harmonized glissandi created by the dedicated string players. Altogether “Part Two” and concluding “Part Three” are more humid and atmospheric, it’s the final section that reaches an apogee. Here ringing guitar frails overcome the clanking, crisscrossing timbres of percussion, horns and pushed-to-limit tape deck electronics to end with a dissolving steel-guitar-like echo. However the multi-toned crescendo exposition and climax is expressed in the preceding sequence. As unstructured crackles, accents, undulations and pops concentrate and accelerate to a crescendo of undifferentiated timbres, Peter Knight’s brassy cock-a-doodle-do trumpet squeezes and soothing vibrations from Aviva Endean’s clarinet propel multiphonic textures that cackle and rumble as they adhere.

More decorous than other works from the guitarist and the AAO, Vesper can be appreciated as a chamber suite that could be regularly performed without upset in formal mutated or free-wheeling improvised music concerts.

–Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. Part One: I caught a glimpse of the sea through the leafy boughs of the pines 2. Part Two: We seemed to grow more and more pensive, but in fact we were less and less 3. Part Three: No walls, no ceiling, no windows

Personnel: Peter Knight (trumpet, hammered dulcimer, electronics): Aviva Endean (clarinet, bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet, autoharp, umtshingo): Lizzy Welsh (violin): Erkki Veltheim (viola); Kim Myhr (12-string guitar); Jacques Emery (bass, autoharp): Tony Buck (drums, percussion); Joe Talia (Revox B77 tape deck, electronics)