Quartet Solo Series

Marina Peterson
Phillip Schultz
Jonathan Chen
Andrew DeWar 

Four very extreme solo pieces, and they’re evaluated below:

Marina Peterson / athens.s /  for cello, paper clips, sticks

Peterson effectively gets you to focus on small details, tiny things, the possibilities of the very small. Floorboards creaking, doors opening and similar mundane things are transformed into much more than just random, uninteresting sound. 

Phillip Schulze / Cause Unfold Proceed II /  for electronics 

This sortie comes across like a machine trying to communicate with humans. We can’t understand it, but the effort the machine put into it was interesting and more than welcome. That machine probably has a rich life of its own when we’re not hanging around.

Jonathan Chen / Drummer /  for electronics 

Basically one ongoing, virtually unchanging drone. Sound this limited pretty much made me feel like an irrelevant party. If La Monte Young’s 60s group’s drones were too maximal for you, you may latch onto this in a big way.

Andrew Dewar / Diptych / for soprano sax  

A worthy entry in the genre where a sax is conceived of as a piece of metal capable of makings sounds that don’t sound recognizably saxophone-like at all.

Striking Mechanism

SM 0001

Richard Grooms