Lesser Epitomes would seem to exist in an ironic and paroxystic phase. A play of types that, in its measured pace and steady expression, exudes a certain mockery or sly wit. It would seem Leimer has attended to the melodic and rhythmic invention of disparate musical traditions and has developed his own playing within an awareness of and concern for those limitations. His re-action is to engage in a strategic shadowing that feeds back into and invests, erodes, and pushes ahead these ‘lesser epitomes’.
On this edition, Leimer seeks to accomplish this with a polished, professional, and occasionally predictable set of musical variations on a particular score. Owing to these family resemblances, one is then encouraged to mix up and alter the order in which these pieces unfold, thus revealing them in their equiprobability, their lack of fixed relation of opposition, and fundamental in-difference.
In proceeding in this manner, with a certain Beckett-like aridity, particularly in the linear notes and track titles, Leimer posits an apparently selfless art concerned with the purity of physical acoustic phenomenon, undisturbed by any manner of distortion or empty space. And, indeed, the music works quite well as background noise, aural wallpaper, as it were. But it also functions on other plains: one can quite simply bypass such conceptual and technical details and focus actively on the music’s sheer content, which oftentimes is, in a word, beautiful. With “Nonadaptive Layers”, fragments of electronics skirl and a mesmerizing play of mobility on cello, viola, and oboe whirl within an intricate montage. Closing the album, “Naive Music” places strings and oboe in a bath of elongated sustain while Leimer adjusts the parameters of the elegantly spacious surrounding. These movements tend to neo-classical music in its survival of itself. By no means what it first seems, Lesser Epitomes shines forth in more ways than one.
Max Schaefer
