‘Exploring the border between chaos and discipline’ is an over-used phrase usually adopted by ambitious conceptual improvisors, however it is an apt and deserving description of this recording, ‘ED09 for String/Wind Ensemble’, by Brooklyn-based composer and sound artist Duane Pitre. Essentially a long drone piece for chamber ensemble, utilising 21 New York musicians on the title instruments and Pitre’s own bowed guitar, in both concept and resultant sound ‘ED09’ follows in the footsteps of such long-form composers as Morton Feldman and Phil Niblock and, less so, the textural music of Ligeti and Xenakis.
The combination of so many voices makes discerning individual instruments particularly difficult, strings and horns for the most part blurred into a vague, beautifully shimmering haze, and it is here that Pitre best achieves the order/chaos balancing act. Based on a score of set playing methods, pitch groups and spontaneous conduction – ‘real time mixing’, as the release puts it – ‘ED09’ seems constantly on the verge of collapsing, or rather overflowing, Pitre guiding the work through gentle shifts in depth and dynamics, the music slippery and fluid, contracting and expanding as though drawing the same breath as the wind musicians. Frequently, the music achieves such thickness – and volume – that the resultant sound mass most closely resembles an organ. In other moments the strings seem to dominate, but these moments occur almost like tricks in gestalt perception, like the ‘duck-rabbit’s phenomenon, it brings Tony Conrad to mind, but soon other elements crowd the scene and the focus is shifted. This is drone music of rare depth and power, rich with crescendos and bucolic calm.
Joshua Meggitt
