I hear enough placating, mind-numbing American Idol and rehashed Haydn just living in this world so, dear experimental music, I look to you for help and expect to be grabbed by the pants and thrown around the room with an adventurous, jarring fury and re-re-rebirth of The Cool. After a few moments of American violinist/violist Mary Oliver and Austrian cellist Johanna Varner's relatively straight thirteen-minute opener, "Bedtime Story", I prepared statements regarding the limitless possibilities of stringed instruments and Ivory Tower's so-called contemporary music, how "barring a few anomalies, the acoustic realm hasn't progressed past 1945"...
And then Oliver and Varner shut me up.
The duo begins with prim, reserved, simple strokes, whispering to one other with lilting open strings and lightly grazed harmonics. Their unfocused weaving gradually finds purchase as they add pitches, slowly gliss up and down strings and careen in and out of tonalities/microtonalities and each other's respective playing; high register sing-song meets non-vibrato chords, and Oliver and Varner deftly — on a dime — switch duties. In other words, once given the proper attention, the piece reveals itself as an incredibly virtuosic exposition of musical economy, how much musicians can do without veering too far from convention. Pivoting, "Jomo" and "Mojo" move and scream like Paganini yet remain as harmonically ambivalent (to most of us who can't keep track of hexachordal retrogrades and inversions, that is) as the best Webern string quartets. The duo shifts, again, on "Monkey", initially forming a wonky pulse of just-out-of-tune staccato bursts then crushing it with toe-tangling counterpoint.
When they do employ Post-Crumb extended techniques (the author of the liner notes prefers the term "Extra-territorial"), the duo offers these methods as an inherent extension, not the basis, of the work — or they just want to have a bit of fun. At the heart of the string-wrench and Doppler mix (each instrument sonically traverses in concentric circles, edging away from/closer to the microphone with each successive loop) of "Night Sweets" is a formally sound encapsulation with thematic development and a natural ebb, flow and climax; though presented as a rhizomic interlude, Oliver and Varner give "2 AM" a standout personality by breaking up the sawing, slapping and skronking dissonance with playful walking bass and lyrical Joe Pass-like scalar material.
But they're just warming up. Throughout the disc, Oliver and Varner carefully cache, then dole out, their endless secrets, the most obvious being the peerless mastery over their instruments and the extemporization process (JOMO is completely improvised and exudes an inspired aesthetic, but the spot-on, sophisticated cues and preternatural union give the impression of a painstakingly planned endeavor).
With myriad experience and varied personal campaigns, (i.e. Mary Oliver PhD has premiered pieces by everyone from Cage to Xenakis to Feldman and performed with Phil Minton, Evan Parker, Joelle Leandre etc.), Oliver and Varner author an exotic, extraordinary perspective that both respectfully flits on the outskirts of several traditions and dive-bombs expectations.
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