By the end of the first few minutes this new album by Bostonian composer Nomi Epstein, one already knows what the next sixty minutes hold: beautiful, patient gradualist music. "Shades", the sole composition written specifically for this project and in this realization a perfect opener, features a curtailed Apartment House roster (violin, viola, cello) slowly volleying long strands of glissando back and forth. Light pizzicato periodically punctures the resulting fabric, but the focus remains on soft, subtle variations on stretched, bent, and coaxed tones woven into a lattice. In true neo-minimalist form, the piece never gets too far from where it starts but still covers a lot of territory in its slow, buoyant unfolding.
Sounds, the second selection, takes a similar approach as shades, but with more gradual oscillations. It is just as delicate, and the instrumentation — a Berlin-based quartet of voice, clarinet, violin, and piano (with a couple of whistles for good measure) — adds breadth (and breath) to the string-centrism of the previous track. The focus here, however, seems gradations of harmony. The piano adds gravity, both when played conventionally and percussively, and takes on the role of time-keeper — striking just a fraction before the rest of the quartet or even more overtly providing the call in call-and-response passages — though it is also used sparingly. The harmonies — usually blurred and layered pitches with little melodic breadth — come from the other instruments. In its vast spaces of quiet and these intervallic instances of concord and discord, sounds is especially haunting. One never knows when a given note will end or where the next note is coming from. As an analogy, sounds might be the sad song of wolves — distant from the listener and each other — trying to make a connection with each other through their adjacent, lonely howls. Strikingly, they make that connection three-quarters in, but only for a moment, which quickly dissipates before a deeper bond can really take hold.
"Sextet", the earliest composition and final track on the album, here performed by an expanded Apartment House crew, is more hurried, though that term is fitting only relative to the first two pieces. It consists of a series of synchronized, crescendo-ing and shifting tones. Over time the sounds accumulate into something of a melody. Notes tend to repeat in short sets, though in imperfect replication. By the last third of the piece, the tones cohere into a series of long, overlapping waves, which meld into a single quavering whole. The change is surreptitious but engrossing. As, I must add, is the rest of the album.
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