The contemporary composer's life is a complicated thing. Not only are there commissions to be written and personal works to be performed, but there are musicians, academic directors, tony labels, demanding benefactors, and gala-happy chamber arts societies to be placated. Not only is there the classical canon and instrumentation to be managed; there are also all kinds of electronic devices and experiments to be integrated, not infrequently amid multidisciplinary performance settings. And if navigating this demanding new music world isn't enough, there's the indie one it increasingly mingles with, sending you scampering between campus auditoriums and nightclub stages.
Scottish composer Anna Meredith knows what it's like to keep such a complex machine of prestige and exigency humming along. She has been a composer-in-residence at the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. She's made classically trained young people perform something like a goofy symphonic version of Steve Reich’s Clapping Music at Royal Albert Hall. She's padded her income with commercial work including, reportedly, music for MRI scanners. That's a terrifying prospect if you consider it through the lens of her solo style, which is shaping up-- understandably, given the aforementioned context-- as a pressure vent for overwhelming, spontaneous, brazen grandeur. Would you want to hear Death Star explosion music while getting your brain scanned in a metal pod?
Meredith unveiled her smart, intrepid electronic music last year on the Black Prince Fury EP, which was steeped in a sense of adventure associated with the fantasy video games and fantasy metal of the 1980s, when Meredith was a child. The EP was spearheaded by "Nautilus", a sentient tidal wave of synthetic brass pulses more gloriously malevolent than anything cooked up by TNGHT or ripped off the Godzilla soundtrack by Pharoahe Monch. "I came up with a bit of it, and thought, 'Well, that's a bit ridiculous, but let's just roll with it!'" Meredith told Pitchfork. On the new Jet Black Raider EP, she adds some real clarinets, glockenspiels, drums, cello, and even singing to her virtual instruments, but otherwise, she picks up in the same retro-flavored, high-spirited, questing mood where she left off.
The 8-bit video game scores of the 80s were influenced by medieval music-- its limited polyphony suited the handful of channels you could get on a chip-- and by hair metal guitar solos, for their built-in adrenaline. Video game composers used these channels as maximally as possible, stuffing them with ghoulish chromatic bass lines, runaway arpeggios, and memorably brave or haunting melodic themes. Meredith's solo work feels couched in this dated techno-cultural moment. Her song titles sound like Zelda monsters; her EP names like Final Fantasy summon spells. With the short hair and puffy shirt she wears in promo photos, she would make a great bard at a LARP session. "Orlok", which fills the monstrous-banger slot established by "Nautilus", begins with a fast sinister progression that makes you feel like you've booted up Wizards & Warriors, then rampages through seven minutes of explosive final-boss music, but with contemplative respites and beats nudged around in time.
As on Black Prince Fury, the new EP's initial shock-and-awe campaign is rounded out by three shorter, lighter pieces, though the mercurial "Unicron"-- imagine if there was such a thing as a pipe organ with a built-in digital sequencer, and it was totally haunted-- nears "Orlok" in groaning weight and playful menace, and often feels, as do many of Meredith's tracks, like the brief moment when an orchestra scrambles for a tempo change protracted for a breathlessly long time. The sparse "Bubble Gun" is as quirkily schematic as its name, with effervescent arpeggios for bubbles, a bass and some brass chords for the gun. Most surprising is "ALR", where Meredith sings ingenuous lyrics in a clear, humble voice over molten electro-pop, melding the breezniess of Au Revoir Simone with the wide-open thrusters of M83.
Certainly, Meredith must share Anthony Gonzalez's love of 80s synth-pop; this is someone who twisted apart "The Power of Love" on her last EP. But rather than a nostalgic embalming of old feelings, this is rough and ready music that bursts with contemporary inspiration, aiming to flood the synapses and master the senses. Though musical subtleties naturally emerge from Meredith's training and practice, the extroverted impact and unserious charisma of Jet Black Raider is even more admirable and rare.
