Michael Gordon is one of the founding members of the Bang on a Can ensemble, who, for over a decade, have concerned themselves with injecting the vitality and relevance of popular forms into the world of modern art music. Such attempts have ranged from embarrassing to completely gripping, and Gordon's work has usually fallen on the positive end of the spectrum. His newest release, Light Is Calling, is an endeavor to join electronic influences with his distinctive style of shifting polyrhythmic structures.
You'd be right to approach such an attempt warily-- many modern composers' hybridization of strings and electronic production can give listeners too little credit, or sound like a bookish recluse's attempt to hang with the cool kids. It can be especially cringe-inducing when an aging composer "discovers" modern electronic equipment and genres, demonstrating only a basic knowledge of drum 'n' bass and ending with a product that in no way gets it. Michael Gordon avoids these pitfalls, enlisting the contributions of electronic musicians/producers Luke DuBois and Damian LeGassick as well as Ethel quartet violinist Todd Reynolds, and their collaboration has resulted in an accessible work that remains uncompromising in its subtle complexity and is a truly coherent meeting of styles. While the album isn't completely consistent, it achieves at its best moments a totally strange and unheard beauty.
The cover photo of Light Is Calling is taken from a short movie by filmmaker Bill Morrison (included as a Quicktime video on the disc) for which Gordon provides the soundtrack. Morrison's short was made through the process of reshooting decomposing black and white film, and the result is a dreamy, melting, light-drenched scene that could very well be occurring within the technicolor woods on the cover of Tortoise's It's All Around You. The aesthetic of Morrison's film is inexorably intertwined with many of Michael Gordon's pieces, and is key to understanding the album's intent. Both image and music act as meditations on memory and the warping effects of time, the beauty of decay, and the role of an outdated romanticism in the present day.
In the movie, we watch a decomposing film reel of a soldier who meets a mysterious woman in the woods. Gordon provides the sounds of a quartet playing time-warped instruments against a bent metallic background-- the innocent beauty of a silent-film soundtrack attempting to break through the rusty barrier of years passed by. Its particular conjoining of electronics and acoustic instruments calls to mind Gavin Bryars' seminal work "The Sinking of the Titanic", in which echoes of the ship's famous string quartet resound from the depths of the ocean floor. Most pieces on Light Is Calling take a similar concept as their genesis, offering the sounds of dead genres being dusted off and made to run their course through all the complications of the present day.
Light Is Calling establishes its thesis in the opener "Tinge", a track that echoes the unfettered dramaticism of Björk's Homogenic years, where orchestral hits and a Vivaldi-esque violin section are tempered by a winding found-sound percussion loop and plodding bassline. Measures of brilliant strings drop in and out of the following piece "Instrumental", offering some of the greatest moments of beauty on the album as it blurs the lines between live instrumentation and manipulated samples. Gordon falters with overblown sections of dissonant disco in "My Frig" and "Receiver" that upset the careful balance he achieves elsewhere of melodrama with musical humility and reservation. But the album regains its footing in "Idle", a piece that successfully enters the dangerous territory of world-folk influences and emerges a surreal, hypnotic interlude.
While the varied influences in each track of Light Is Calling are apparent, the result is an admirably focused and specific realization of an original aesthetic concept. Like most Nonesuch releases these days, this album's design is beautiful, and here, the art and music conjoin to present a fully unified work. The facade of decay is as integral as the past itself in the art of Gordon and Morrison, transmitting the glow of distorted memories and ache of the past's inaccessibility.
