To listen to Corps Exquis, an album of compositions by the Paris-born composer Daniel Wohl, is to be mowed over by a tiny army's worth of interesting sounds. It's hard to tell, sometimes, if those noises represent the crackle of cell phone interference or the creaky floor of an old house: The opening piece, "Neighborhood", churns together little bits of composer and performer Aaron Roche's processed voice with furious scribbles of tremolo'd string, a waveform that Wohl snags with his software and distends, so that we no longer picture human arms generating the sound. There are an abundance of other noises here, too, all of them of hazy origin-- some percussive clicks, some radiant, soft-edged keyboard arpeggios, a shimmer effect that resembles locusts or a lawn sprinkler. There is some groaning, burping electronic noise in the music's low end that could be a groaning double bass or electronics. This zone of confusion, between the digital glitch and bow-on-string screech, is where Wohl lives, and Corps Exquis gets more interesting the more confused you get.
The album, recorded by the modern classical guitarist and composer Andrew McKenna Lee, is beautiful and maze-like, with sounds emanating from all directions in your listening space. It is performed by the excellent five-piece ensemble Transit (percussion, clarinet and bass clarinet, violin, cello, and piano), which Wohl co-founded. The album is a kind of all-star affair, at least as far as the tight-knit world of NYC contemporary classical is concerned: So Percussion show up on "Neighborhood"; Julia Holter drops by on "Corpus". They render Wohl's music as a world overrun with small scrapes and fidgets, constantly scurrying across the floorboards while larger, more patient sounds operate above. "Insext" opens on a digital storm of white noise, overlaid with wisps of bowed string harmonics. A little string melody eventually rises out of the din, like someone whispering some half-remembered Copland, but it's promptly buffeted by waves of digital percussion. This push and pull, this sense that the music Transit plays is being sucked into the void and spit out transformed, like the tennis-ball scene in Poltergeist, is part of what makes Wohl such an original voice.
His voice is not manic, however, and his canvas is not seething: Even as it's surrounded by a clattering of pots and pans, the center of "323" is a radiant, booming nimbus of major chords, moving slowly. "Cantus" meanwhile, opens on a gently piling snowdrift of strings, all bowing in different pattern to create a gorgeously featureless expanse similar to Arvo Pärt's Fratres For Eight Cellos. Slowly, other noises creep into the frame-- a sharp, stabbing cello sound, some hollow rattles, like bottles being racked up at a bar counter. The piece dissolves, near the end, into a distressed racket of competing cries from all players, but Wohl leaves us with a contemplatively cool sound in its last seconds, a small sigh. In each piece, clamor briefly overwhelms serenity, but each time, clamor loses.
Most pieces operate on both planes at once: "Ouverture" generates a hushed, expectant mood that recalls George Crumb's "Star-Child". That piece builds its most fearsome roar from an old-fashioned pedaled piano, then fans out into a soothing hum of manipulated string textures. Whatever Wohl's vision is, about the noise of digital lives, and how they affect the mind, it isn't binary: Solace, these pieces seem to argue, can come from anywhere we look for it.
