Resistance/Resonance
New Focus, 2021
8/10
Listen to Resistance/Resonance
An extremely adventurous project, Resistance/Resonance brings the 113 Composers Collective together with Duo Gelland for 6 pieces that allow Cecilia and Martin Gelland to showcase their inimitable and vast violin dynamics.
Jeremy Wagner’s “Oberleitung” leads the listen with both tense and playful string manipulation that’s equally haunting and exciting in its calculated precision where the violins even sound percussive, and “A Lifeless Object, Alive (Dysarthia)”, by Michael Duffy, follows with an artistic approach to space and time being adjusted with the utmost care that’s capable of noisy as well as soft moments.
The middle tracks offer us 3 chapters of Joshua Musikantow’s “Autochrome Lumiére”, where the violins dance around each other with sublime melody, furious string acrobatics, and even calming gestures of bare beauty. The title track, one of the album’s best, then quivers with a cinematic appeal that’s blurry and innovative in its pitch focused range.
The final two tracks, Adam Zahller’s “Difficult Ferns” and Tiffany M. Skidmore’s “cistern. anechoic. sonolucent.”, continue the creative landscape, as the former alternates between calm and swift across its 3 movements of fascinating tonality, and the latter finishes with a dreamy 10 minutes that explores the serene side of the violin.
For fans of unconventional violin music, or those that absorb atypical chamber and orchestral sounds, this is a journey worth taking that embraces intimacy and exploration in ways that few could replicate.
Travels well with: Curtis K. Hughes- Tulpa; Douglas Boyce- The Hunt By Night