BANDCAMP DAILY: Best of Bandcamp Contemporary Classical: October 2020

BANDCAMP DAILY: Best of Bandcamp Contemporary Classical: October 2020

BY PETER MARGASAK

“Although she’s firmly rooted in classical music tradition, violinist and composer Michi Wiancko has been defined partly by her Catholic sensibilities. She’s arranged music for the indie rock band Wye Oak and worked with artists as diverse as Laurie Anderson, Vijay Iyer, and Alarm Will Sound. Her abiding curiosity radiates from this terrific, boldly varied solo album featuring commissions from some of her favorite composers.

On Christopher Adler’s ‘Jolie Sphinx,’ a single line grows increasingly complex, with a needling rhythm and intensely jagged elaborations demanding superhuman dexterity. Paula Matthusen composed two pieces, including open-ended ‘Songs of Fuel and Insomnia,’ which finds the violinist improvising within an electronic landscape that’s both haunting and harsh. William Brittelle also wrote two compositions that reflect Wiancko’s love for rock music, including ‘So Long Art Decade,’ a salute to David Bowie’s tune ‘Art Decade,’ and ‘Disintegration (for Michi),’ a tip of the hat to The Cure. Still, as enjoyable as those works are, the most arresting composition is the title piece by Wiancko herself. Over 11 enthralling minutes she overdubs a variety of extended techniques, using objects like a wooden kitchen spoon and seashells to create percussive thrumming to complement more conventional arco lines, within a work that traverses disparate moods and attacks before evolving into a gorgeous meditation where she delicately sings a quotation from a meditation delivered by the Buddhist leader Thich Nhat Hanh: ‘Breathing in, I know that I am breathing in. Breathing out, I know that I am breathing out.’”

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