A Colorful, Auspiciously Acerbic Debut Collection From Composer Gilbert Galindo

Not only is composer Gilbert Galindo’s debut album Terrestrial Journeys – streaming at Bandcamp – full of color and humor and vivid, edgy ideas: he’s also assembled a fantastic crew of New York new-classical types to play these compositions.

The opening track is Spunk, a lively, coyly dancing tune with tricky tempo changes, bursting staccato, understatedly clever counterpoint and a deft use of space. Dan Lippel‘s guitar adds a tantalizingly biting, gritty, slightly revertoned edge behind Clara Kim’s sailing violin solo. Jeff Hudgins’ crystalline alto sax cedes to a similarly all-too-brief solo from bassist Gregory Chudzik; the long quote as they reach the end is too good to give away.

Kathleen Supové‘s portentous Day in the Life piano chord opens Echoes of the Divine, Clare Monfredo’s distantly Indian-tinged cello joined by high harmonics from violinists Giancarlo Latta and violist Maren Rothfritz. Galindo packs a lot into almost fifteen minutes. Delicately stalactite droplets and the occasional raptured chord from the piano fill out the layered loops and slow, tectonically shifting textures from the strings, for a striking yet hypnotic contrast. Stately swells lead to a fleeting, warmly Romantic hint of a coda from Supové, bittersweet viola over sparse stillness, a moment of agitation and allusions to Messiaen before the composer reaches to complete the circle.

A brief, colorful, suspensefully pulsing overture, Let’s Begin features the Argus Quartet: all of the aforementioned string players minus Chudzik. Latta plays Though Your Footsteps Were Unseen, a brief diptych for solo violin, taking his time with simple, drifting chords and keening atmospheric harmonics when not pouncing through some devious poltergeist riffs.

Virtuoso clarinetist Thomas Piercy takes a rare turn on bass model in Lost in the Caves, a light touch of electronic reverb enhancing his tightly clustering, energetic, wary phrasing, with an animatedly conversational passage but also moments of surprising calm.

The trio of Kim, Monfredo and Supové tackle Imagined Passions, the three voices disengaged sufficiently to fuel a moody, wary, sometimes wispy disconnect with strong Messiaen echoes. This kind of passion could become deadly in a split second. Supové’s balance of lefthand murk beneath an icy stroll is striking, through a frequently disquieting gallery walk that becomes more of a shivery funhouse mirror.

She plays solo in My Soul Waits: this one’s full of some serious suspense and otherworldly, bell-like upper register along with anxious concentric riffs. Iktus Percussion take over for the concluding triptych, Not the Light, But the Fire That Burns, Supové joined by Chris Graham and Sean Statser. That coldly starry piano glitters in tandem with similarly eerie bells and bowed vibraphone throughout part one, The Glow That Flickers. Understatedly savage gongs and lows figure in part two, Deep Blue. The conclusion, Burn! has broodingly romping low-register in ratcheting syncopation from Supové, whiplash metallic drums amid menacingly echoey ambience. This is an unusual and often unselfconsciously profound collection of new classical music: let’s hope we hear more from Galindo sooner than later.

Among the artists on the record, the Argus Quartet have are ahead of everyone else in terms of upcoming concerts. Their next one is with pianist Steven Beck, playing play the New York premieres of Michael Shapiro’s Yiddish Quartet and Piano Quintet at Bargemusic on April 30 at 8 PM. Cover is steep, $35, but word on the street is that Shapiro’s new material is worth it.

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Surreal, Occasionally Assaultive Epics and a Bushwick Brewery Gig from Bassist James Ilgenfritz

You’re going to want to turn down the volume on your device for the first track on bassist James Ilgenfritz‘s wildly uncategorizable new album You Scream a Rapid Language – streaming at Bandcamp – especially if you’re wearing earbuds. Some of this is assaultive, abrasive music, but it can be a treat for people who gravitate toward those kinds of sounds. The bassist’s next gig is a two-night stand with multimedia artist and playwright Sarah Krasnow at Honey’s, a mead brewery at 93 Scott Ave. in Bushwick on Jan 4 and 5 at 8 PM. Cover is $10; since this is happening over another L-pocalypse weekend, if you’re not in the neighborhood, it’s going to be a bitch to get to. The closest train that’s running is the M to Myrtle Ave; you could take your chances with the bus after.

Muted, pummeling beats anchor violinist Pauline Kim Harris’ sharp, shrieking, slashing upper-register riffage in the album’s first track, Terminal Affirmative. As usual, Ilgenfritz writes for every fraction of the available sonics, from nails-down-the-blackboard upper-register harmonics, to cello-like low-midrange washes, to pings and thuds from Alex Cohen’s double bass drum. .And just when you think this might be all shards and fragments, it turns into a witchy tarantella.

The second number, Apophenia III: The Index is a twistedly disjointed electroacoustic epic with lots of sardonic wah-wah, a talkbox, creepy, minimalist piano from Kathleen Supove, sepulchral wisps from James Moore’s guitar and Jennifer Choi’s violin, and a bit of a strolling stalker theme. How to Talk to Your Children About Not Looking at the Eclipse, a chattering solo tableau for Margaret Lancaster’s solo flute, is as ridiculously picturesque as the title suggests.

Freaky faux-operatic spoken word, fragmentary Joseph Kubera piano, flickering bass and lingering vibes from William Winant blend uneasily, sometimes edging toward horror, in Apophenia IV: A Bell in Every Finger. It could be a performance art parody, or maybe everybody just got really stoned before improvising it. Either way, it runs out of gas short of the twelve-minute mark. The album winds up with the five-part suite Fanfares For Modest Accomplishments, played by violin duo String Noise and spanning from chirpy, minimalistic acerbity, to wry conversationality, playfully adrenalizing rollercoaster interludes and a coy false ending.

A Challenging, Relevant New Album From Avant Garde Piano Titan Kathleen Supove

Kathleen Supove is not only the most virtuosically dazzling pianist to emerge from the downtown New York scene of the 1980s; she’s also a champion of some of the most individualistic composers of the past few decades. Her new album Eye to Ivory, a collection of five world premiere recordings, is streaming at Bandcamp. She’s playing the album release show on Nov 24 at 3 PM at Spectrum; cover is $15

She opens the album’s title track, by Mary Ellen Childs, with a stern, grimly marching lefthand, adding increasingly cynical, emphatic righthand accents. Ghostly flickers can’t derail this stomping steam train even as it slows to an echoey pause. Supove’s legendary technique comes front and center with the insistently challenging staccato of the second movement. A stygian, deadpool call-and-response is followed by a lively contrapuntal waltz and a twisted, increasingly savage boogie – the dystopic ELO classic From the Sun to the World taken to the next level. The menace rises with the sun over Supove’s chillingly minimalist, looped righthand.

Akin to a slowly melting ice sculpture, the late Nick Didkovsky’s slow, Terry Riley-ish Rama Broom has slowly increasing, Debussy-esque activity over subtle variations on a hypnotic fifth interval anchored by a lingering low A note. There’s also a cut-and-pasted spoken word component: dread seems to be the central theme, which makes sense when you reach the end. No spoilers here, ha!

Talkback IV, by Guy Barash, is an electroacoustic piece, echoey phrases disintegrating into distortion amid eerie insistence and flailing chaos. A caricaturish march emerges, only to dissolve into a hammering reflecting pool. Likewise, an echoey calm following a return to belltone disquiet is subsumed in persistent atonalities.

Randall Woolf’s nine-part suite In the Privacy of My Own Home makes its point, although it could be shorter. Everyone who’s not living in a cave (or glued to a screen 24/7) is aware of how the confluence of the surveillance state and social media imperil us. Here, an attractively uneasy, slowly unfolding series of loopy riffs contrast with samples of laughs, sighs, gasps and a burp or three. Yes, TMI is ugly: yes, the pornification of even the most mundane moments is too.  For what it’s worth, Supove negotiates the piece’s tricky metrics with an agile aplomb.

Supove closes the album with Dafna Naphtali’s Landmine, a dissociative, occasionally creepy four-part electroacoustic suite. Mechanical, Louis Andriessen-style staccato accents and an increasingly ominous belltone melody mingle with split-second bursts of various timbres, sometimes like a scan of a busy radio dial. Although there are no explosive moments until more than midway through, everything does get blown to shreds here.

Paula Matthusen and Terri Hron Bring Sounds to Get Lost In To the Lower East Side

Like most composers these days, Paula Matthusen gets commissioned to write for all sorts of projects, from film and video to dance. Maybe for that reason, her latest album Pieces for People – streaming at Spotify – is very eclectic. Much of this you could call ambient; minimalism works too. It’s a clinic in how to have maximum fun with getting all sorts of different textures out of a single note or simple phrase. If you’re around this weekend or just back from the march on Washington and need to chill out, Matthusen and woodwind player Terri Hron are doing an electroacoustic set at Spectrum at 3 (three) PM on Jan 22. It’s a fair bet that they’ll do some of the material from the album, and there’s a reception afterward. Cover is $15.

The opening number, Sparrows In Supermarkets, features Hron’s playfully flitting lines reprocessed and spun back as a percussion instrument of sorts; as the piece goes on, it develops into a warmly enveloping Brian Eno-esque soundscape. James Moore plays the distantly Asian-tinged, microtonal Limerence solo on banjo: as with the previous piece, Matthusen uses an echo effect as a percussion track. It builds to a toweringly hypnotic peak in the same vein as much of Moore’s work with the Dither guitar quartet.

Jamie Jordan provides tenderly nuanced, melismatic vocalese on The Days Are Nouns, backed by Mantra Percussion‘s echoey, vibraphone-fueled resonance. The first half of a diptych for the Estonian National Ballet, AEG (movements III & IV) features pianists Kathleen Supové and Yvonne Troxler mingling uneasy, loopy, increasingly insistent piano phrases. Vocalists Molly Shaiken and Tiit Helimets exchange droll spoken-word nonsequiturs in English and Estonian over backward-masked long-tone motives in the second part.

Organist Wil Smith plays another Eno-esque diptych of sorts, Of Architecture and Accumulation, a feast of timbres: airy, keening, smoky and distorted, and subtly oscillating, gently spiced with ominous close harmonies. Then Smith pulls out all the stops for a mighty, strolling, slo-mo fugue before winding down gracefully.

Wim Boerman conducts the Orkest De Ereprijs playing Corpo/Cage. A funny rainscape sequence and playful variations on brassy loops eventually get mashed together, more or less: it’s the album’s most epic track. The final piece is the elegaic In Absentia, Troxler’s broodingly spaced, plaintively plucked phrases over violinist Todd Reynolds‘ atmospherics. Turn on, tune in, get lost.

New York’s Most Eclectic Music Festival Begins This Week

The free, annual Music with a View festival is happening from June 17 through June 30 at the Flea Theatre in Tribeca, 41 White St. between Church and Broadway. Pyrotechnic pianist Kathleen Supove’s celebration of new music from across the entire spectrum is sort of a fortnight-long Bang on a Can marathon, but served up in tasty bite-size portions, eighty minutes of music per night with lively banter afterward directed by the evening’s moderator. Here’s the schedule: early arrival is very highly advised since the comfortable black-box space fills up quickly. You can also reserve a place here. Shows during the week begin at 7 PM sharp, 3 PM sharp on the weekend.

Monday, June 17 @ 7PM
“ORDINARY OBJECTS, EXTRAORDINARY MUSIC”
MODERATOR: Robert Schwimmer
Joshua Fried/Hans Tammen
Judy Dunaway

Tuesday, June 18 @ 7PM
“FANTASTIC FORCE: PIANO, TROMBONES”
MODERATOR: Daniel Felsenfeld
Dimitar Pentchev
Alex Weiser

Wednesday, June 19 @ 7PM
“SPACE: REAL AND VIRTUAL”
MODERATOR: Paula Matthusen
Peri Mauer’s polyrhythmic, spatially shifting work Life on Earth, alternating configurations from among 15 instrumentalists a la Lisa Bielawa’s recent explorations.
Tristan McKay/Ellery Trafford

Friday, June 21 @ 7PM
“THE SHAPE AND TEXTURE OF EMOTION”
MODERATOR: Eve Beglarian
Gregg Wramage
Yotam Haber/Contemporaneous

Saturday, June 22 @ 7PM
“UP AND COMING…AND HERE!”
MODERATOR: Todd Reynolds
Tim Hansen/Transit
Amplified Cactus

Sunday, June 23 @ 3PM
“THE SONG IN ALL OF US”
MODERATOR: Mary Rowell
William Gardiner
Kirsten Volness/Hotel Elefant

Tuesday, June 25 @ 7PM
“SURPRISING ROLES”
MODERATOR: Randall Woolf
Chamber pop innovator Matthew Siffert
Pat Muchmore

Friday, June 28 @ 7PM
“BELIEF: RELIGION OPTIONAL”
MODERATOR: Martha Mooke
Paul Pinto
Dsert blues/cantorial rockers Jeremiah Lockwood/The Sway Machinery

Saturday, June 29 @ 7PM
“ICONOCLASTS”
MODERATOR: Miguel Frasconi
Michael Century
Legendary, intense downtown avant-punk-jazz duo Iconoclast (Leo Ciesa and Julie Joslyn)

Sunday, June 30 @ 3PM
“FREE SPIRITS”
MODERATORL: Jed Distler
Intense, witty, eclectic pianist/accordionist Shoko Nagai
Christy & Emily

Kathleen Supove’s Three-Day Stand in Tribeca: A Must-See for Fans of Edgy Piano Music

Kathleen Supove, the go-to pianist of the New York underground,  debuted her most recent, hauntingly surreal theme program, modestly titled Digital Debussy, last night at the Flea Theatre in Tribeca. It continues with shows tonight, April 26 at 7 PM and two on Saturday the 27th at 3 and 7 PM. If cutting-edge piano music is on your agenda, don’t miss this. Supove, who doesn’t shy away from a challenge, put herself in the position of having to play along to a collage of keyboards mixed with found sounds of storms and god knows what else, and she was up for it, even though that meant taking cues not from melody but from stormclouds and seemingly random, possibly backward-masked sonic markers.

And she nailed it! Supove – who is always great fun to watch, opening the show decked out all in white with a white piano along with watery film projections – began by negotiating her way through the rain-drenched, hauntingly immersive, deceptively minimalist funhouse mirrors of Joan LaBarbara’s Storefront Diva: A Dreamscape. Inspired by Joseph Cornell’s dreams of Debussy playing in a storefront window, it was like being transported to a sonic Cornell box. Supove chose her spots  As much fun as this was to witness, it would be fantastic to hear on album (reputedly there’s a DVD in the works). There’s a visual aspect that gives Supove – a very physical performer, albeit a lithe, graceful one – lots of room for balletesque movement. Throughout LaBarbara’s otherworldly, Lynchian resonances, Supove played Lynch Girl at the keys to the hilt, exchanging melodies between hands whether or not she was playing them. The surrealism of it all hit hard, a hurricane tableau as seen from a safe interior, resonantly comforting despite itself.

Annie Gosfield’s Shattered Apparitions of the Western Wind – like all of the pieces on the program, a new commision from Supove, this being an update on Debussy’s What the West Wind Saw – seemingly illustrated a triumphant human spirit in the face of cruel distractions. Ostensibly, the sound collage that Supove played against reimagined Debussy fragments along with samples from Hurricane Sandy. Aside from a gusty, swooping interlude late in the piece, it was hard to tell what was organic and what was machine-made. Perhaps that was intentional. Throughout it all, beauty triumphed amid chaos, Beatles quotes and endless, hypnotic circularity.

Up to this point, Supove hadn’t been able to indulge in much humor (give her an inch and she”ll take a mile or two: she can be hilarious). So it was fun to watch her tackle her longtime Dr. Nerve  art-rock bandmate Nick Didkovsky’s Triumph of Innocence, a sarcastic title if there ever was one. Supove played hypnotic, distantly Indian-tinged cascades and circular motives while narrating fragments from a Bette Page memoir, actress Georgia Ximenes Lifsher acting out the stripper’s deadpan, seemingly innocent recollections of Estes Kefauver’s foreshadowing of the Meese Commission, Page’s fondness for her photographer/pimp Irving Klaw (what a name, huh?) and her terror of growing old and losing her looks. As it crescendoed, Supove’s breathless narration channeled an increasing violence to match her rapidfire work on the keys. It was enough to make you forget that there was, at least ostensibly, a stripper onstage, no mean feat. Tickets for this explosive and entertaining show are still available as of now. Supove also books the intriguing, vastly cross-pollinational annual Music with a View series here: watch this space for a series of June concerts that promise to match  this kind of excitement.

An Auspicious First Night at This Year’s MATA Festival

The MATA Festival continues tonight and tomorrow night at Roulette’s spacious new digs in Brooklyn across the street from Hank’s Saloon, a thirty-second hop from the Atlantic Avenue subway. If the rest of the program is as richly enjoyable as last night’s was, it’ll be one of the high-water marks of what’s been so far a great year for live music. Tonight features composer-performers including fascinating sound-sculptor Leslie Flanigan along with Cecilia Lopez and Eli Kelzer; tomorrow’s bill features SIGNAL playing works by Francesco Filidei and David Coll, plus a viola quartet by Eric Wubbels and a piece for solo kantele (Finnish autoharp) by Alex Freeman along with the charismatically pyrotechnic Kathleen Supove attacking an Ivan Orozco composition.

MATA has come a long way since it was Music at the Anthology (meaning Anthology Film Archives) about a dozen years ago; this particular program had an ambitiously global scope, with two equally ambitious ensembles, all-female German recorder ensemble QNG (Susanne Fröhlich, Yoshiko Klein,Miako Klein and Heide Schwarz) alternating with the JACK Quartet (violinists Christopher Otto, Caleb Burhans, violist John Pickford Richards and cellist Kevin McFarland). Both groups were playing with ringers – QNG with Yoshiko Klein subbing for Andrea Guttman, and Burhans filling in for JACK’s Ari Streisfeld – and each player blended in flawlessly.

QNG opened, tackling Qin Yi’s new Sound Shadow. Dancing and rippling with a staccato pointillism, the group held it together with a pinpoint rhythmic insistence: Messiaen’s birdsong as Bach might have orchestrated it. It would be difficult enough as a work for piano: it must be doubly so for wind instruments. Even a sonic crisis midway through couldn’t derail the JACK Quartet’s first assignment, a Huck Hodge partita that played permutations of the word “refuse.” Up and away with a swirl they went, the jaggedly acidic tone poem’s microtones pulling hard against a wavery central anchor, bracingly and intensely. A bell-like chorus shot off glissandos like roman candles, atmospherics evoking an accordion with half the keys held down, and an off-center call from the viola and cello against an increasingly agitated, eventually horrified thicket of violins that finally wound up with a grinding, gnashing march. It wasn’t the biggest audience hit of the night – that would come a little later – but it was the most exhilarating piece of music. Their take on a second tone poem, Icelandic composer Hugi Gudmunsson’s Matins, a pastorale depicting sunrise over the mountains, was every bit as cinematically majestic as anyone could possibly want, yet without being the least bit over-the-top.

Frohlich played Oscar Bianchi’s Crepuscolo, from 2004, solo, powerfully amplified so as to capture the most minute sonics escaping from her mighty multi-chamber large-scale recorder. Considering how vast the piece’s dynamic range would become, it’s a good thing she started as quietly as she did, especially since it involves percussion on the recorder almost as much as melody. Precisely oscillating riffs tiptoed, then scurried, then helicoptered suddenly and explosively out of suspenseful stillness, careening off the walls of the theatre. It’s amazing that a single recorder could create such a vast and assaultive array of sounds, especially the low-register ones, and quite the herculean feat to witness, never mind attempt. Frohlich has a place on an Olympic team waiting for her somewhere if she ever gets sick of music.

QNG followed with Gordon Beeferman’s Passages, whose rapt, organ-like ambience offered not the slightest hint of the rousing roller-coaster ride of swoops and dives the group would get to joyously swing through before returning comfortably home. The concert ended with both ensembles joining forces for a mutual commission, Yotam Haber’s Estro Poetico-Armonico. The Vivaldi allusion came through vividly: Haber based this on Benedetto Marcello’s final transcription of a series of psalms sung in a baroque-era Venetian synagogue. Through a glass darkly, it fluttered, microtonal curliques rising, obscuring and then backing away, elegantly ceding centerstage to the stately, wary, old-world stained-glass ambience.

Kathleen Supové’s Piano Threatens to Explode

A titan of the new music community, Kathleen Supové has been a go-to pianist for important, innovative composers since the 80s. Her latest album The Exploding Piano – her first since 2004’s stunningly virtuosic Infusion – is characteristically eclectic and cerebral. Where much of Infusion weaves a dizzying lattice of textures, this one – except for the final, practically 25-minute cut – is more direct and more of a showcase for Supové’s legendary chops. Except for that final cut, the electronics here are pretty much limited to lightly processed sound and the occasional loop.

Missy Mazzoli’s Isabelle Eberhardt Dreams of Pianos is the opening track, replete with Mazzoli’s signature traits: terse, richly interlocking melodies, counterrythms, and hypnotically circular motifs. It’s a tribute to the great adventurer, imagining her riding across her adopted Sahara Desert on horseback, reflecting on the comfort of her early life inVienna high society as bits and pieces of Schubert’s A Major Sonata float to the surface. And then the melody spreads away from the tonic, insistent forte chords create a Radiohead-inflected swirl against a repetitive loop, and the flood that will kill her at age 27 is upon her. It’s as poignant as it is intense.

Michael Gatonska’s A Shaking of the Pumpkin is meant to illustrate activity in the insect kingdom, alternating low rumble with judicious righthand melody and a lot of sustain that finally reaches a roar – and then goes on and on, A Day in the Life style. The placement of a bass drum under the piano lid enhances the boomy sustain of the low tonalities. It ends with a series of muted thumps – a pedal springing back into place? Shots? A salute?

Anna Clyne’s On Track is a launching pad for Supové’s trademark deadpan wit. Inspired by a spoken-word quote from Queen Elizabeth about how quickly circumstances change (which recurs as a sample here), it walks resolutely until the Mission Impossible theme appears for an instant, insistently in the left hand. Eventually Mission Impossible will casually interrupt the busy, rippling melody again and again until it finally shuts it off cold. Dan Becker’s circular Revolution illustrates a Martin Luther King speech (sampled here) using the story of Rip Van Winkle as a parable for how America is sleeping through a revolution. It’s a duet between Supové and a prepared Disklavier (a sort of digital player piano with strings modified to produce what amounts to a percussion track here). After running a series of widening circles, Supové finally breaks free of the rhythmic stranglehold – a hint, it seems – and then lets the melody fall away gracefully as it winds down to just a few repetitive, increasingly simple chords.

Supové’s husband Randall Woolf’s intense, bristling, bluesily magisterial suite Adrenaline Revival was the highlight of Infusion. Here, he’s represented by Sutra Sutra, a long work punctuated by many spoken word passages which reach to string theory as an explanation for both life and matter: as expressed here, vibration is everything (which for a musician it pretty much is). But in less than a couple of minutes, the genuine plaintiveness of the melody is subsumed by all the psychedelic effects and a whispery crash course in subatomic physics. It would be a treat to hear just the piano all the way through. Supove has been busy this year – her performance at the new music series at Brooklyn’s First Presbyterian Church was a 2010 highlight – and her Music with a View series coming next spring at the Flea Theatre is always chock-full of surprises.

Ana Milosavljevic Plays a Compelling, Intense Program at Lincoln Center

Last night at Lincoln Center, Serbian-American violinist Ana Milosavljevic treated what looked like a sold-out room to a performance that was as intense as it was subtle. Playing both solo and duet pieces, she showed off a meticulously expert command of the instrument’s intricacies, which made the drama of her occasional cadenzas or rapidfire solo flights all the more effective. She’d chosen a terrific program of recent works by composers from home or close to it, opening with Katarina Miljkovic’s 2008 piece White City, a portrait of a rather horizontal Belgrade. Playing along to a soundtrack of found sounds from the streets there along with loops of motifs she’d just played, she made it an early morning tableau. A playful, kaleidoscopic video played behind her: facades of buildings and public spaces were warped into a wraparound shape to appear as faces, one amusingly crossing its eyes again and again (was that city hall, maybe?). Milosavljevic’s astringent overtones mingled deftly with the atmospherics as the still, ambient tone poem unwound, a display of subtle dynamics and timbre shifts punctuated by terse phrases that moved hypnotically and dubwise through the sonic frame.

Like the first piece, it became hard to tell what was live or looped on the next one, Aleksandra Vrebalov’s The Spell II, and maybe that was the point. Based on an Eastern Serbian melody made famous by the female vocal group Moba, it was music to get lost in, playful swoops and acerbic staccato phrases in a sort of call-and-response with the playback of motifs that had appeared earlier, a seemingly endless series of minimalist permutations that managed to be both incisive and hypnotic. The showstopper was Milosavljevic’s own song without words, the title track to her new Innova cd Reflections, a duet with pianist Kathleen Supové. Milosavljevic explained beforehand that it’s an evocation of “sadness and hope all at once.” Together, the violinist and pianist gave its stunningly memorable, brooding Satie-esque changes an understatedly raw lyricism, depicting an incessant cycle of pain and disappointment while trying not to lose sight of something slightly brighter. It was absolutely devastating, finally rising to an approximation of a crescendo the third time through the verse but ending enigmatically. If there’s any justice in the world, someday it will be as well known as the Chopin preludes, whose intensity and emotional wallop it matches.

Milosavljevic returned to electroacoustic mode with the program’s final work, Svjetlana Bukvich-Nichols’ Before and After the Tekke, a slightly more vigorous piece that once again paired fluidly airy, steely motifs against a backing track including pulsing bass, breathing, running water and eventually a compellingly anthemic crescendo played by a small ensemble or approximation thereof. Watching Milosavljevic pair off against all of this was interesting; watching her alongside all of this live would have been vastly more so. Although it can be a disaster onstage, running water can also be great fun to work with!

The Dither Quartet Mess with Your Mind

File this under psychedelia. If you’re a fan of the dirtier, more ominous textures an electric guitar can create, an entire ocean of them, the Dither guitar quartet’s new album is for you. This is one of those albums that sounds like it was an awful lot of fun to make, in places moreso than it is to listen to. Incorporating elements of noise-rock, dreampop, guitar jazz, classical and the avant-garde, Dither’s dense, hypnotic, overtone-laden instrumentals are imaginative, clever, sometimes subtly funny, other times flat-out assaultive. The influence of Elliott Sharp (who wrote the album liner notes) is everywhere, as is that of Steve Reich. But this isn’t mere layers of drones: with five different composers (including Dither’s own Joshua Lopes) represented, there’s a wide diversity among the tracks here. From the first few seconds, it’s clear that trying to figure out which of the group’s members – Lopes, Taylor Levine, David Linaburg and James Moore – is playing what is a lost cause, but there’s a consistent dedication to thinking out of the box and just simply having fun.

The opening track, Lainie Fefferman’s Tongue of Torns, is a pretty standard Steve Reich-ish “let’s all play the same A chord for an hour and a half” except that this one has a surprise, a shock to the system about three quarters of the way through. And they do it again, and again. Pantagruel, written by Lopes, is the most overtly jazz-oriented work here, serpentine ascending progresssions intertwined through off-key, tone-warping patches that eventually crash, burn and then fade out a la A Day in the Life. Lisa R. Coons’ suite Cross-Sections is a showcase for the group’s exuberant command of every guitar texture ever invented, weaving hypnotically through skronk, atmospherics, muted plucking, a long siren passage, raptly still atmospherics and good old-fashioned noise. The showstopper here (they played this at Bang on a Can last year) is Eric KM Clark’s ExPAT, written for “as many guitarists as possible.” It’s a hearing-deprivation piece, each guitarist sonically isolated from the rest of the group, wearing headphones blasting white noise so as to throw their timing off. Yet the group is not so easily distracted! Ominous and intense, it’s a pulsing, echoing choir of hell’s bells, very evocative of Louis Andriessen at his most insistently abrasive. And yet, its shifts are extremely subtle, drifting apart but then coming together before another slight divergence.

Dither plays the cd release show on June 12 at the Invisible Dog Art Center, 51 Bergen St. in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn on a ridiculously inviting bill, a mini-Bang on a Can marathon of sorts with Redhooker, Kathleen Supové and Nick Didkovsky, Elliott Sharp, Matthew Welch, the Deprivation Orchestra of NY, Loud Objects, Mantra Percussion and Florent Ghys, which for a $6 cover turns out to be less than a dollar a band.