Gina Biver: 3: The Music of Gina Biver
Ravello Records

Is Gina Biver a contemporary classical composer? Experimental guitarist? Electroacoustic explorer? She's all of that and then some, at least insofar as 3, her debut recording on Ravello Records, might be seen as representative of her world. This stylistically wide-ranging release is also a highly personalized portrait that reflects her eclectic interests and features Biver as a performer. Omnivorous in her artistic appetites, this graduate of Berklee College of Music and George Mason University has collaborated with musicians, filmmakers, choreographers, poets, sculptors, painters, and video artists, and has composed electroacoustic music for chamber ensemble, choirs, dance, multimedia, and film. For two of the album's five pieces, all performed by members of Fuse Ensemble, the Washington DC-based new music collective with which she's been associated for the past decade, Biver drew for inspiration from American poet Colette Inez and visual artist Jackie Tileston, yet it's Carl Jung whose influence looms largest when much of the recording hinges on the nature of identity.

Both Biver and Inez contribute spoken word performances to the first piece, Mirror, which was inspired by the latter's poem “Empress in the Mirror” and also features violinist Greg Hiser and pianist Ina Mirtcheva Blevins. Jung emerges already in this opening setting, specifically in the way conscious and unconscious sides of the empress exemplify his theory of the 'shadow.' Cryptically creeping in tone, the material sets a daring, experimental tone for the release when the voices' ponderous cross-currents (which literally mirror one another during its second half) appear alongside pensive instrumental explorations, and even at this early juncture of the release, we know we're in the presence of an original artistic sensibility.

A literary source also factored into the creation of Girl, Walking, which features five improv-based sections performed by flutist Jennifer Lapple, bassist Ethan Foote, the composer herself on electric guitar, and percussionist Scott Deal playing teacups. Identity is again the theme, though this time the source for Biver's musings was Andrew Solomon's Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity, which has to do with the myriad ways by which a persona develops. Much as parts of it can be formed consciously, some of it's outside our control (e.g., heredity), and it's this unpredictability that Biver weaves into the instrumental fabric as it advances. The chiming phrases of the guitar constitute a through-line for shared commentaries by Lapple and Foote, with the tinkling of Deal's teacups a bright punctuation whenever they appear.

Inspired by Jung's The Red Book, The Cellar Door explores his theory of individuation, which has to do with the process of psychic integration, by juxtaposing the unusual sounds of the waterphone (the unconscious) and the mercurial interactions of Pam Clem's cello and Blevins' piano (the conscious). Now joined by clarinetist Angela Murakami, Blevins and Hiser reappear on No Matter Where, the only one of the five pieces not rooted in psychological inquiry; instead, inspiration comes from a painting by Tileston titled No Matter Where, Not Pictured Here. Having likened the image to a journey, Biver decided to attempt a sonic equivalent and so fashioned the restlessly mutating material to suggest the movements of trains and water, the former audible throughout as quietly insistent clatter.

If there's a misstep on the release, it has to do with the length of We Meet Ourselves, which at ten minutes feels longer than necessary. As missteps go, however, it's a minor one, especially when the piece is otherwise engrossing. In this performance, Deal (to which the piece is dedicated) cues audio samples from small triggers on his marimba bars, and again Jung's invoked when the samples are quotes by the psychologist relating to the unconscious and other matters; in that regard it makes sense that the voice utterances should be pitched at a low volume, given how much they suggest background material attempting to force its way into consciousness.

Given the evidence at hand, Biver would seem to be a rebel of sorts or at the very least provocateur. Her challenges to convention aren't, however, administered abrasively but instead non-confrontationally—which doesn't make them any less forceful. How fitting it is that 3, a recording so predicated on issues of identity, should be the creative brainchild of someone so multifaceted.

August 2018