Invisible Anatomy: Dissections
New Amsterdam Records
yMusic, NOW Ensemble, ICE, Eighth Blackbird, Alarm Will Sound—with so many contemporary music ensembles crowding the field, what can a new addition do to stand out? If you're Invisible Anatomy, you root your very musical concept in the human body and align musical production to dramatic visual presentation. In its inaugural show Body Parts, for example, the New York-based outfit apparently “dismembered, manipulated, and reanimated bodies in performance”—hardly the kind of thing one'll witness at any of those other group's performances. Further to that, Invisible Anatomy's sound is a tad harder-edged than its new music brethren, its sound leaning slightly more in the direction of experimental rock than neo-classical, and vocals are central to the group identity also.
On its debut outing, Invisible Anatomists Ian Gottlieb (cello), Paul Kerekes (keyboards), Brendon Randall-Myers (guitars), Daniel Schlosberg (keyboards), Benjamin Wallace (percussion), and Fay Wang (vocals) are augmented by William Gardiner, who contributed additional arrangements and electronics to three of the six works. If Dissections can be reduced to a singular theme, it has to do with the peeling away of human surfaces and the intimacy and danger that comes from making oneself vulnerable, something with which the group members contended in exposing themselves to one another during the album production process.
Very much a group endeavour, Dissections features compositions from all five members, and the presentation is as democratic, with each element assuming a prominent place within the overall fabric. Wang's singing naturally acts as a focal point, but piano, guitar, cello, and percussion are as critical to the presentation. The bite of Randall-Myers' playing lends Invisible Anatomy a bit of a Bang On A Can All-Stars vibe (even if Wang's vocalizing puts distance between them), and extra-musical sounds sometimes find their way into the material, such as the shutter-click of a camera in “Facial Polygraph XVIA” and the beep of a hospital monitor during “Threading Light.”
As per its title, Wang's “Facial Polygraph XVIA” takes as its focal point facial expressions and the examination thereof, specifically the subtle ways by which they signal underlying emotions. The juxtaposition of Wang's soft voice, which, in this instance isn't unlike Broadcast's Trish Keenan's, and the oft-angular expressions of Gottlieb's cello and Randall-Myers' raw textures makes for a disquieting presentation that'll keep you guessing. The latter's “Permission” explores the tension between intimacy and pain in unsettling manner, with Wang fervently voicing lines such as “Can you hold me close and comfort me as I break all your fingers?” Slightly less acerbic is Gottlieb's two-part “Threading Light,” which builds its ponderous meditation from semi-dissonant chords and textural flourishes. For his two-part “A Demonstration,” Schlosberg drew for inspiration from Leonardo da Vinci's studies of human cadavers, with the Invisible Anatomy members performing parallel kinds of operations by using screwdrivers and knives to wrest sounds from the insides of a grand piano.
In keeping with the general tone of the album concept, the band attacks the material surgically, pulling the songs' strands apart and then reconstructing them into new forms. The pieces are, in short, intricate constructions where the different instrumental elements pursue separate pathways whilst also cohering intelligibly into collective designs. Referencing da Vinci would perhaps carry with it a whiff of pretension in another group's hands, but in Invisible Anatomy's case the gesture's as natural as it is appropriate.June 2018