Scott Miller: Raba
New Focus Recordings

Though Raba was conceived originally as a retrospective of Scott Miller's work in the ambient field, it ultimately blossomed into a project comprising: solo electronic settings; collaborations with Estonian ensemble Ensemble U:, flutist Laura Cocks, and guitarist Daniel Lippel; and a video component, with visual content for all but one of the seven works having been created especially for the release and featured on a a limited edition DVD (not included with the review copy). In his day job, Miller's a Professor of Music at St. Cloud State University, Minnesota, where he teaches composition, electroacoustic music, and theory, and is also President of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS). Aside from electroacoustic, another term for the material on Raba is ecosystemic, a term Miller uses to describe the way activity in the natural world is translated in his works into electronic form, interactive sonic ecosystems the result.

It's a striking recording on multiple levels: rather than being purely electronic in design, much of the album's material incorporates sounds from the environment, which has been a major source of inspiration for the Minneapolis-based composer for two decades; and many of the pieces wed Miller's electronic sounds to acoustic sonorities produced by his guests. The hour-long set is enhanced by sequencing that, in general, sees solo settings created by Miller alone alternating with those featuring others. Indicative of his approach is the opening work, Autumn Etude, in which the composer uses granular synthesis to transform sounds of leaves recorded in his backyard into abstract swishing and rattling noises. Similar to the album's other pieces, environment-derived sounds become less identifiable (if not wholly unidentifiable) after processing's been applied, making for material where tensions between abstraction and representation are constantly in play. There's a steely, industrial quality, for example, to the sweeping tones in Autumn Etude that feels far removed from the leaves in Miller's backyard. Not all the solo pieces are as abstract, however: in Hilltop at Montalvo, unprocessed field recordings of the natural environment are present, such that sounds of crickets and an overhead plane are audible alongside the pulsating oscillators.

Ensemble U: plays on the title piece, with in this case the slowly shifting lines of the group's acoustic instruments—alto flute, clarinet, violin, cello, tam-tam, and piano—merging effectively with an oscillator-generated drone. Despite the presence of the latter element, Raba is the most conventional-sounding of the album's seven pieces, even if its electroacoustic drone character aligns it to the project as a whole. Minimal gestures by the players—a single piano note here, a long-held pitch by the cello there—help brand it a Miller creation, but there are moments when the glacial pace and clarinet sonorities suggest a connection, if a tangential one, to Gavin Bryars' chamber ensemble.

In Admiration, Lippel layers his angular electric expressions on top of an ebbing-and-flowing backing track Miller created by processing the playing of clarinetist Pat O'Keefe and cellist Jacqueline Ultan, who were recorded performing a Baroque Sarabande independently of one another. Lippel's second of three appearances occurs within Meditation, where his classical guitar picking interacts in real time with a modular series of patches triggered by Miller—a markedly more destabilizing soundworld than the one crafted in Admiration, with again contrast evident, in this case between the acoustic textures of the guitar and the buzz of the electronics. The marriage of acoustic and electronic sounds works especially well during The Frost Performs its Secret Ministry, specifically in the way Cocks's shakuhachi-like flute and Lippel's guitar textures are used to evoke a frigid winter setting.

The settings on Raba eschew the hermetic chill that sometimes shadows electroacoustic productions for a multi-dimensional presentation that feels expansive and inviting by comparison; it's certainly not every day one encounters electroacoustic material that includes the whisper of a flute or intimations of the natural world. Anything but bombastic, Miller's chamber-styled pieces are also generally restrained, understatement and nuance being key to the material's effect.

June 2018