Scott Worthington & Renato D'Agostin: Orbit
IIKKI

Orbit's one of those audio-visual projects where multiple modes of reception are possible: in this instance, one can view Italian photographer Renato D'Agostin's black-and-white images while listening to double bassist Scott Worthington's music, or experience each separately if one's so inclined. Issued by the French company IIKKI (founded by Eilean Records' Mathias Van Eecloo), the project comprises two parts: a hand-numbered, hand-stamped book displaying fifty-nine D'Agostin photos (in a limited edition of 700 copies); and a hand-numbered, hand-sealed, and handcrafted vinyl disc featuring three Worthington pieces (in a limited edition of 300 copies). As the timeframe for the project's production was short, Worthington chose not to compose an entirely new set of material in response to the photographs but to instead select and record pieces he'd already written that seemed a good match for the photos. Though the two artists never directly interacted, the visual and audio content function well together (a promotional Vimeo video is available that shows pages from the book).

It's the audio portion with which we're most concerned here. Worthington's a familiar name in these parts, with the Los Angeles-based composer having been the subject of a textura profile and the two albums he issued on Populist Records also reviewed in these pages. His sophomore release, Prism, which presented music for solo bass with electronics and bass ensemble, was chosen by Alex Ross as one of The New Yorker's top ten classical albums of 2015, and Worthington currently holds the position of principal bass of the Redlands Symphony and teaches bass at the University of Redlands.

Consistent with the style of the material on those earlier releases, the three settings on Orbit are minimal; not minimal in some Glass- or Reich-related sense, but minimal in the truest sense of the word. In each case, the music has been pared to its essence, with one or two instruments used to give voice to it. Such extreme reduction doesn't, however, make the material less interesting; if anything, it bolsters its appeal: when music is presented with all possible adornment stripped away, it takes on a timeless character in assuming a more elemental guise. Were one to remove the electronic washes and drones Worthington positions alongside Rachel Beetz's single-note flute tones in “A Time That Is Also A Place,” for example, the woodwind sounds are ones that could just as easily have been played thousands of years ago as today. That eleven-minute meditation is followed by “Interlude,” an ambient-drone electronics setting that unspools placidly for four minutes, and “A Flame That Could Go Out,” a twenty-minute opus scored for two five-string electric basses.

Of the three pieces (their titles, incidentally, also appear in the book to group the photographs into three section), it's the latter that distills Worthington's aesthetic into a single setting. Notes appear unhurriedly in material where the slow tempo induces a concomitant and not unwelcome arrestation in the listener; as the minutes advance, time begins to feel suspended altogether, especially when the principle of reduction is pushed to its extreme. As effective as the music is as a standalone, the optimal impression one can acquire of the project naturally comes from experiencing the images and sounds together.

April 2018