Aperture Duo: Aperture Duo
Populist Records

In liner notes written for Aperture Duo's self-titled album, Ashon Crawley pinpoints the fundamental element in play on the release and in the duo's shared practice: relation. That's clearly present in the interplay between wild Up members violinist Adrianne Pope and violist Linnea Powell but also in the call-and-response of the innovative material they perform, in the drawing together and pulling apart of their expressions, and in their complex and ever-evolving dialogue. Such tensions permeate their renderings of commissioned pieces by Los Angeles composers Carolyn Chen, Noah Meites, Andrew Tholl, Derek Twyoniuk, and the Berlin-based Clara Iannotta. Aperture Duo has actively expanded the violin-and-viola chamber repertoire with over fifteen explorative works, including the five performed here, since the Los Angeles-based project's 2015 founding.

Though he was born and raised in Chicago, Meites references the topics of LA drought and environmental crisis in general in his 2016 composition Water and Power. Here already we witness the push and pull between the musicians in the keening cross-patterning that initiates the piece. An elegiac feel infuses the material early on, after which episodes of violent scrapes and fiddling gestures appear in turn. Insistent bowed and plucked patterns lend the playing a surging flow reminiscent of water rapids, and hoedown and vocal episodes—the two intoning “overflowing”—also emerge in an adventurous piece marked by mercurial change.

Iannotta, an Italian composer based in Berlin, is represented by Limun, which explores friction using scrapes, glides, and slides and by pushing tension to the extreme. A meditative episode of relative calm offers a welcome respite and counterpoint to such gestures when the duo resolves the work with a shimmering, upper-register dialogue. The sole multi-part work on the release, Bluets by Twyoniuk presents five pithy statements featuring a diverse range of moods and treatments. The opening “#75” arrests immediately with the expressiveness of its hymnal plea, as do “#207” and “#238-240” for their lyrical qualities and echoes of folk and minimalism. Animated by comparison is “#136-139,” which races forth with unison patterns delivered furiously by the duo.

The recording ends with two long-form pieces, both memorable. Like Pope and Powell a member of wildUP, violinist Tholl is presented by hold still while the world turns, a fourteen-minute exploration of movement and stasis. To answer the paradoxical question of how a time-grounded form such as music might achieve a state of stillness, Tholl clusters long tones around a central, repeating trio of pitches until the strings blossom rapturously into a cycling pattern—movement and stasis combined—before decompressing for a peaceful resolution. At sixteen minutes the recording's longest piece, Chen's My Loves Are in America catches the ear instantly with bluesy glissando figures whose blend-and-glide gradually morphs into a stream of siren-like voicings, swoops and dive-bombings, and outpourings both agitated and plaintive, the whole registering as a protracted lament for a country wrestling with issues of race, immigration, and crippling political and ideological divisions.

March 2022