Rachel Beetz: Script - Rescript
Populist Records

Upholding Populist Records' support of challenging contemporary music projects, Script - Rescript features collaborations presented in alternating sets, the first involving flutist Rachel Beetz and visual artist Nichole Speciale and the second Beetz performing new works by Nicholas Deyoe, Edward Hamel, Brian Griffeath-Loeb, Kurt Isaacson, and Yiheng Yvonne Wu. The pieces aren't, as anyone familiar with the LA-based label's previous releases would expect, conventional, melodically based reveries but instead adventurous sound explorations. Accentuating both the highly personalized character of the project and Beetz's interest in graphic scores, each CD in the limited-edition series is housed within a sleek fold-out package that includes two panels hand-stitched by Speciale and Beetz.

Six Script - Rescript variations alternate between the five composer-based works, with Speciale and Beetz collaborating in the truest sense. In that six-part title work, a dialogue of sorts between sound and image is enacted, Speciale generating marks that echo musical lines and Beetz transmuting drawn gestures into sound. The pieces featuring her performing the composers' pieces reflect a similar level of connectivity, as many of them evolved over multiple performances and involving exchanges between composer and performer.

That the recording won't be a conventional set of solo flute pieces is evident the moment a low-flying roar introduces the first Script - Rescript, its mass not quite dominant enough to muffle the flute glissandos blossoming within. Whereas the second shifts the focus to pairs of flute tones whose pitches shift between alignment and separation, the third finds wavering flute tones engulfed by an industrial storm. The fourth and fifth opt for sustained drones whose dissonant edges increase their alien quality; strangest of all, the sixth unfolds in a series of organ-like shrieks.

Ranging between eight to fourteen minutes in duration, all of the five composers' works afford Beetz ample room to explore. An entire menagerie of sound emerges within Deyoe's NCTRN3, from breath-laden trills and high-pitched fragments to guttural, animal noises and whirring, bird-like calls. Executed at a controlled pace, the piece documents explorative practice born in the moment, with Beetz using her technical ability and extended techniques to render ideas into physical form. Like Deyoe's, Griffeath-Loeb's Echoes of Cassandra keeps listeners on their toes. Here compact phrases flutter and leap, the movements suggestive of salamanders, birds, and other creatures rapidly moving about within their natural habitat. Adding to the unpredictability, some phrases are pitched at a whisper, others piercingly loud.

Consistent with its title, the flute parts in Hamel's Pull the Name from my Tongue create the impression of something stored in memory but resistant to retrieval, with bass flute patterns suggesting the insistent struggle to remember and the flutter of high-pitched accents intimating the refusal of the, in this case, name to materialize. Wu's Relay/Replay fluctuates between upper register flute tones and electronics and lower-pitched figures, their at times overlapping expressions coalescing into a call-and-response relationship. As the range of expressions expands, the flute expressions seem to take on a voice-like quality, with the phrases variously suggesting keening, wailing, and even crying.

In the album's sole guest appearance, percussionist Dustin Donahue adds to the sound world of Isaacson's invasive species/version a. Episodes of breathy bass tones alternate with granular clouds of hiss, until the repetition of bell accents and sustained flute pitches instates a ritualistic feel; the emergence of a snare drum announces an abrupt shift in character that's further amplified by breathy, hollowed-out tones perhaps intended to suggest the invasive species in question.

Script - Rescript is anything but a collection of pastoral solo flute reveries, but that doesn't make it any the less fascinating a proposition. While full attention is required to fully appreciate what Beetz and Speciale are doing here, it is rewarded. Uncompromising and unconventional, the release illustrates how unlimited the flute's range of possibilities is when intrepid creative sensibilities come together.

June 2020