Amanda Gookin: Forward Music Project 2.0
Bright Shiny Things

As its title indicates, Forward Music Project 2.0 picks up where Amanda Gookin's first solo album left off. In fact, so thematically tied are the two volumes, they could conceivably have been issued as a double-CD release. As before, the intrepid cellist demonstrates a fearlessness in her programming choices and execution, and again the release celebrates contemporary composers of diverse backgrounds and sensibilities. Like 2020's Forward Music Project 1.0, the new collection promotes feminine self-expression and empowerment through performances that push beyond conventional cello practice, and with the exception of guest contributors to two pieces, it's all Gookin, who supplements her cello playing with vocals and kick drum.

A broad spectrum is encompassed by the performances, from anger and defiance to celebration and beauty. The cello naturally lends itself to such extremes, especially when played by Gookin and when composers such as Niloufar Nourbakhsh, Alex Temple, Paola Prestini, Kamala Sankaram, and Shelley Washington are involved. A case in point is Veiled, for which Iranian composer Nourbakhsh drew on the anger she felt over growing up in a country where women are covered in different ways, from the compulsory wearing of the hijab to the banning of solo female singers from pursuing professional careers. With Chelsea Loew and Solmaz Badri adding multi-layered vocal textures to Gookin's mournful phrasings, Veiled evokes the composer's homeland elegiacally and conveys a desperate longing for change.

As its title suggests, Tactile has to do with, in Temple's words, “the erotics of everyday life,” and intense interpersonal moments of a perhaps sexual kind. The intimacy of the composition is intimated by the whispered text (“The violence of the winter wind by the lake …”) that introduces the piece and carries on once the cello appears. Playfulness emerges in the way the instrument replicates the voice pattern and in the bold flourishes with which Gookin elaborates on the text in the margins. Tactile is a bravura performance for the incredible range of vocal and cello effects that it demands for its realization.

Along similar physical lines, Sankaram's three-part Belly has to do with the relationships people have with their bodies and how that changes as we advance through youth, adulthood, and old age. During the opening “Sanguine,” samples of speaking voices collect into a dense babble as Gookin's cello scrapes beneath the frenzy and emotes plaintively otherwise. After “Choleric” unspools in a hoedown-like roar, “Melancholic” reintroduces a voice element, this time Gookin whispering amidst rapid bowing.

Prestini was inspired to create To Tell A Story after witnessing the way Blasey Ford's testimony at the Kavanaugh hearings were reduced to fiction. With sound artist Sxip Shirey providing a backing track of manipulated voices (from an interview that touched on storytelling, Susan Sontag's is one) that stutter and repeat, Gookin's cello wails and moans in dialogue with the voice elements. The tip-off to Washington's Seething is its title, naturally, but Gookin does more than merely seethe in her rendering. Text isn't physically present, though a poem by the composer included with the release describes the visceral experience of the body readying itself for action. With kick drum providing an evolving rhythmic guide, her cello stops-and-starts, snaps, and snarls for an engrossing eleven minutes in the oft-bluesy treatment.

January 2022