Eric Lyon: Giga Concerto
New Focus Recordings

String Noise: A Lunch Between Order and Chaos
Chaikin Records

In an inner sleeve note for Giga Concerto, Greg Saunier describes Eric Lyon's music as “fun and exciting” to play, think, and talk about. It's also, however, great fun to listen to, a quality that's generally undervalued in a genre where seriousness reigns. A number of very smart decisions help make the recording so pleasurable. For starters, its eleven exuberant movements weigh in at a compact forty minutes, which makes for an intense, breezy, and bloat-free ride; even better, Lyon interspersed the concerto's six formal movements with re-imaginings of Brahms' op. 105 songs; accenting the contrast between the two components, the former pairs String Noise (violinists Pauline Kim Harris and Conrad Harris) with International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), whereas the latter couples the duo with Deerhoof drummer Saunier. The concerto's an irreverent animal too, as Lyon applies an audacious mashup approach to its construction such that canonic forms and classical tropes merge with brash experimentalism and quotes from songs by Sun Ra (“Nuclear War”), Elton John (“Rocket Man”), Deerhoof (“Giga Dance”) and others. The dizzying result grabs the attention instantly and holds it for the duration.

Lyon's not your typical classical composer, as indicated not only by the material on the release but the brief bio accompanying it that describes his music as drawing on “chaos, digital intervention, post-hierarchies, and the inspiration of performer-based creativity.” He's well-matched by Saunier and String Noise, the latter sometimes pitched as an avant-punk violin duo. If the concerto's six movements are a little less frenetic than the trio treatments, they're no less engrossing when String Noise mixes it up with sixteen ICE members (including conductor Nicholas Demaison). Playing alongside the larger ensemble, String Noise executes its parts with the same high-wire bravado it brings to the Brahms renditions. The latter are hardly punk treatments, yet they do exhibit the manic energy of the form, especially when Saunier's playing amplifies the anarchistic spirit in play. It's refreshing hearing the composer's melodies fractured through the trio's irreverent prism.

In its opening movement, Giga Concerto marches determinedly into position before pivoting to a robust neo-baroque passage featuring the soloists. In truth, we're not all that far removed at this juncture from traditional classical, but things switch up thereafter as the music grows destabilized by Lyon's interventions. String swoops and eruptive gestures signal the transition into disruptive territory, which the first Brahms treatment (“Wie Melodien Zieht Es Mir”) is only too happy to take up. As wild as String Noise can be on its own, wildness increases exponentially when Saunier's barrelhouse rambunction is folded into the mix. Sour notes and elegant figures collide in the concerto's second movement, with string glissandos draping roller-coaster runs across a pumping backdrop of French horns and woodwinds.

The general template established, Lyon's material advances through the recording's eight subsequent parts according to plan, alternating as it does between concerto movements and trio renderings. A madcap tone infuses some parts, though quasi-serious passages appear too. Still, as light-hearted as Giga Concerto is, it's substantially more than a ribald mix of sarcastic quotes and other tomfoolery. Consider the fourth movement, for example, where moments of stark beauty crystallize at its middle in the form of a lyrical chorale of minimalistic arpeggios and string figures—even if the episode is accompanied on each side by rapid jump-cutting. And anyone seeking an example of String Noise's violin prowess needs look no further than the fifth movement's rustic fiddling and deft intertwining of neo-Baroque patterns. Capping the work, the fragmented, collage-styled sixth revisits the martial material in the first, with this time String Noise adding scintillating runs and Lyon's material splintering into shards. A more dizzying forty-minute work would be hard to find, and one imagines a live performance would leave performers and audience alike exhausted at its close.

Issued concurrently with Giga Concerto is String Noise's own A Lunch Between Order and Chaos, a cassette-and-digital release that sees the duo collaborating with Saunier again, though this time he's mixer, producer, and composer, not player. Recorded “in various closets” in New York City in 2016-17, the release represents String Noise at its purest, the six pieces performed by the violinists alone. According to Saunier, the decision to record in an enclosed acoustical environment was done to accentuate the intimacy of the married couple's performances and document the technical challenges of playing in unison and in shared time, tone, and feeling. To realize this end, pieces heavily rooted in minimalist structures by Saunier, Caleb Burhans, David Lang, Tyondai Braxton, Paul Reller, and the grandmaster himself, Philip Glass, were recorded.

Initiating the set is Burhans' Escape New York, the violinist, Alarm Will Sound member, and solo recording artist effectively setting the scene with a piece that could be taken for a Glass homage. As their string patterns swirl rapidly for four-and-a-half minutes, Pauline and Conrad demonstrate a strikingly close alliance, though that's hardly the only time the impression forms during the fifty-four-minute set. Whereas Braxton's aptly titled Unison presents the duo executing intricate syncopations so closely the result resembles the playing of a single violinist, Lang downplays joint statements in Warmth for staggered criss-crossing, the duo's jagged jabs and scrapes coming across like judo moves. While emphasizing high-pitched harmonics and flirtations with dissonance, Reller's Piss Rows also moves the instrument's creaking and sawing sides to the fore.

Saunier's Superintendent for the Destruction of the Gods alternates between bowed and plucked passages, and though a technique such as hocketing could have been deployed in the piece, he, like the other composers, hews to the unison concept central to the release. The recording's zenith is reached with Glass's Two Pages, a rigorous and uncompromising work from 1968 that subjects an ascending five-note figure to elongation and contraction for almost eighteen minutes. In this and the other performances, there's an unsanitized rawness to String Noise's playing that suggests its natural place is more on a club than conservatory stage.

April 2021