Andrew McIntosh: We See the Flying Bird/Five Songs (feat. Yarn/Wire and Estelí Gomez)
Populist Records

Of course you could purchase the download version of Andrew McIntosh's release, but why would you when a beautiful vinyl edition's available (in 200 copies). Watching the blue-and-white, marble-patterned ten-inch revolve as the music plays certainly makes the experience more engrossing and a whole lot more fun, too. Which is not to suggest that the music itself is frivolous: the Los Angeles-based composer and violinist is a serious artist not only intent on promoting his own music but others, too. For a number of years now, he's been doing that through the auspices of Populist Records, the small, independent label McIntosh co-founded that's done much to shine a light on many a new-music practitioner.

This concise, twenty-minute presentation of his artistry, the second Populist release, in fact, to feature his music exclusively, backs a ten-minute piece performed by percussionists Ian Antonio and Russell Greenberg, members of the New York-based piano/percussion quartet Yarn/Wire, with a song cycle that adds soprano Estelí Gomez (Roomful of Teeth) and Yarn/Wire bandmate Laura Barger on Fender Rhodes and percussion to the mix. The release marks the second time McIntosh has collaborated with Yarn/Wire, the outfit first appearing on his earlier full-length, Hyenas in the Temples of Pleasure.

Written for Antonio and Greenberg, We See the Flying Bird (2015-16) advances unhurriedly, the percussionists patiently building a bright, reverberant field of metal percussion sonorities into a panoramic design. The metronomic ting of triangle and the glassy shimmer of bowed vibraphone appear alongside xylophone and tuned aluminum pipes, all elements working in tandem to establish a calming, mutating array of percussive textures. The timbres are often icy, yet the cumulative result exudes warmth and tranquility.

Though each of the wordless vocalises in Five Songs (written for Gomez in 2015) hovers around the two-minute mark, the uninterrupted presentation gives it the character of a single-movement work. The presence of Antonio and Greenberg creates a through-line from the first to the second side, but it's Gomez's pure, crystalline voice you'll likely remember most. The softly murmuring vibes accompanying her disembodied musing also do much to distinguish the presentation, as do timpani accents and bowed mallet textures.

March 2019