Sarah Plum: Personal Noise
Blue Griffin Records

Personal Noise is very much emblematic of Sarah Plum's approach to music-making. In her discography and concert performances, the Chicago-based violinist has established herself as a forward-thinking advocate for contemporary composers and their works, and this new sixty-five-minute collection embodies that splendidly in featuring pieces by Mari Takano, Mari Kimura, Kyong Mee Choi, Jeff Herriot, Charles Nichols, Eric Moe, and Eric Lyon. It's a personal statement in a very strong sense, given that five of the seven works were commissioned by and/or written for Plum. While she champions living composers, she's not averse to performing earlier ones, her 2015 release with pianist Timothy Lovelace of Bartok works a prime example.

Plum, a graduate of SUNY Stony Brook and Juilliard who's on faculty at the Music Institute of Chicago and teaches at the Zodiac Music Academy in the South of France, is a familiar presence in Chicago's contemporary music scene (the Ear Taxi Festival, for instance), but she's performed at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof, among other places. In fact, the starting point for Personal Noise happened in Berlin when Plum, scheduled to perform a release concert for Absconditus, her album of music by Sidney Corbett, included Full Moon by Takano, whom Corbett had come to know when they were students of Ligeti in Hamburg. Other pieces, such as those by Kimura and Nichols, grew out of personal connections that often arose serendipitously. After she commissioned him to write a piece for solo violin with electronics, she and Nichols performed Il Prete Rosso dozens of times around the country, with him handling electronics. Adding to the intense personal dimension of the album project, Plum's given, by her own estimation, at least thirty performances of many of the compositions.

The character of the release is instantly established by its opening work, Moe's Obey Your Thirst. Like others on the release, he's a composer with impressive research and academic credentials plus a university tie, in his case to the University of Pittsburgh where he's Professor of Composition and Theory. Many of the composers are award-winning digital and electroacoustic explorers who extend that adventurous practice into the works they create. In Obey Your Thirst, Plum's violin navigates a methodical path through a restlessly active field of rattling percussive thrum, the effect akin, as Moe accurately likens it, to a cartoonish cat-and-mouse game where it's difficult to know who's chasing who. It's an ever-stimulating ride, regardless, when each element shadows the other without pause and the acoustic timbres of the violin contrast so extremely with the churning mass fashioned by Moe.

Choi's Flowering Dandelion is as expressive as its title intimates. Using a part from the adagio in J. S. Bach's Violin Sonata in B minor as a springboard, Choi's piece expands and contacts throughout its eight-minute run, blossoming in one passage and withdrawing into near-silence during another. Shimmering ripples of electronics and percussive textures enwrap the pitch-shifting violin daringly, the result a hallucinatory dreamscape. Speaking of which, Kimura's contribution entrances for its own magical character and romantic aura, with Sarahal distinguished by the inclusion of a second violin part (played by Yvonne Lam) and its ethereal electronic character.

Herriott's score for after time: a resolution, whose electronic component includes both live processing of the violin and playback of pre-recorded material, plays to Plum's strengths in allowing room for unscripted contributions. There's a set musical foundation in place, but the composer worked into the design opportunities for spontaneity and surprise, things Plum takes full advantage of in her thoughtful gestures. If she sounds particularly comfortable here, it might have something to do with the fifty-plus performances she's given since he wrote it for her in 2013. Nichols' Il Prete Rosso is a natural complement to Herriott's in the way it plays back a live-recorded amplified violin part in four parts and spatializes it around the audience. The computer musician accompanying the violinist amplifies the dizzying disorientation even more by applying wah, phaser, and delay effects to the soloist's playing.

A natural bookend to Moe's Obey Your Thirst is the album's closing piece, Takano's Full Moon, for similarly partnering violin with an ever-mutating mass of electronically treated sounds—even if much of the material in the electronic track derives from processing of violin samples. Drawing for inspiration from Bjork's Medúlla and Pina Bausch's ballet Vollmond, Takano has created a wild shape-shifter that advances through gentle waltz and pizzicati passages to countrified swing and frenetic episodes—fascinating though a little too chaotic for my liking.

As arresting as the violin-with-electronics works are, there's something undeniably appealing about Lyon's Personal Noise with Accelerants in featuring acoustic violin only. Plum delivers a commanding performance in a work that articulates a musical cryptogram spelling her first name and was conceived by Lyon as a musical response to Plum's Bartok performances. Though it's pitched as “an articulated noise composition in which the formal structure is generated with white noise,” the piece plays like an elaborate examination of a set of core figures, somewhat reminiscent of a theme-and-variations exercise but one exponentially more abstract and unpredictable by comparison. Plum's performance is riveting, the achievement impressing all the more for being executed solo.

The album's seven stimulating works aren't brutalizing provocations but neither are they gentle etudes. Like Plum's other recordings, Personal Noise presents challenging material that's nevertheless wholly listenable, accessible, and arresting. The album also offers a welcoming portal into what for some might be an intimidating realm of experimental music. One comes away from the release with great admiration for Plum as both intrepid new music champion and a violin virtuoso.

October 2022