TAK ensemble & Taylor Brook: Star Maker Fragments
TAK editions

The realization by TAK ensemble of Taylor Brook's concert-length Star Maker Fragments is so definitive, it would be hard to imagine any other outfit of similar makeup matching it, let alone performing it. The Canadian composer's no outsider to the group, however: he's TAK Ensemble's technical director, and on this recording his electronics appear alongside Marina Kifferstein's violin, Laura Cocks' flute, Madison Greenstone's bass clarinet, Ellery Trafford's percussion, and Charlotte Mundy's voice. Each one's contribution is essential to the work's character.

The six have birthed with this project an experimental chamber album unlike any other. The conjoining of Mundy's recitation of text from Olaf Stapledon's 1937 novel Star Maker with a constantly mutating design of acoustic and electronic sounds makes for a performance that's engrossing and transporting. Eschewing histrionics, her delivery is carefully calibrated and typically restrained—a smart choice that helps focus the listener's attention on the striking narrative content. She naturally assumes a focal point status in being the conduit for the work's meaning, yet sonically the other elements are as important when each instrument is as an integral part of the sound design. Multi-tracking, field recordings, and other treatments work their way into a presentation that plays like a live performance.

In brief, the novel presents a multiple-worlds model of the universe through the perspective of a narrator released from the human body to travel through space and time. Imaginary societies are described in detail, with Brooks incorporating into the text critiques of global authoritarianism. Brook, who acquired graduate degrees at Columbia University and McGill University, has a penchant for writing music with microtonal sonorities and certainly evidence of that can be found in Star Maker Fragments. That said, the work, which follows the seven-part main course with an eleven-minute instrumental postlude, is far too rich to be reduced to a simplistic definition.

Opening with a startling convulsion, the work fills in its painterly sound world with bird and insect noises before instruments seep in. Electronic textures and instrument fragments form a dense backdrop against which Mundy's measured voice intones. With each line, the narrative grows clearer as violin, flute, vibes, cymbals, and bass clarinet punctuate the words and amplify their meaning. As the narrator leaves both the body and earth behind, the adventure truly begins (“With amazement I realized that I must be traveling at a fantastic, quite impossible rate”), the swirl of the instrumental design reinforcing the disorientation of disembodiment. Creatures of other worlds are encountered, their appearance and belief systems holding up contrasting anthropological mirrors to ours. A sense of calm re-establishes itself with the return to earth, the planet now seen by the narrator as an arena of struggle primed for destruction and where all “one should live for seemed folly and mockery and near self-indulgence in the presence of calamity”; yet despite that bleak assessment, the work ends on a tentatively hopeful note: “Strange that in this life, … the human crisis did not lose but gain significance; strange that it seems more not less urgent to play some part in this struggle.”

While the seven sections are temporally marked, the chamber setting plays without breaks as a forty-four-minute whole that unfailingly commands one's attention. While Mundy (also a member of the vocal group Ekmeles) more speaks than sings during the piece, the effect is no less gripping when the text she reads is so compelling. Changes occur in the sound design as the piece develops and as denser passages alternate with quieter ones. Different sound combinations appear too, with individual instruments sometimes moving to the forefront and Brook tailoring the writing to the text. It's not uncommon for a vocal swoop to surface alongside a restlessly shape-shifting mix of acoustic and electronic elements, with such metamorphosis happening fluidly in tandem with the narrative.

March 2021