Barrett McCormack Lim Musique pour ensemble Ensemble Elision - HCR21CD - Contemporain

world-line presents the forces of ELISION on Huddersfield Contemporary Records for the fourth tme, once again pushing the boundaries of instruments in search of visceral, expressive musical experiences. The three works present very different aesthetc approaches, crafing dynamic and innovatve sound worlds from the ensemble’s instrumental resources. Expanding out from the explosive grinding of lap steel and electronics to an intricate interplay between lap steel, trumpet, flugelhorn, percussion, and electronics, Richard Barret’s world-line recombines its overlapping movements and sectons, contnually recontextualising the lap steel guitar against the wider ensemble. The results are riotous and unpredictable, sometmes producing delicate and ethereal tones, other tmes forming dense and jagged musical interactons, the performers discharging fragmented motfs that ricochet off of one another. Timothy McCormack’s subsidence utlises two performers on a single electric lap steel guitar. Capturing the feeling of ongoing collapse, the guitar’s strings are gradually loosened, constantly lowering the pitch untl the instrument begins to groan in protest. Gradually, noise occupies the space opened by the mechanical failings of the instrument, transforming the clean, crisp sound of the lap steel into a distorted tangle of sound before being subsumed by silence and the distant echoes of the now fallen strings. Finally, Liza Lim’s trumpet solo Roda – The Living Circle, performed here by its dedicatee Tristram Williams, references the energetc space within which the Afro-Brazilian martal arts practce known as capoeira is enacted. The capoeiristas spin and wheel in stylized combat: lyrical, celebratory, transcendent and joyous.