The Wreck Of Former Boundaries

Williams, Tristram; Evans, Peter; Wu, Wei; Elision Ensemble; Rosman, Carl

This album presents major new works commissioned to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the ELISION Ensemble by two composers with longstanding associations with the group. The works foreground the virtuosic, innovative talents of the musicians of ELISION, integrating the ensemble’s expertise in improvisation alongside novel instrumental techniques developed in collaboration with these performers. Liza Lim’s How Forests Think, featuring the Chinese sheng expert Wu Wei as a guest soloist, reflects on the work of anthropologist Eduardo Kohn, who writes about forest ecologies as the ‘living thought’ of human and non-human selves. Its music emerges out of criss-crossing conversations patterned like roots, vines, or fungal networks, its emergent forms made from assemblages of instruments whose qualities are like tendrils looking for places on which to clasp and entangle themselves. Aaron Cassidy’s The wreck of former boundaries is a double trumpet concerto conceived for the unique talents of ELISION’s Tristram Williams and New York-based improviser Peter Evans. Its wild, visceral virtuosity liquidates geometric, architectural, and latticed structures in favour of sinuous, sculptural, and shape-shifting instability. It is a work that sets movement, energy, force, and velocity against states of friction, resistance, viscosity, and elasticity, revelling in the fluid relationships that arise out of the flickering, gurgling, swerving multi-channel electronics that run across the work’s duration.

Price: $27.98