Twenty Ten

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 2011-06-21

Label: 12k

“January 4, 2011” is created with metallophones and xylophones from a local school, is perhaps the most chaotic, and the most natural, we’ve ever heard Kirschner’s music, as two simultaneous layers of subtly microtuned percussive bells roll and skip, sped up, slowed down and playing off of one another. Natural, because there was no computer trickery, only hours of playing and recording edited down to this “short” length. As almost the polar opposite, the second track on Disc One (the only disc with more than one piece), “November 7, 2010”, takes piano, strings and celeste into severely microtonal territory – at first perhaps a difficult listen, but at the end of the 42-minute piece it somehow all makes sense. It’s a dynamic recording whose high-pitched bowed sounds whisper across low piano notes, leaving the listener sometimes holding their breath, afraid to disturb the delicacy.
“September 25, 2010” (47:00) is a composition for strings, woodwinds and horns in which 142 different chords float in a sea of silence with no repetitions and no recurrences. Every chord was composed so that each instrumental combination only happened once throughout the piece, and the sparse approach evokes “October 19, 2006” on Filaments & Voids, where Kirschner spent as much time composing the silences between chords as he did the notes themselves.
The final work on Twenty Ten is the 51-minute “January 18, 2011”. This piece sees Kirschner return to the instrument he is most often associated with: the aging piano. Two pairs of equal-tempered layers are microtuned against each other, with occasionally jarring edits and unexpected cuts and stops breaking the moody atmosphere created by Kirschner’s use of noise and exploited lo-fi recording artifacts.