#modney

Modney found in JI a method that made sense of his instrument; it simply sounded better. But he hasn’t kept the pleasure to himself. The performance units he has assembled for this double album advance in steps dictated by the progression of prime numbers — one, three, five, seven and finally 11 players. His violin, sometimes amplified, is the only instrument to appear in every aggregation. As the ensembles expand and change, so does the music. It is never simple, but neither is it cluttered or unnecessarily busy. Playing alone, the sound of each of Modney’s violin string leaps out, illuminated by the overtones that JI enables and coarsened by liberally applied distortion.

The smaller line-ups are non-standard but exemplify the chamber music aesthetic of exposed interaction between players. At different points Sam Pluta’s electronics and Cory Smythe’s JI-tuned piano disrupt the flow. But as the ensemble’s increase in size and diversity of instrumentation, jazz elements creep in. Ben Lamar Gay’s puckering cornet and Charmaine Lee’s swooping voice adopt jazz-informed, solo voices within the septet, poised atop the multi-directional rhythms of Dan Peck’s tuba and Katie Gentile’s drums. The largest ensemble is also the most inclusive, marshalling hackle-raising strings, gut-rumbling horns, rhythm-opposing clusters, angelic/demonic vocal exchanges and straight-up noise into a sequence of events that seem to be pushing against implacable time-keeping.

There’s a lot of JI music, especially that made by string players, that seems to treat tuning system’s sonorities as ends in themselves, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But Modney has taken another tack. Like Anna Webber, who appears in the largest ensemble, he puts the sounds to work alongside the genre elements to create music that is stylistically unlimited and viscerally affecting.