I hope I will be pardoned if I submit a dissenting view. This is by FAR the best work — faint praise though it be — of its multifarious dubious kinds (instruments with electronics, wannabe "raveyness", wannabe hip-with-it-ness – the sorts of things that conjure images of enormous turds floating in a Platonic Ideal Unflushed Toilet). The irruptions of electronics are effective (no "Repons"-type Supreme Agonies of Pierre Boulez giving birth to a glorified guitar pedal here), the instrumental writing and textures are excellent, and the execution of the concept unexceptionable (I, very differently, found the "plodding beat" section effective – perhaps an accident of varying moods at time of hearing, but enough to suggest the work merits a reconsideration). To be clear, this is work whose epiphenomena — everthing from the title to the portrait of the composer — screams "awful" to me; I very pleasantly found it to be nothing of the kind.
I hope I will be pardoned if I submit a dissenting view. This is by FAR the best work — faint praise though it be — of its multifarious dubious kinds (instruments with electronics, wannabe "raveyness", wannabe hip-with-it-ness – the sorts of things that conjure images of enormous turds floating in a Platonic Ideal Unflushed Toilet). The irruptions of electronics are effective (no "Repons"-type Supreme Agonies of Pierre Boulez giving birth to a glorified guitar pedal here), the instrumental writing and textures are excellent, and the execution of the concept unexceptionable (I, very differently, found the "plodding beat" section effective – perhaps an accident of varying moods at time of hearing, but enough to suggest the work merits a reconsideration).
To be clear, this is work whose epiphenomena — everthing from the title to the portrait of the composer — screams "awful" to me; I very pleasantly found it to be nothing of the kind.
CJS