Lysis is the name of Canadian composer Amy Brandon‘s latest album, featuring eight works for various chamber, ensemble and electroacoustic groupings. The word ‘lysis’ is a word with several meanings, mostly biological, primarily referring to the breakdown of cells. There’s something very apt in that choice of word for Brandon’s music, as it embodies both subtlety (these processes happen on very small scales, invisibly, soundlessly) and transformation between states, with a potential connotation of violence due to the destructiveness of this mechanism. These are all qualities that permeate Brandon’s music, with extreme contrasts being one of the key features running throughout Lysis.
Not in the opening piece, microchimerisms, however. This serves as a 67-second curtain raiser, a hint of what’s to follow, and despite its brevity it’s extraordinary. You’d be hard-pushed to realise it’s a work for solo flute (superbly performed by Sara Constant), being as it is filled with wild, animalistic behaviour, all whispers, growls, chittering and other mouth and teeth sounds, just occasionally garnished with more obviously flute-like whooshes.
This miniature demonstrates the same no-holds barred approach heard everywhere else. Indeed, when the next piece, threads, starts, it’s a fluid continuation from the attitude of the flute. A work for string trio, threads is nine minutes of all-or-nothing intensity, one minute nebulous, the next unleashing explosive tremolandi. Around three minutes in, a wiry melody makes an appearance. It’s a sign of things to come, the music eventually moving beyond its initially polarised position, via tight clusters and an absolute mess of more tremolos into clear harmonic movement. Despite the foreshadowing, the extent of the contrast is so great that it’s hard to reconcile with what went before. We’ve found ourselves in an unexpected oasis of clarity, one that ultimately fades and dies, culminating in a final burst of the earlier wildness.
An even greater contrast of elements is heard in ensemble piece Affine, where the material is preoccupied with quick, somewhat forceful repeating notes. Pitted against this are loud, harsh swells, so overwhelming that, after their first appearance, all pitch is erased, and while the repetitions continue they’re subdued and nocturnalised. Being plunged into gloom only makes them more mesmerising, a demonstration of tenacity that’s tested again toward the end in the second large swell, which this time wipes everything out. The behavioural clarity in this piece is hugely effective.
Sometimes the element of contrast becomes structural to the point of rendering the music a diptych. That’s certainly the case in Caduceus, for two cellos and electronics. At first the cellos growl, snarl and snap, either at each other or at the world in general. After a couple of minutes they abruptly switch to a high quasi-unison duet, one now following the other at a slight delay. Everything has been transformed into lyricism and while it’s compelling in its own right it’s even more so coming in the wake of that gruff preceding section, with the electronics crumpling at the close, leaving the cellos still flying high.
Tsiyr, another ensemble work, also functions as a diptych, with the players initially focusing on regular, loud, detuned piano chords, while the strings skitter and develop into big tremolandi (echoes of threads). Yet, as with Caduceus, around the mid-point everything turns and changes: now the music is faint, suspended, a sporadic piano note not so much leading the way as emphasising how much things have stopped moving. They actually haven’t, though: as if being gently pulled by an unseen force, the hovering notes slowly rise and eventually crescendo. The ending is delicious, Brandon mischeivously bringing back those fierce tremolandi for a mad, final flourish (another echo of threads).
The title work is another diptych, and while it comes from a different point of inspiration (concerned, as ‘lysis’ implies, with breaking down aspects of sound), it sounds as if it’s built from similar elements to Tsiyr. A faint noise texture with emergent high pitches swells into another of Brandon’s frenzied tremolos. This process repeats until the work’s literal dead centre point, where this evaporates, replaced with sustained notes, initially in octave unison but quickly moving out of alignment, their slithering periodically punctuated by more volatile tremolando outbreaks snapping through.
One of my favourite works on the album is Intermountainous, for 10-string guitar and electronics, because it ventures a little further from the tropes and attitudes explored elsewhere as well as, despite the long distant implications of its title, introducing a palpable tone of intimacy. It’s a ruminative piece, slow and reflective, the guitar meandering through microtonal phrases, while the electronics, having emerged as a pitch-noise hybrid, become a diffuse form of accompaniment. It’s like hearing an attempt to duet with an alien, or (perhaps better) an artificial intelligence, familiar and bizarre working together in a genuinely captivating two-part invention that’s as strange as it is touchingly beautiful. Brandon increases the tension a little after halfway through, both parts abruptly becoming more forceful, the electronics especially – more expansive, as if they’re pushing harder – and during this episode the two, while not becoming disconnected as such, nonetheless seem more in parallel. But this subsides, the guitar emerges alone, closing with a quasi-recap of the opening, accompanied once again by pitch-noise.
At 12½ minutes, cello concerto Simulacra is the longest piece on the album, and in some ways it’s the most ambitious, also using the largest forces (performed by Symphony Nova Scotia with soloist Jeffrey Zeigler). To call it a synthesis of everything else heard on the album would be simplistic, but the enormous intensity demonstrated in those other works, as well as their propensity to veer between extremes, are present in abundance here. Yet there’s more besides; apropos, the opening episode, where we plunge, seemingly in medias res, into a wild tangle of elements, ends up in a roiling tutti caught in a rhythmic pattern where both the whereabouts of the cello and its role in this punchy tutti (in control? at its mercy?) is impossible to discern. Brandon breaks the pattern and tilts the music instead into lyricism; it’s one of many places throughout this album that leave us, rather breathlessly, wondering how we got here. At the instigation of the cello the piece returns to energetic, squally surging before everything suddenly collapses. What follows is lovely, low and mysterious, with the soloist continuing to sing overhead. Was this where we were always headed? Improbably the orchestra gets involved, turning Simulacra‘s peroration into a kind of strained, unstable but impressively bold melody emerging against the odds.
i’ve not said anything about Brandon’s extra-musical concerns, or her interest in alternative tunings, which feature in several of the pieces. That’s not because those aspects aren’t interesting – quite the contrary – but simply because, in my case, it’s information i took on board later, after listening (as usual), and it’s certainly not necessary when first engaging with Lysis. Taken on its own terms, this is cogent, arresting, riveting music, highly original and individual, demonstrating a consistency of approach while allowing for every piece to have its own unique identity and dialect of Brandon’s fascinating musical language.
Released last week by New Focus Recordings, Lysis is available digitally from Brandon’s Bandcamp site; a limited number of CDs are available by contacting her directly.
