Andrew Byrne: White Bone Country
Liner Notes   Cat. No. 80696     Release Date: 2009-01-01

Stephen Gosling, piano; David Shively, percussion

Andrew Byrne's (b 1966) tripartite CD has a mobile-like character, working entirely with a fabric of piano and metal percussion in changing manners and images, all of them remote from the duo relationship of conventional chamber music.

The central work, Tracks, is also the earliest one (composed 1998, revised 2006), and presents the solo piano in its most 'normal' sound and interaction with the player-a kind of journey, as the title suggests, within a dense and accumulating polyrhythmic expression. The two surrounding groups of pieces extend from this in two different directions-the opening White Bone Country (2006) towards reduced sound-reveries in processed piano and small metal percussion, the succeeding Mirages (2007) into pure sonic fantasies made from sampled sounds of prepared piano.

Byrne relates these pieces to "the other American experimental tradition of Cowell, Harrison, Peter Garland, John Luther Adams, rather than the New York minimalists/post-minimalists-to their concerns with polyrhythms in a reduced meditative sound world, suggestions of strange folk musics, depiction of landscape."

Fundamental to the language of all Byrne's pieces are pulsations, from which varied melodic motives and overlaid rhythmic meters can be drawn. In this respect his approach differs from other landscape-orientated music based on drones and evolving fields of sound, along with their opposite, flurries of irregular disjunct rhythms.

Steven Gosling

Andrew Byrne: White Bone Country

MP3/320 $15.00
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WAV $15.00
CD $24.00

Track Listing

White Bone Country Part I: Desert Terrain - for processed piano and percussion
Andrew Byrne
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White Bone Country Part I: Desert Terrain - for solo piano
Andrew Byrne
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White Bone Country Part I: Desert Terrain - for solo crotales
Andrew Byrne
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White Bone Country Part II: Desert Life - for piano and gongs
Andrew Byrne
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White Bone Country Part II: Desert Life - for piano and bells
Andrew Byrne
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White Bone Country Part II: Desert Life - for piano and knocking
Andrew Byrne
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White Bone Country Part III: Desert Weather - for solo piano
Andrew Byrne
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White Bone Country Part III: Desert Weather - for piano inside and out
Andrew Byrne
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White Bone Country Part III: Desert Weather - for piano and crotales and glockenspiel
Andrew Byrne
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Tracks
Andrew Byrne
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Fata Morgana: Mirages on the Horizon - First Mirage
Andrew Byrne
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Fata Morgana: Mirages on the Horizon - Second Mirage
Andrew Byrne
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Fata Morgana: Mirages on the Horizon - Third Mirage
Andrew Byrne
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Fata Morgana: Mirages on the Horizon - Fourth Mirage
Andrew Byrne
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