Back catalogue: Modern Classical

Review: Geir Jenssen (Biosphere) marks his AD93 debut with The Way Of Time, wrapping elucted echo and looping synth drift around spoken fragments of Elizabeth Madox Roberts' great 1926 novel The Time Of Man. A Midwestern gothic literary staple, Roberts' novel is about the daughter of a Kentucky tenant farmer, and Jenssen's haunting use of Joan Lorring's voice from the 1951 radio play adaptation readapts his usual icy predilections for suitably huger desert horizons. Rather than treating the vocal as ornament, he folds it deep into the mix, letting it dissolve into the melodic architecture.

Review: Composed in New York by the Baltimore-born minimalist Philip Glass and released in 1971, Music With Changing Parts was the album that put his vivid, colour-rich sound on the map, marking a shift away from the ultra minimal 600 Lines (1967) and Two Pages (1968). Performed with free instrumentation, the piece allows musicians to switch between eight staves at specified cues, generating abrupt shifts in texture and timbre. Though its melodic material remains tightly looped and minimal, changes in orchestration continuously refresh the sonic landscape. Most striking is the psychoacoustic illusion Glass observed during rehearsals: when multiple players repeated the same short patterns, sustained tones seemed to emerge on their own. He eventually formalised this in the score, permitting long notes to enhance the effect. What results is a hallucinated resonance that pulses and flickersian early indication of the harmonic depth he would later bring to works like the miestone Einstein On The Beach.