This album opens with the 53-second Tender: sweet, husky, tentative sounds circling in space like a mobile. Later, there is Tender (Second Version) – just 47 seconds this time, but now with more tremble and more pain. Michigan-born experimental composer Joseph Kudirka uses simple terms to say significant things. His music is considered; he doesn’t shout or clutter the edges or overfill the gaps. The piece 21st Century Music is a slow and starkly beautiful cycle of downward shifting intervals; Wyoming Snow was inspired by a drive through a wintry landscape; and Beauty and Industry alternates between soft-hewn gestures against clangy, dark ones. The scores leave much to interpretation. There are two or three versions of several pieces on this disc, each one an insight into the astutely calibrated textures made by Apartment House.
