Lewis Nielson, garage rock guitarist turned composition professor at Oberlin College, writes music that loiters on the fringes: almost tangible, nearly lyrical, subversive to a point. Strands of moderate wit and eloquence mix with stylised modernism, but vanish as soon as they surface. This disc features three recent-ish chamber works. The Jack Quartet gives an acrobatic account of Le Journal du Corps, all squeaking, bouncing, grunting bows and a ticking clock that makes a heavy-handed metaphor. Another laboured jolt comes when the players start to sing vehement passages of Aimé Césaire over fragile chords.
The nervy Tocsin uses six percussionists (a fiery-sounding red fish blue fish led by Steven Schick) to whip up the discord, belligerence and doubt of crowds on the brink of revolution. Axis, for percussion (Schick) and string quintet, is a sequence of gestures that don’t seem to have much impact on what comes before or after. The take-home message is disquieting, and the Jack’s playing is bright and shimmering.
