NUENI #011 - 'STARPERMEABLE'- Adam Zuckerman.
' Héctor Rey has been releasing music on his Nueni label since 2010, though there have been only, I believe, ten recordings, always of great interest at least, often more. The most recent is 'Starpermeable', by Adam Zuckerman (about whom I know nothing), written for a quintet of Kanoa Ichiyanagi (viola), Zaq Kenefick (harmonica), Juan Marroquin (flute), Dylan Marx (guitar) and Kristyna Svihalkova (percussion). All seem to contribute voice as well. 21 tracks, often shimmering and gorgeous, sometimes elusive to the point of being not quite there, always mysterious, even other-worldly; quite unusual. Aspects of some Wandelweserian sound worlds, but...tangier. Hard to describe, but one of my favorite things heard this year. Check it. '
Brian Olewnick
' It’s telling that after repeated listenings to Adam Zuckerman’s STARPERMEABLE (Nueni) I still flip back and forth between thinking he’s too precious and he’s too sincere. A composition for “at least three musicians and processed field recording playback”, it makes no effort towards momentum, direction or movement. Each of its eighteen short sections are made of delicate and languorous melodies slowly overlapping to produce clouds of sound that veil the internal movement of pitch, so that its changes require closer attention. Each of these moments is separated by silence, confounding attempts to find continuity or coherence. The musicians frequently hum together, adding both to their serenity and our distance from them. The field recordings are noticeable only by the absence of the musicians: there are three interludes of six minutes each, making nearly half the piece’s entire length, where the only sound is that of the open air at almost imperceptible volume. Contradictions abound: it’s both too natural and too contrived, both seeking to inspire interest by actively repelling it. It starts to resemble Scelsi in that way it needs a mind at peace to be receptive to it, but whether for contemplation as an idea or as a phenomenon remains a mystery. The musicians do play very prettily though, while it lasts. '
Ben Harper (Boring Like A Drill)
' The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man
Adam Zuckerman (US composer) scored and recorded Starpermeable (NUENI RECS #11), here played by a small chamber group on viola, harmonica, flute, guitar, and percussion. Three separate named “melodies” have fed into it, although the playback of the CD mysteriously ends up as 21 very short tracks, which start and stop in an endearingly odd fashion as they exude charming and unassuming tones.
Unlike the more severe and testing modernist minimalists we sometimes hear on Insub.Records, Zuckerman is not living in denial of beauty, air, or sunlight, and he has a basinful of conceptual ideas that drive his wispy motifs and gestural wands. If I half-understand his printed statement of intent, he seems to be rethinking melody in terms of time and memory, and mapping out music as a sequence of points – which probably is not the same thing as conventional notation, which is my best guess having only just encountered the work of this fellow who also wishes to engage with the environment and produce art installations too. It may be a commonplace to say as he does that his “melodies…become only through the process of their realisation”, which sounds like an elliptical way of saying that we only hear music when musicians play it, but it might indicate something about his simple joy of discovery, hearing his music unfold like a flower opening. If he was a watercolour painter, he’s be unwilling to stain even half an inch of his textured paper with the merest smidge of eggshell blue if it didn’t feel quite right to him.
Lines of a poem by Paul Celan have been translated into English, and printed here; some of them have turned into “track titles” here, if we can use so vulgar a term; they are evocative, like ‘Gone Into The Night’ and ‘Something Remains for Wild Wasting’. Readers are free to accuse me of shrinking to size of an elf and joining the fairies in a dance around the mushroom ring, but there’s real conviction and moments of delicate beauty in Adam Zuckerman’s gentle interventions. And – oddly for this all-acoustic music, it feels like it’s being played on a very modest soft-spoken Casio. Released on Hector Rey’s anti-copyright label in Bilbao. '
Ed Pinsent (The Sound Projector)