With Echo Echo Mirror House, the most recent conceptual shift in his evolutionary compositional paradigm, Anthony Braxton has added a simple yet effective element which amplifies its multi-dimensional symbolism. For Braxton, composition is not just a system of musical strategies, but a philosophical and spiritual state of being, meant to initiate a transformational experience for performer and listener alike. Previously, in various stages, he has incorporated compositional grafting, pulse track substitution, collage logic, structured improvisational schemes, mutable forms, varieties of notation, interactive electronics, visual elements, body movement, environmental conditions, literary and/or dramatized subplots — all of which have symbolic, as well as musical, consequences. (No one said it was going to be easy.)

Composition No. 347, the first of the Echo Echo Mirror House works to be recorded (a second, Composition No. 376, for a 15-piece ensemble, has been issued on New Braxton House), makes use of notational maps and graphs which allow the performers to plot their own course through the possibilities of the available material; however, each instrumentalist is additionally supplied with an iPod loaded with earlier Braxton recordings, to be played back as score or response dictates. Sampling of prerecorded sources is nothing new, of course, and yet in this specific context serves not only as an inclusive nod to electronica, hip-hop, and other “popular” genres, but more importantly as an expanded symbolic representation of time — not in the sense of musical time passing, but as an indication of individual perception. If, for example, Braxton’s initial forays into compositional quotation and restructuring “altered” the manipulation and perception of musical time through the spontaneous choices made by the performers at hand, and, eventually, the Ghost Trance Music was a means of informing repetitive and extended material as a visionary experience of “timeless” time (the trance), the audible portions of (often) familiar Braxton recordings emerging from and coexisting with the “live” details of Composition No. 347 offers the “illusion” of multi-dimensional time as an ironic structural agent. (Stuart Broomer spins off on this subject and develops it in interesting ways in his book Time and Anthony Braxton, Mercury Press.)

From the two recordings we have so far, it appears that the Echo Echo Mirror House system intends to create a polyphonic network of details — each instrument a distinct voice, selecting or inventing material in response to the score, causing a fluctuating, kinetic tangle of textures that clash rather than blend. The effect is of continuous change, energized movement, a complexity of relationships (reminding me of Marianne Moore’s un-ironic belief that “It is a privilege to see so / much confusion” from her poem The Steeple-Jack). As exhilarating, albeit sonically promiscuous, as Composition No. 376 is, the smaller septet of No. 347, from a 2011 concert during the Musique Actuelle Festival in Victoriaville, Quebec, has several advantages, not the least of which are the leaner, cleaner textures, allowing individual instruments to define their own identity, alternating currents of ensemble energy to affect the flow, and the sampled recordings more space in which to resonate, be recognized, and work their magic. […]