In his sharply observed liner note essay, Canadian composer Martin Arnold refers to the two pieces on this beguiling album—written by Rebecca Bruton and Jason Doell — as “psychedelic,” which is not a description one expects for contemporary classical music. “It seems to me that undermining/displacing cultural conventions/pre-conditionings is not a straightforward task. You can’t just do something that’s not them: something the opposite or something exotically strange, for example.” Indeed, both works undercut a familiarity with weird, disorienting elements. In Bruton’s Faerie Rhythm, it’s the composer’s own folk-ish, wordless singing and shy whistling that feels deliciously alien, limning elegantly proportioned lines and shapes articulated by Montréal’s endlessly adventurous and adaptable Quatuor Bozzini. All of that sits alongside the work of Toronto keyboard trio junctQín, which sticks exclusively to acoustic piano here. The relative activity of the two outer sections of the piece involved all the musicians, but the two middle parts strip things down to a sparse solo piano passage, which is soon enhanced by solo piano, joining to refashion the outer parts in a solemn, melancholy reverie of unabashed beauty and deceptive simplicity. Doell’s undeniably trippy “to carry dust & breaks through the body” get a lot of its warped qualities from the deceptive fake drone that emerges as the strings steadily pitch down half a step throughout the piece while the piano maintains the same tuning, which makes it seem as if the keyboard is losing it. The interplay between the work’s tender melodic thrust and the increasingly sour harmonic confusion provides its unalloyed power.
