Weather Systems, Vol. 2: Soundlines

Presentación del Álbum

No one could accuse percussionist Steven Schick of not thinking big. Here, he offers a three-CD set of contemporary percussion music, with one work almost an hour long, and this is just the second volume in a set of three that seem to provide a summation of Schick's influential career. This installment may seem a lot for non-percussionists, but general listeners will not, perhaps surprisingly, be bored. The album arose from a walk Schick took, more or less spontaneously, from San Diego to San Francisco, culminating in a marriage proposal to his now-wife, Brenda. One composition, George Lewis' Soundlines (A Dreaming Track), is based directly on Schick's walk. The others are related to it in a more general way, using the percussion battery to evoke terrestrial phenomena or using these directly. Perhaps at once the most ingenious and the most disturbing is Vivian Fung's The Ice Is Talking, which uses percussion instruments made of ice that melt during the performance in a commentary on climate change. There are also found instruments; Sarah Hennies' Thought Sectors breaks up its long repetitive sections with a flour sifter. Some of the pieces have text: sample Roger Reynolds' Here and There, with words drawn from Samuel Beckett. Most of the pieces are new, but there are also well-established works by Frederic Rzewski and Iannis Xenakis. Schick is a master performer, and each of these pieces is arresting in its own way. An essential find for anyone with the slightest interest in contemporary percussion music.

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