Some albums have the power to shift the listener’s mood: to excite, stimulate, slow down, or soothe. Other albums have the power to enhance the listener’s mood: to foster a deeper, more profound internal experience. Roberta Michel’s album of newly commissioned works for flute and electronics does the latter. Over the course of 52 minutes, Hush presents listeners with an assemblage of piquant and peculiar sounds, musical metaphors, and indulgent sonic experiments; the New Focus Recordings album plays like a guided meditation, rewarding listeners who have the patience to listen, be led, and lose track of time.
The flute playing on Hush is top-notch. Michel’s versatile tone and nimble embouchure make possible a wide range of complicated extended techniques, which feature heavily throughout the album. She plays all of the flute, bass flute, and piccolo parts, including the pre-recorded playback tracks for Victoria Cheah’s And for you, castles and Mert Moralı’s Quintet.
After doing a little digging, I learned that only three of the five pieces involve electronics (in all cases, fixed playback), while the other two are for solo flute. I wish this were made clearer in the album notes, so I could better appreciate Michel’s solo performances in Jane Rigler’s Red and Jen Baker’s The Great Bridge and a Lion’s Gate. Many of the unique sonorities in these pieces involve multiphonics and playing the flute while vocalizing at the same time — a fact made more impressive by the knowledge that one person is creating all those sounds simultaneously.
Red for solo piccolo — the only non-commission on the album — is a whirlwind of a piece that begins with quiet key clicks and builds to a screaming-whistling climax. (Is it an orgasm or an exorcism? A strong case could be made for either.) As the piece ramps up to catharsis, Michel’s piccolo sputters and trills with increasing passion and unpredictability, accelerating and overblowing notes into overtones while circular breathing. On the page, Red is written like a detailed blueprint — Rigler provides a goal, structure, and initial patterns, from which the performer is expected to craft their own wild and bespoke incantation — and the piece balances the often-fraught relationship between imposed structure and performer freedom remarkably well.
The energy captured in The Great Bridge and a Lion’s Gate is less rapturous and much more frazzled. Here, Michel opens with a series of rapidly-articulated escalating notes interspersed with flutter-tongued accents, grunts, and battle cries. The warrior-like tenacity of the opening (recalled again in the closing) is contrasted by a meandering middle section featuring lyrical melodies and Michel singing in counterpoint with her flute. The effect is eerie, beautiful, even petulant at times.
More than anything else on this album, Moralı’s Quintet begs to be experienced live. For this piece, Michel plays the bass flute in the middle of a room surrounded by four loudspeakers, each of which plays pre-recorded bass flute material that has been electronically manipulated by the composer. The intentional blurring between live flute and electronically processed flute results in scintillating textures, from the overlapping timbral trills evoking a muffled sea of crying voices to the choppy “popcorn-ing” flutes glitching out a few minutes later. But while the piece offers some of the most sonically intriguing moments of the album, the lack of spatial depth in the recording is disappointing.
Roberta Michel — Photo by Manuela Rana
And for you, castles is both conceptually lovely and experientially frustrating to listen to — that is, if you’re hoping for a discernible arc and resolution. According to the composer, the piece explores “intimacies in close quarters of the touch of a sound, the promise of communication, and the possibility of stability without fulfillment.” Indeed, unfulfilled we remain, as the playback emits sustained notes and the flute overlaps to form fragile, diaphanous chords for 12 minutes. There’s a palpable hesitancy, caution, furtiveness, and yearning to the piece, as if two people are reaching out to touch each other’s fingers but finding culmination perpetually elusive.
The title track by Angélica Negrón includes the album’s most overt use of electronics; rather than blending in with the flute, the playback track sits in a distinctly different timbral world. Prominent chimes and water effects attract the ears to but tend to overpower the flute, while evenly-spaced electronic pulses feel like a mechanical accompaniment. The cool austerity of Hush is slightly at odds with the lushly saturated plant photography of Fred Michel (Roberta’s father) that inspired it, but the piece still shines in its soft moments, especially when flute key clicks combine with the reverberation of muted bells and subtle mechanical churnings.
Speaking of Fred Michel’s photography, a stunning photo of his (64573.01 leaves) is featured on the album cover with some of the most exquisite graphic and type design (by Marc Wolf) that I’ve seen on a new music release in a long time. Hush is a beautifully-crafted and considered album from top to bottom, and it’s exciting to see a powerhouse performer like Michel championing, commissioning, and recording so much new music and sharing it with audiences in such a comprehensively competent way.
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