The violin doesn’t always sound like a violin on Marina Kifferstein’s new album, Strand Line (Oct. 23, Gold Bolus Recordings). Across its five tracks, the violinist and composer creates one aural illusion after another, conjuring the sounds of a crackling fire, a riotous aviary, and an ensemble much bigger than her solo self would suggest. That sonic presence is perhaps fitting for Kifferstein, who considers herself a chamber musician at her core. She has released over two dozen albums as an ensemble member with groups like TAK Ensemble and The Rhythm Method. As a soloist, she has so far released one — a low-fi collection of livestreamed performances called Open Improvisations (2020).
Strand Line marks Kifferstein’s first fully-produced solo studio album. Musically, it feels like a natural outgrowth of the ideas explored in Open Improvisations but with more succinct and cogent architecture. While the earlier album was entirely improvised, the new record offers three composed works (tracks 1, 3, and 5) bridged by improvisations (tracks 2 and 4). Kifferstein, who took her time recording Strand Line over the course of months, gives highly-nuanced performances full of articulative and expressive detail; each piece sounds utterly lived-in, and the pared-down tracklist affords each of the uniquely ambitious compositions the space to make a big impact.
Taking up the most room on the album is How quiet — at the bottom of a lake, peaks of clouds, a piece composed for Kifferstein by longtime collaborator Ashkan Behzadi and named after a haiku by Kobayashi Issa. The poem, which evokes the image of a person lying still at the bottom of a lake and looking at the sky, provokes weighty contemplation as the reader imagines what the subject is doing there, whether they are alive or holding their breath.
Rather than offer answers, How quiet unfolds as a time-dilated somatic experience rendered in a richly quiet score — which, according to Kifferstein, was intended “to be played to oneself, for oneself, with great care.” The audience, merely invited “to listen in as voyeurs” witnesses the violin drifting precisely and delicately over large intervals — often doubled by Kifferstein’s own voice — through an unmooring microtonal palette that Behzadi designed to estrange the listener from familiar harmonic footholds. When Kifferstein’s violin and voice sing in unison, the melodies take on an eerie corona, sometimes combining frequencies to sound like a flute’s flutter-tonguing.
There’s a poetic symmetry to the bookends of this album; while the Behzadi takes place at the bottom of a lake, Liza Lim’s The Su Song Star Map transports listeners to the sky. The eponymous star map, created by 11th-century Chinese scientist Su Song, charts stellar positions and lunar mansions in a visually striking arrangement, its circles, lines, and curves forming constellations that resemble loosely connected strings of notes cascading across the page. Lim’s composition is a whimsical journey through Su Song’s cosmos, and Kifferstein flies through its morphing technical demands with ease; she exploits an extreme range of bow contact points, pressures, and speeds, hitting harmonics of seemingly every flavor, and re-articulating pitches at different points on the fingerboard to evoke pulsing starlight.
Few violinists tackle Berio’s demanding Sequenza VIII, but Kifferstein — who has lived with the piece for over a decade — makes it the heroic centerpiece of her album. An homage to Bach’s D minor Chaconne, Sequenza VIII emulates Baroque techniques while pushing them to dramatic and hyper-virtuosic extremes. Kifferstein stuns in her rendition, particularly during the frenetic and volatile moto perpetuo. Here, she drives a relentless staccato 32nd-note motor while constantly interjecting herself with dense ff chords, creating the illusion of two people playing at once before scurrying off into an impossibly fast slurred section. This beast of a piece, written by a composer who considered the violin the “most subtle and complex of instruments,” is perfectly suited for an album that mines those nuances and pushes the physical boundaries of the violin so unremittingly.
Kifferstein’s prowess as an interpreter is evident in the tentpole pieces that make up Strand Lines, but in the two improvisations, titled E and Dust, she leaves no doubt about her own intrepidness as an acoustic explorer. Here, she makes sounds that violinists are traditionally taught avoid, eliciting guttural growls and plaintive yowls from her erratic bow in Dust; in E, she maintains such unrelenting pressure on the upper strings that sparks and embers seem to violently shoot out from aural candescence.
In both improvisations, Kifferstein sounds like an ensemble unto herself. The commitment required to coax these caustic sounds from a violin, let alone push them to such extremes, cannot be overstated. Rather than treating the violin as a vehicle for the well-trod classical idiom, Kifferstein reinvents it as an expressive apparatus with an entirely new vocabulary.
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