Recording: Thin Edge New Music Collective with Ensemble Paramirabo

Artist: Thin Edge New Music Collective with Ensemble Paramirabo

Song: Double Sextet [excerpt] [composer: Steve Reich]

Recorded at The Music Gallery, February 19, 2015.

Thin Edge New Music Collective with Ensemble Paramirabo - Double Sextet [excerpt]

This night of music from Thin Edge was billed as "Raging Against the Machine", a slightly-nostalgic look back to the time when people still had the energy and/or tenaciousness to voice their displeasure at being worn down by consumer society, late capitalism, etc. etc. The programme mixed a trio of new works — of which Anna Höstman's drifting "Fog" was the highlight — with a couple pieces from big-name composers. The latter included Louis Andriessen's somewhat-clompy "Workers Union" as well as this Reich piece, which subverts the usual progression of the Reich Curve¹ with a LOUD/quiet/LOUD structure (possibly a late-blooming "grunge" influence). Throughout the night, Thin Edge's musicians were joined by Montréal's Ensemble Paramirabo in various combinations, a tasty collaboration allowing for a wide range of musical textures.

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¹ The Reich Curve is a standardized duration-based aesthetic response to the works of Steve Reich which postulates that the compositional use of repetition is at first bracing, then a little dull, then exciting again as the listener finds the hidden patterns within the repetition. It can be illustrated thusly in graph form: