Recording: Tone Cathedral

Artist: Tone Cathedral

Song: It's Always the Apocalypse [edited excerpt]

Recorded at Gerard Art Space (Faster presents), February 25, 2023.

Tone Cathedral - It's Always the Apocalypse [edited excerpt]

Rather a pleasing treat to return to this cozy east end haunt with Brian Abbott and Kayla Milmine reactivating their "Faster presents" banner. Here Abbott (on guitar) lead an ensemble of top-notch players (Meghan Cheng, violin; Sara Constant, flutes; Andrew Furlong, double bass; Paul Newman, tenor saxophone + clarinet) through a couple of his pieces showing his ever-deeper burrowing into the realms of microtonality.

Unlike the works on his A Loose Grip on Reality album, which focuses on hyper-real pieces ("music that would purposely be unplayable by humans even if anyone was crazy enough to try"), the pair of compositions essayed here had a woozier pace, with sounds from one instrument sliding into another in a sort of slow-motion hocketing, sounding almost like paulstretched audio at times — or perhaps like a version of a tape-loop piece like Music For Airports where little loops are being played on tape decks with dying batteries, putting things out of skew in subtle ways.

[That same album will be celebrated this Saturday (March 25th) at Array Space with animation by Meghan Cheng and performaces from Tone Cathedral and Mun Mun C.F.]