Andrew Byrne: White Bone Country

Andrew Byrne (b. 1966) has lived and worked mostly in New York since the early 1990s. This tripartite CD has a mobile-like character, working entirely with a fabric of piano and metal percussion in changing manners and images, all of them remote from the duo relationship of conventional chamber music. The central work Tracksis also the earliest one (composed 1998, revised 2006), and presents the solo piano in its most ‘normal’ sound and interaction with the player a kind of journey, as the title suggests, within a dense and accumulating polyrhythmic expression. The two surrounding groups of pieces extend from this in two different directions, the opening White Bone Country (2006) towards reduced sound-reveries in processed piano and small metal percussion, the succeeding Mirages (2007) into pure sonic fantasies made from sampled sounds of prepared piano. Byrne relates these pieces to “the other American experimental tradition of Cowell, Harrison, Peter Garland, John Luther Adams, rather than the New York minimalists/post-minimalists to their concerns with polyrhythms in a reduced meditative sound world, suggestions of strange folk musics, depiction of landscape…” Fundamental to the language of all Byrne’s pieces are pulsations, from which varied melodic motives and overlaid rhythmic meters can be drawn. In this respect his approach differs from other landscape-orientated music based on drones and evolving fields of sound, along with their opposite, flurries of irregular disjunct rhythms.