"[..] With Rebecca Bruton’s piece, the melody/ harmony is transmuted into something psychedelic by manifesting its essential indivisibility from the shifting textures of the music as a whole. There’s often an ephemeral virtuosity to this music, an intricate (sometimes opaque, sometimes disorientingly transparent), florid weave of sound. But this virtuosity doesn’t assert dramatic effects; there are gestures here, but they’re the movements of sounding bodies, not the quasi-meaningful gesticulations of expressive characters. And that virtuosity can be montaged with untrained voices singing simple, consonant harmonies. Yet here, this doesn’t strike me as a theatrical juxtaposition, but rather just another way that sounding bodies are weaving psychedelic textures.

There’s so much detail in both pieces: they’re both variously piano-delic (one piano rung by six hands!); string harmonics pinging and whistling (sometimes together with mouths whistling); impossible piano sustains created with rolling mallets; impossible solos made by many players sounding as one. This could continue; this is just a start at an almanac of wonders available here, a start of an open-ended list I have no room to go on compiling here.

The titles of both works could be taken in a way that makes one think the pieces mean something. But I think they just compliment the sounding music by pushing the convention of meaning into the psychedelic. Jason Doell has titled his piece to carry dust and breaks through the body. But in his performance notes, he also calls it to curry rust and bleaks through the buds and to parry mist and bleeds through the nows. He says it’s “a work born of strange conversation caught in webs that cling to beliefs still continuously being spun. A simpler image that comes to mind is the sound of folding paper. But in reality, the shared becoming I’ve experienced with Syd (my feline BFF) is the greatest imaginable pressure on this work.” Rebecca Bruton offers The Faerie Ribbon. It’s a title that maybe invokes vintage psychedelic music (maybe a lost Incredible String Band album). And it’s important to remember that faeries are radically immanent magical beings; they’re of this world, but not a part easily accessible to mortals; they’re marvelous (a wonder of the world), not miraculous (transcendentally divine). I think Rebecca is folding paper into a web, and Jason has woven a faerie ribbon." - Martin Arnold