Gordon Grdinia’s East Van Strings — The Breathing of Statues

There’s been so much experimental, digital, post-this and post-that stuff entering my ears lately that a disc of music as it might be performed live (gasp) by real people (double gasp) is as refreshing as a hike in the country after years of city asphalt. Such music is far from dead, but I fear it’s been shoved so far into the margins that it has become as much of a niche as, oh, Merzbow.

And while I have a buttload of Merzbow on my shelves, I have at least as much Miles and ‘Trane and Art Tatum—so sitting down with Gordon Grdinia and his electric guitar, along with his cohorts on violin, viola and cello, didn’t just amount to some retreat into boring normalcy. Gordon and his crew play in a variety of styles, derived from both classical (formal composition) and jazz (improvised; emphasis on the performer), and the results are lively and engaging.

It’s tough to make any kind of music, and Grdinia’s working in an idiom where too many other people have created “sensitive” New Age abominations. Probably all the more reason he embraces compositional vigor and avoids pastoral clichés—the opening track, “Selma”, is the closest we come to such territory, and it’s good enough to not earn being slapped too freely with such a derogatory label. Some of the stuff is just plain beautiful without apology, though—“Santiago”, for instance, which made me wonder what Grdinia’s cover version of Miles Davis’s “Concierto de Aranjuez” might sound like.

When the quartet experiments, which they do a fair amount of the time, it’s to good end. In “Silence of Paintings”, “Webern” and “Origin”, they veer into the kind of territory found on some of John Zorn’s mutant orchestral albums—strident, atonal, but also vigorous and always with some sense of purpose in the music. Even the fourteen-minute title cut, an extended venture somewhere between Spanish, Greek and Russian musical metaphors, never bogs down or gets redundant. People talk about “adventurous” music, but this music not only goes out on the adventure but comes back home with treasure found along the way.

Technical note: This album’s a hybrid SACD, which provides five-channel playback if you have the proper playback equipment for it. That said, even the two-channel mix on the conventional CD portion of the disc is immersive and superbly recorded, so everyone out there with only two ears can also buy with confidence.