Michelle Lou — Near Distant
Near Distant is a three CD/three-plus hour journey in Michelle Lou’s sound worlds. The San Digo-born composer's work sits somewhere between electro-acoustic and modern composition, with touches of saw/ grating industrial texturing, moments of all-out noise sear, as well as gloomy to doomed atmospherics.
The release appears on Austria’s Kairos – with the three discs presented in an eight-panel digipak, featuring a moody blue and black coloured layout. Also included is a nineteen stuck-in-gloss inlay nineteen-page inlay booklet- featuring English / German texts giving bios of the composer. The pieces, payers, and the process to hand.
Lou has been creating work since the early 2010s- with performances in the likes of Donaueschinger Musiktage, Darmstadt Ferienkurse, Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik, The Festival of New American Music (Sacramento), the MATA Festival (New York City), The 66th American Music Festival at the National Gallery in Washington D.C., The Rainy Days Festival (Luxembourg), Ultima Festival (Oslo), Chance and Circumstance (Brooklyn), Klub Katarakt (Hamburg), Klangwerkstatt and MaerzMusik (both in Berlin), amongst others.
The ten pieces featured over the three CDs date from between 2014 and 2021, with runtimes of fifteen and thirty-one-minute mark.
Disc one opens with the title track- this is for bass flute, tenor sax, piano, percussion and electronics. It starts off all gloomily tolling/ hazing with stretched horn tones & doomy tolling keys. Later on, we get the addition of knife-like slices, electro-grain spins/machine hisses, and chattering metal percussion. The first disc plays out with the longest track here "Opal"- which is for sax, percussion and electronics. It opens with a paired-back/yet taut blend of low-grade hiss, electro-tone scrape, and high-pitch flicks. As we progress we find on/ off moments of machine belt turn ‘n’ knock, electro-tone rise, ball bearing-like spin, etc- making for a wonderful tense, yet eventful thirty-one-minute journey.
Onto the second disc, we move from “Telegrams” for bass clarinet and electronics. It’s built around breathy/ high pitch-warbling blows, discordant vibe like drone pitches, and steady tonal drags/ hissing slides Onto “Burial” which is for an ensemble The track mixes lurking & brooding ambience, with slurred electro knocks, churning noise machine grain, and belt toll trail tones.
The third/ final disc moves from ensemble-based track “Heart/ Lung(V.1)” which melds doomed echoing key reverbed, sour string fiddle ‘n’ fork, electro tone seam pull/ stretch. Though to the electric guitar & cello fed “Sections 1-20” with its blend of flying saucer tone glide & stretched rip like stabs ‘n’ darts. Onto “Untitled three part Construction” which is for accordion and two percussionists, and is built around wonky honks, ticket machine snap, and urgent scribble ‘n’ chugging scrape.
As a release, I found Near Distant most captivating in its busy meets uneasy sound setting. There is no doubt that Ms Lou has the ability to pull out some startling, seared, and wonderful sounds from relatively straight/ forward/ normal instrumental pallet. I played the album material as both concentrated/ focused listening and more background sonics- and each time it rewarded me wonderfully- another excellent release from Kairos Music