Imaginary Friends by Andrew May (review)

According to the one sheet for Imaginary Friends, composer Andrew May's compositions "defy classification, seamlessly blending the personal expressiveness of traditional classical performance with the alien landscape of ambient computer music." This statement does a good job mapping out the territory that May covers on this, his debut release. But it only tells half the story because he also uses conventional computer processing techniques, and deftly traverses alien acoustic landscapes.

The first piece on this disc, Shimmer, is scored for piano and electroacoustic sound. The title refers to a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson. May presents us with quickly shifting, freely atonal palettes alongside analogous processing changes. There are also clear, yet temporary, centric pitch areas that successfully push the listener in a given direction, only to be diverted by other pitches also used as center points.

Until about a third of the way into this 12-minute piece the piano and computer follow separate, hierarchically divided trajectories. After four minutes or so, aspects of computer processing are foregrounded. May uses a wide array of processing techniques, including delay, reverb, flange, chorus, equalization, sound reversal, and envelope truncation. Shimmer uses prerecorded electroacoustic materials, but they are so well integrated that upon listening without having first read the liner notes, I had assumed that this was an interactive piece. Much of the prerecorded materials were from recordings that the composer made of the pianist playing through initial sketches for the piece.

Around the two-thirds point there is a climactic, rather artificial sounding downward glissando that clearly draws attention to itself, especially because it is set apart by silence and initiates a different type of texture. Until this moment the predominant texture consisted of fast tremolo flourishes mostly in the piano part. After the glissando, the texture becomes much more subdued. Combined with the focus on reverb, this change causes one to experience a visceral sense of spatial distance. Toward the end of the piece the tape and piano parts attempt to sync up in a series of rhythmic unison passages that eventually conclude in F.

Chant/Songe, for clarinet and computer, uses a wide frequency range, including very low frequencies that are not always apparent in digitally generated computer music. The harmonic pacing is much slower than in the first piece. Large parts of this piece feature admirably sparse textures. May carefully and masterfully crafts each subsequent phrase, from silence to thick textures, and back to silence. At times the clarinet seems to recede into the background, perhaps because of the overlapping frequencies shared between it and the computer. Additionally, we hear the live clarinet through the same audio settings, whereas the computer's materials sound like they are in continual flux. Thus, they command more attention than the clarinet. Although one can clearly discern the clarinet from the computer, its recorded invariance leads this listener to want the clarinet's live-to-processed mixture to break out of its "box."

Nevertheless, one of May's compositional strengths is evident in this piece: He knows how to write for acoustic instruments while skillfully mixing in electroacoustic components. For example, in Chant/Songe the clarinet performs several bi-and multi-phonics while the computer reinforces these unique timbral resonances, providing them with a resonant acoustic space.

Retake, the third piece on this disc, begins with some breathy, high-pitched whistles and flute sounds. An occasional snare drum hit disrupts the mostly continuous texture. Interestingly, the snare drum timbre never evolves, and so remains a fixed, accompanimental element to the live flute. The computer-generated tones, combined with the live flute, produce piercing difference tones that sometimes sound disturbingly loud. These are especially evident in the thicker textures in this piece. Toward the end, the flute pays a series of long, sustained tones that might be described as mournful, especially given how they microtonally slide around at their terminal points. The computer processing in this piece involves the...