The Silent Ballet staff counts down its top picks of the month. 

This year, April showers meant more than just rain.  Christians celebrated the latest Easter in recent memory, Brits celebrated a royal wedding, and the TSB staff celebrated the release of over 150 new instrumental and experimental works.  This downpour of chocolate eggs, confetti and clef notes brought a much-needed respite, if only for the span of a meal, a broadcast or an album.  But what do we do when it stops raining – when the dessert has been devoured, the wedding has ended, and the downloads have slowed to a trickle?  Evaluate.  “How was your Easter?  Did you watch the wedding?  What was your favorite release of the month?”

With its April picks, the TSB staff proved once again to be an eclectic bunch.  Where were the brand name albums, the early season frontrunners, the Vegas favorites?  Left at the altar.  Perhaps the staff felt they’d already received enough attention.  Perhaps the expectations had been too high.  Such a result is oddly fitting in a month in which no #1 seed reached the NCAA finals.  All of April’s honorees were underdogs at the start of the month, which makes the top pick, like Kate Middleton, a true Cinderella.

1) NOW Ensemble ~ Awake
New Amsterdam
NOW Ensemble‘s latest album is an energetic, enthralling showcase of modern chamber music, with influences from across the classical and popular boards.  The five members of the group work together seamlessly, allowing each other the space to play, generally led by either piano or woodwind.  Awake is modern without ever seeming unnecessarily harsh or self-indulgent.  Dissonance, shifting time signatures and unrest appear many times, but sweeping melody, light-heartedness and calm frequently appear as well.  Judd Greenstein‘s “Change” proudly declares that modern classical can be fun, too.  The real triumph of the album, however, is the personality that the ensemble brings to each of the compositions.  Although all six pieces come from different composers, the idiomatic style applied allows Awake to flow as a whole, a testament to the ensemble’s talents.  The three in-house compositions may form the backbone of the album, but the guest composers’ pieces are performed just as well, with Mizzy Mazzoli‘s “Magic With Everyday Objects” being one of the highlights.  Awake solidifies NOW Ensemble’s place as a serious player in the field of modern composition.  (Matt Gilley)

2) Petrels ~ Haeligwielle
Bandcamp (Tartaruga)
Bowed strings, found percussion, and on one track, a choir; a mixture of dark and light ambient, modern classical and drone; and a unifying theme: these elements combine to make Haeligwielle (holy well or sacred spring) a remarkable release.  These watery odes include tributes to Francis Danby (painter of the apocalyptically haunting 15-foot-wide The Deluge), Canute the Great (who once – ineffectively, it should be noted – commanded the sea to retreat) and William Walker (“the deep sea diver who saved Winchester Cathedral”).  All of this is lovingly brought to us by Bleeding Heart Narrative‘s Oli Barrett, whose side project turns out to be his greatest achievement.  Limited to 100 copies, so act quickly if you’d like the handmade edition.  (Richard Allen)

3) Ezekiel Honig ~ Folding In On Itself
Type
NYC native Ezekiel Honig, the man behind the magnificent Anticipate label, comes at us with Folding In On Itself, his first record since 2008’s Surfaces of a Broken Marching Band and his Type debut.  This time, Honig lets his field recordings stay more or less intact, his edits carefully constructing soundscapes built around repeated warm melodic instruments and rhythmic samples.  He uses the recordings of the city around him to add color and direction to his already textured music, while also granting the record an increased sense of space, even if in that end that space remains fairly abstract and open to interpretation.  Not conventionally narrative, one still gets the impression that Honig is taking his listeners along for a trip.  Any piece of sound that has been so thoughtfully sculpted deserves an attentive listener, and such a listener will certainly be rewarded.  (Joseph Sannicandro) 

4) Grouper ~ A / A
yellowelectric
A / A is a dark, blissful moment of solemnity, like the mild delerium before sleep, when one disconnects and gets fearfully displaced from one’s self.  This ecstatic feeling turns time meaningless, confusing the mind into seeing itself from astronomical distances, an Alien Observer that watches its own temporary madness and, in its self-destructive brilliance, loses its dreams to vague emotions and evanescent perceptions.  Grouper has crafted a voyage not of epic proportions, but of intimate environs, withering away in waves of distortion and lo-fi unintelligibility.  The result is seductively moving, and definitely not to be missed.  (David Murrieta)

Written By: host
Date Posted: 5/1/2011
Number of Views: 600