Today we listen in on EVRLY MVSIC, a very intriguing upcoming release from Patrick Higgins and Josh Modney that will come out via NNA Tapes on September 22nd. Higgins’ Social Death Mixtape, a 2015 release for the label, found him creating electro-acoustic compositions for a variety of performers, but here he forms a duo with fellow avant composer/musician, the violinist Josh Modney.
Modney has lent his skills as an improvisor and performer to a variety of projects including playing in the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) and composer-performer collective Wet Ink Ensemble, and he also appeared on a live recording from Oberlin College on Higgins’ Social Death Mixtape.
Describing the upcoming release, NNA Tapes explains:
“On ‘EVRLY MVSIC,’ the two performers have taken the concept of “Early Music” as a stimulus to inspire performances of acoustic improvisation that aim at a compositional tightness, creating a musical framework based more around the feeling, rather than the sound, of Medieval struggle.”
Built around a highly nuanced interaction between acoustic guitar and violin, EVRLY MVSIC progresses thru three Partitas to eventually include, in the final Partita, electric guitar as well as real-time electronic processing on the instruments. “Renaissance Recap,” the album’s second track, offers an austere beauty of plucked and bowed strings that bring to mind Renaissance lute music, but Higgins and Modney are just as likely to take this music apart right before your ears. Like Medieval surgeons, they seem to share a fascination in dissection, applying a sort of controlled violence to their extended technique creating scratches and punctures in the melody, and it makes for a truly fascinating listen.
