Brendon Randall-Myers has a brilliant new video for “Trem Chorale” from his upcoming LP Dynamics of Vanishing Bodies due out September 25th via New Focus Recordings. Directed by Derrick Belcham and featuring four dancers whose movements have been captured and suspended in tightly wound motion, he explains that the images are a response to COVID quarantine. The director calls them a “mixture of confinement and agitation” and an expression of “collective grief” in the face of loss and an uncertain future.
Needless to say, the visuals are a perfect accompaniment to composer/guitarist Brendon Randall-Myers’ difficult composition. A conductor for the Glenn Branca Ensemble, and former member as well, the musician explains that his first time leading that group resulted in “a kind of possession” that left him physically injured and bed-ridden for two days. Couple that with an interest in long-distance running, and Randall-Myers’ endurance testing composition begins to come into focus. Knowing the difficulties it would demand to perform, he turned to the New York City quartet Dither, a group he had sat in with on occasion.
Comprised of Taylor Levine, Joshua Lopes, James Moore, and Gyan Riley (son of Terry), Dither has worked with avant-music luminaries such as Phill Niblock, John Zorn, Steve Reich, and Elliott Sharp. Under Randall-Myers’ direction, the guitarists navigated his physically demanding 37-minute piece involving 20 different idiosyncratic tunings, as well as re-tunings mid-piece. The composer concedes: “I could ask myself to do it, or them, but pretty much nobody else.”
Dynamics of Vanishing Bodies was originally written as part of a Jerome Foundation-sponsored residency at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn. The five-part composition is meant to sonically embody ‘absence as a felt presence.’ Inspired by the loss of his grandfather, as well as periods of forced separation from his wife while she navigated the difficulties of acquiring a Green Card in Beijing, he remembers: “I was in our apartment surrounded by our stuff and communicating digitally with her, but with no idea when I’d be able to be with her in that space again.”
This palpable sense of absence can be sonically felt throughout Dynamics of Vanishing Bodies. On the version of “Trem Chorale” below, the reverberating tremolo-like effect between the different guitars creates shards of sound as well as their reflection. Together, this sense of presence and absence oscillates holding the physically generated sound and its shadow in a dynamically fused whole. Quite the feat!
