Kyle Bruckmann’s Degradient - Dear Everyone (2019)

Luciano Berio said in 1974, concerning the search for "specific analogies" between verbal language and music, that "precisely this type of research is another way of experiencing one of the most real and permanent conditions of music, which is to chase without stop a utopia of language, "to" discover new and temporary relationships between sound and meaning, "to" teach us to see the world as a set of processes that interact. "

Composer, soloist of oboe and English horn, Kyle Bruckmann engages his provocations on the mutual interaction between poetic language and music in this Dear Everyone, with the eccentric idea of ​​proposing to ninety-nine voices the recitation of surreal verses of his poet friend Matt Shears, taken from the collection entitled Dear Everyone. The vocal recordings, very different from each other, are segmented and used within Bruckmann's work in different ways, in part by providing rhythmic-melodic nuclei to the music, partly by reacting to music and voices (but also the same voices recorded) , or searching for the prosody that acts in a prism of reflections between music and acting.

Bruckmann worked in the Chicago area before moving to San Francisco in 2003. Since then, his business has maintained a pendulum form, still in contact with the creative musicians of the Chicago scene, including Jason Stein, Jeb Bishop, Fred Lonberg - Holm, Weasel Walter, Tim Daisy, and at the same time active in the Bay Area, also with ensembles dedicated to contemporary academic music.

In the operation of this CD is involved the quartet called Degradient (from the play on words between degrade, "degrade," and slope, "gradient"). This is the first direct line-up by Bruckmann which originated entirely from the West Coast, although the saxophonist and clarinetist Aram Shelton has also linked his name to projects with Chicagoans. Unlike other groups he leads, more focused on a fusion between jazz and contemporary music, (see for example Wrack), in this case the pulsation and timbres of certain avant rock enter the game in an evident way. The presence of the rhythmic couple formed by the electric bass player Jason Hoopes and the drummer Jordan Glenn, members of the Fred Frith trio, is particularly responsible.

So many ingredients and so many stimuli are mixed in the work, in a vortex of evident Surrealist provocation, as emerges from the titles of the songs themselves. Operation of juxtaposition and contiguity between free improvisation, rough riffs, penetrating use of electronics, acting, in a game that Bruckmann shows he knows how to dominate with a remarkable sense of dramatic structure. To underline the remarkable contribution in some passages of the powerful trombone of Weston Olencki.