Annie Gosfield - Almost Truths and Open Deceptions (2012)

"Gosfield's pieces, driven by strong instrumental protagonists, stake their claim to a unique world - she's a glorious provincial, the Carl Nielsen of Second Avenue."
–Russell Platt, The New Yorker, on "Almost Truths and Open Deceptions"

"Annie Gosfield, a New York composer and keyboardist, exuberantly exploits the inadvertent music of contemporary life: static, distortion, the clangor of industry and the siren song of space junk form part of her digital palette."
–The New York Times, CD release concert review by Steve Smith

"The urban urgency, collisions and intensities of New York surge through keyboard player Annie Gosfield’s concerts with electric guitarist Roger Kleier and drummer Ches Smith. "Almost Truths and Open Deceptions" includes a blast of that group in action, augmented to a quintet, heavily rock-inflected and laced with industrial noise. But the city also leaves its residue in the music Gosfield notates for others. Her 24 minute chamber concerto, written for cellist Felix Fan, is stealthily paced but packed with characteristic clashes and disjunctions, abrasive timbres, pounding piano, smeared glissandi and fierce ensemble surges. Gosfield writes tough music, packing a punch and steering clear of sentimentality, even when evoking through an instrumental quartet a long lost sound from tenement hallways - the mechanical flaws and crackling shellac of wavering hand-cranked phonographs fitted with cactus spines for needles. Her own solo performance of Phantom Shakedown is a splendidly pungent distillation of her attitude and humour, combining raucously strummed piano with burbling shortwave radio and the churning grind of a cement mixer."
- Julian Cowley, The Wire #344, October 2012

"Annie is a composer of great imagination whose work brings together noise, traditional notation, and improvisation with wit and a charming sense of humor. For her fourth Tzadik CD she has put together another remarkable program of pieces inspired by (among other things) 78rpm records, deterioration, junk dealers and baseball. Including a piece for her own electric group inspired by the industrial revolution, a concerto for cello and six players and a composition for solo piano and broken shortwave radio this is one of Annie’s most imaginative and varied collections."
–John Zorn