Mark Kirschenmann - Cybersonic Outreach (2021) [Hi-Res]

Composer, trumpeter, and improviser Mark Kirschenmann releases Cybersonic Outreach, a focused collection of improvisations for processed trumpet and electronics. Kirschenmann’s scholarship has focused on improvising practices, and he has cultivated his own unique approach that draws on wide ranging sources, from Messiaen to Stockhausen to Morton Subotnick, Miles Davis to Ornette Coleman, and including various idiomatic musical traditions.

Kirschenmann’s approach on this release remains consistent throughout — for each piece, he establishes an electronic environment that evolves during the track, and uses effects and processing to transform his trumpet into a different instrumental voice. Within the context of that “instrument,” Kirschenmann then explores pitch and gestural material, mining it for depth. His patient excavation of unconventional scalar and melodic materials frequently takes on a ritualistic character, functioning as a meditation on expressive affect, gesture, and registral expansion that shares some characteristics with Indian classical music. Within this consistent soloist and electronics frame, Kirschenmann’s palette is broad, cultivating several unique timbres and sonic devices.

Kirschenmann’s ability to transform the timbre of his trumpet is remarkable — he can sound like an exotic double reed instrument one moment (Long Walk), a flute/piccolo the next (The Cascades), and a pitch shifting electric keyboard out of 70’s fusion after that (Turning Time Tables and Lamentation for my Mother). Sometimes the effects on the trumpet sound are more overt, as in the harmonized arpeggiations of Out of Bounds, while at other times it seems Kirschenmann is able to generate timbral transformation largely through his own control of the horn, like in the prayerful, quasi-vocal dialogue between low and high registers in Duet for Vocaloid Trumbots.

Similarly, the electronics are alternately ambient and active. In The Cascades, they are glitchy, evoking the percolation of a vintage mainframe. In Out of Bounds, they establish a nocturnal landscape of insistent crickets and insects. Color Wheel features a mournful low brass sound, a “tuba mirum” of sorts, over an increasingly active electronic part of unsettling bell sounds. They establish an introspective harmonic pad that supports Kirschenmann’s poignant phrasing in Lamentation for my Mother.

Cybersonic Outreach is a manifestation of Kirschenmann’s meticulously cultivated approach to improvisation, timbre, and technology. But it is also a deeply felt personal statement, an hour’s worth of music that manifests a spiritual journey. It is this marriage of the intellectual and ineffable impulses that make Kirschenmann’s work so impactful and uniquely moving.

– Dan Lippel