Once again Electoshock Records presents another genre-bending album that defies conventional categorization in the form of Roman Stolyar's 'Missa Apocryph'. To break the album down to its basic components- take a base of progressive rock, add modern classical chorale and season it liberally with liturgical Gregorian chant. Yet like many culinary recipes, the dish cannot be solely judged by the sum of its ingredients.

Although most listeners in the U.S. probably haven't heard of the Russian (Siberian) composer Roman Stolyar, I'm sure he is much more known in Europe (and probably elsewhere) especially in Russia. Stolyar's background is in modern (free) jazz piano and classical composition. He studied under Yuri Yukechev and has collaborated with such notables as Anatoly Vapirov, Carl Bergstrom-Nielsen, Hans Schüttler, Lot Lorien (Bulgarian world-fusion band), among other projects such as jazz groups Alter Ego, and New Generation and Shanti, an eclectic music duo with Roman and his sister Yelena Silantieva on vocals. For all of his jazz and classical background, Roman looks and sounds like he could have been in one of any progressive rock bands of the 1970's, although he would have been too young to be there at the time having been born in 1967. Then again, almost any progressive rock musician will have some jazz and classical background, some weighing more in one direction than the other. But the music on 'Missa Apocryph' is more about the vocals than it is about the instrumental aspect, as the chorale work dominates in nearly every way.

'Missa Apocryph' is heavily reliant on the Sharomov Vocal Ensemble consisting of Yelena Zabvarfskaya and Olga Ossipova (sopranos); Ludmila Tyukhaeva (mezzo-soprano); Alexander Zverev (tenor) and Pavel Sharomov (bass) to realize the concept of bringing Gregorian liturgical music into the 21st century. Now this is NOT Gregorian chant, although the lyrics (as well as song titles) are derived from it. There six tracks ' 'Kyrie,' 'Gloria,' 'Credo,' 'Sanctus,' 'Benedictus,' and 'Agnus Dei' that span a little under forty minutes. The music begins with a little atmospheric (and amazingly played) solo alto recorder by Roman before the drums (yes, there are drums, programmed drums, but still drums) keyboard accents and allegro vocals kick in. The phrase 'Kyrie eleison' is done in elaborate near-baroque rondos, but with expression that includes modern jazz as well as traditional classical. For reference, anyone familiar with some of the more elaborate vocal choral work by the prog-rock band Gentle Giant might have a clue as to what's going on here, but the GG boys are rank amateurs in the chorale department compared with the Sharomov Vocal Ensemble. There is a tremendous amount of counterpoint and even operatic phrasing as the Sharamov folks belt it out. This is often enhanced with dramatic keyboard accents among the ostinatos. 'Gloria' is a bit more moderate and grand, but still embellished with contrapuntal vocal accents. To some extent, Roman's orchestration takes a back seat to the vocals but still moves it along enhancing the ambience. At times it could be as simple as a bass underpinning, and at others quite polyphonic, yet never overriding the vocals.

I am wondering if it was a conscious decision on Roman's part to use obviously synthetic sounds for his instrumentation rather than pipe organ, piano and real strings. Even the drums don't sound quite real, although the programming is quite elaborate. Maybe that's the modern aspect he was striving for, but it tends to make it 'prog-rocky' something purists might have a hard time with. Prog-rock aficionados should love it though. There are no instrumental solos or extended passages, only occasional brief interludes. 'Credo' is perhaps the closest piece to modern classical vocal music with its very stylized phrasing, the longest piece on the album with little to no instrumental backing until the halfway point. This sounds like an incredibly difficult piece of music to perform. It's really quite amazing, and I have not much to compare it to, except maybe Brian Ferneyhough, although his stuff is a lot more difficult to listen to. Ferneyhough's 'Missa Brevis' comes close but is a good deal more avant-garde and disjunctive. Stolyar's music has smoothness to its form that makes it much more palatable.

'Sanctus' and 'Benedictus' have a lot of rhythmic impetus to them heightening the drama, and they could stand together as a prog-rock mini-opus. If Wakeman or Emerson were doing music like this, people might be buying their albums again! There is a lot more harmonic unison in the vocals on these pieces than the others, quite effective too. There is also some real piano on this track. 'Agnus Dei' has a cinematic ambience through much of it being dreamlike and very moody. I could easily see it being adapted to a soundtrack.

To sum up, Stolyar's 'Missa Apocryph' is much more than the sum of its components- a rich pastiche of the ancient and modern, a work of depth and beauty. I would have preferred a real drummer and some elements like pipe organ and more piano, and maybe the instruments taking a bigger part in the music (perhaps an expanded edition?) but for what it is, it's great. Something I'd love to see performed live. I doubt I'll ever have the chance though.

In spite of the legendary Keith Jarrett defended free jazz players against the criticism by purists and traditionalists some years ago as one of the highest form of jazz, nowadays a lot of festival directors and people involved in music teaching have still too many prejudices against this branch of jazz, maybe the most radical and 'mystical' due to the vanishing ' sometimes just apparent ' and the consequent disarrangement of beat, meter, formal symmetry. The Ames Room trio had some experience with such a distrustful perspective and discordant feedbacks 'bout their style, but they decided to issue this provocative record including just two (very long) exhibitions, they performed in 2009. The first one was recorded at the festival NPAI in Niort (France) and in that occasion Adrien Chiquet, the director of Mulhouse's METEO festival, complained that the best gig in Niort was 'fucking jazz', while the second one was recorded in Poznan (Poland) and Polish organizers said The Ames Room's style was not jazz! The three eccentric guys behind this project 'the Berlin-based Australian double bassist Clayton Thomas, the Australian born jazz drummer, electronic musician and composer Will Guthrie and the French electro-acoustic composer, organist and alto saxophonist Jean-Luc Guionnet ' define their own style as hard driven terror jazz, but they don't seem to be too interested in definitions or academic learned disquisitions and I suppose even the listeners are going to relegate similar troubles to the back of the class after discovering the raw energy this combo is able to free throughout its eccentric session. I particularly appreciated not only the outlandish espressivo spontaneousness of their sound, but also the way they let 'speak' their instruments, being Jean Luc's saxophone ' it's really funny the way he can modulate it as to turn into croaking, moaning, shrieking and screeching across the intensively devious drum dynamics agitated by Mr.Guthrie's sticks and pedals! - and Will's drum the greater dialogists of the sessions and if you concentrate on the role inside the choral performance by each instrument it really seems they created a soundtrack for an Ames room, based on the three-dimensional optical illusion invented by American ophthalmologist Adelbert Ames in 1934 given by a particular interior design for buildings where dwarfs could look like giants and viceversa. Funny brainy stuff!

This breathtaking electro-acoustic record, coming from a prolific collaboration between the talented British composer Joby Talbot ' member of the creative team that produced the ballet 'Chroma' for the Royal Ballet, whose curriculum twinkles for a plenty of awarded works, such as his first major orchestral opera 'Luminescence', premiered by the BBC Philarmonic, boasting an enviable profile as a film and Tv composer as well ' and the quick wit by Benjamin Wynn aka Deru - an electronic musician and sound designer from Los Angeles, counting many releases labeled by Delikatessen Records, Neo Ouija, Ghostly International, Mush, Merck, whose passion for art and architecture seems to live in concord with his high interest in music technology innovations and his talent in carving marvelous synthetic symphonies -, was intended to act as the score for Wayne McGregor's ballet Genus, based on Charles Darwin's theories and discoveries of evolution, being a really topical matter aroused by media due to the increasing interest in genetic research. I'll skip the subject of Darwinism ' you'll find a huge amount of stuff about this matter -, but it's impossible to pass over the impressive charm of the evoked atmosphere in this release as well as its narrative homogeneity, doing its part side by side the documentary inflection of this opus (there are some excerpts taken from Darwin's notes, among which the scientist's ones describing the exact moment of the discovery of evolution, hieratically beginning with the words 'I think..' forestalling his famous diagram as well as many other quotations), so as the whole atmosphere of Genus seems a musical adaptation of the evolutionary graph, translated into a fable-like musical language.

The first four tracks, grouped into just one title, Transmutation, sound more austere and tenser: the initial crackling fading into slightly delayed modulated voices which seem coming from distant places, before they begin flowing around the sound sphere and finally amalgamating into undulating choirs, is going to carry your imagination to the very first evolutionary phases and smelling the scent of that primordial soup Darwin speaks about. The somewhat-liturgical atmosphere, maybe influenced by the location where it was recorded I the end of July 2007 ' St-Michael's Church at Highgate in London - is partially broken by the mechanical sound-clicks by Deru dropped into the gloomy smoky soup in the second track, partially reminding to my mind that kind of sound sculptures Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto usually mould together. The Transmutations follow an ascending whirl-like movement with many dramatic and sometimes obscure moments (that's maybe cause their project has sometimes been compared to the one by the esteemed Mexican composer Murcof'¦ even if Talbot & Deru's sound is not so dim) till the erupting togetherness of all sounding elements reach a critical point. After that moment, according to the words by Joby Talbot, the music 'fractures and collapses into the ambient sounds of the storm that raged outside the church where we recording', a magical moment you could breathe in the second (and more idylliac) part of Genus, featuring a touching performance as solo violinist by Louisa Fuller and the choral one by The Duke Quartet ' it seems that at the end of the recording of the suite Genus, flood waters begun cascading through the building's interiors! -.

The final movement, The Great Tree of Life, shows the perfect amalgamation between classical music elements and the buzz of minimal electronics and it definitively depicts in a lovingly magnificent way the final revelation of the English naturalist, i.e. the discovery of the mechanism by which life has covered the surface of the earth 'with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications'. Available in a deluxe edition (strictly limited to 100 copies) with hardcover sleeve and a 20-page booklet, Genus contains also two intriguing video-clips and a sort of documentary on the matter. Hauntingly sublime workout!

The collaboration between the two industrial/dark ambient polish projects is a mesmerizing production of sorrow. The album is inspired by two poems: 'Madman' and 'Modern Icarus', aiming to tale the descending into the pits of madness of a man. However the result is not so strongly conceptual and linear and, honestly, sounds more like the descending into despair and the self-consciousness of it; but the technical level of the production is amazing and the album sounds good.
The album starts with "mind infinite" and his bass drone and some noise coloring the darkness. "Do you see them too" begins to show the structure of the work: there's a dark ambient drone and some field recordings inserts that create the atmosphere. The result could well stay in a movie due to the cinematic effect. "last waltz" is a love song for dead people with his romantic line of piano. Then the voices: "It's a suicide ... a complicated situation" in the track "boundless oblivion", this track is the peak of the album: bells samples, noise, field recordings tell the story of someone trying to understands what happens in someone else mind. "A clear fuse" close the album with some sort of irony with the carillon like line of piano.
The album sounds well and show that it's conceived as a concept, this is not a innovative release, the composition is full of all the typical trademarks of the genre, but is a record of substance and really well produced.

Gary DiBenedetto is an electro-acoustic composer and kinetic sculptor from New Jersey, who specializes in interactive installations. He has an impressive international resume going all the way back to the early 1970s, and Twin Towers is his latest audio work. While most Electroshock Records artist are European (with a high concentration of Russian) artists, Gary is not, but his music is no less avant garde. As you might expect from an electro-acoustic installation artist, the music is abstract, resembling more a sound-sculpture than any traditional musical format. I have read the intellectual explanations of the pieces on 'Twin Towers' on Gary's website (and also on the CD liner notes), but I won't be rehashing them to any great degree in this review. The nine pieces on this CD are intended to represent different things, and only the final title track refers to the 9/11 tragedy.

The opener (no pun intended) 'Knock and the Door Shall Be Opened,' is based on the sound of the men's room door at the State Library Complex in Berlin. It doesn't get any more obscure than that I suppose. There are some electronics, and mechanical sounds that must be the men's room door. An interesting sound-sculpture for sure. At one point, it sounds like somebody's having a little trouble negotiating said door. 'Walden Pond' is both liquidy and creaky with random sample and hold electronics, buzzes and burbles. 'A Question of Principle' (in 3 Movements) begins with some bellish tones and seemingly randomly played synthetic strings and other sporadic percussion for the First Movement. Not my cup of tea at all. It's those artificial synth strings that really leave me cold. Perhaps if more realistic strings were employed it might have come off better, but it just sounds cheesy. Second Movement dispenses with the obnoxious string ensemble and concentrates more on a clatter of electro-acoustic effects. Not bad, pretty interesting. The Third Movement brings back the obnoxious string ensemble again, much to my chagrin. The other elements of this track are engaging enough, but I can't get past those ersatz strings. This piece is supposed to have some political-religious implications regarding Nicaragua and El Salvador, but it is a stretch to glean that from just listening without reading the text of the artist's vision.

'Oh You're So Adollorable' employs some squinky electronic sounds and rumbles with an occasional repetitive vocal sample stating the obvious ('one dollah') in the background. The temporarily electronics morph into a surreal Star Spangled Banner melody. There is another repeated vocal sample by what sounds like a chorus of Third World children upping the ante to 'three dollah'. The piece sort of reminds me of Joe Byrd's (Field Hippies) music, perhaps an obscure reference that only 'old heads' are likely to get.

'Petroleum Complex' is a brief but interesting piece with perhaps the most currently relevant title, but it doesn't sound very oily to me. Its juxtaposition of high, bright tonality with random percussion elements and low ominous tones seems perfectly in balance. This is classic avant-garde electronic composition. 'Self Portrait ' employs a number of squiggly-wiggly sounds, and further into the piece, processed voice. I am thinking now, that from a strictly audial standpoint, the theme of this CD could just as well be about a colony of alien insects as its intended subject matter. The final track, 'Twin Towers' (the longest track at 10:46) begins with the solo recitation of poems by Meena Alexander that lasts for the first 3:40 of the piece. After that DiBenedetto simulates the flights and explosions of the planes crashing into the World Trade center. What follows is a surreal aftermath, occasionally punctuated by manipulated kettledrum samples (played by high school students). The piece is supposed to condense the 101 minute tragedy into 1/20th of its time frame. It makes me thankful that Gary didn't do it in real time.

As a whole, 'Twin Towers' is an interesting, if somewhat perplexing listen. There are parts that I liked a lot, and some things I didn't care for at all. So it goes with the avant-garde. If you love abstract electronics, especially on an intellectual level, you will probably enjoy this, and even if you don't like all of it, there are elements that make it worthwhile.