Composer/performer Guy Barash teams up with poet Nick Flynn for this affecting work releasing in digital and CD format, featuring spoken word and structured improvisation with collaborators Kathleen Supové, Frank London, Eyal Maoz, Barash, and Flynn in his own voice. Killdeer has a Vonnegut-esque quality to its clear eyed stance on the world, bolstered by the broad range of expression Barash elicits from the ensemble.

Guy Barash and Nick Flynn’s collaborative release Killdeer carves out a unique space in music for spoken word and ensemble. Using the poetry as a score around which to word paint and create evocative soundscapes, Barash deftly manages the ensemble’s contribution, preserving a taut overall structural approach where moments of increased freedom occur in instrumental alone sections and Flynn’s text is allowed to frame the tone of the album. The poetry is unflinching in its courageous approach to pain and modern world weariness, with Flynn’s specific narratives acting as stand ins for trauma in general, capturing the exhaustion of navigating an often unforgiving world.

An instrumental prelude, “The Space Between Silence and Enough,” opens the album, setting the stage with the kind of controlled frenzy one associates with urban living just before being pushed over the edge. Barash’s glitchy electronics propel the rhythm forward, as Frank London’s trumpet spews burbling gestures, evocative of the vaguely unintelligible yet wisdom filled ramblings one might hear from a lost soul wandering the streets. Guitarist Eyal Maoz splashes the texture with glassy, effected guitar chords, as pianist Kathleen Supové punctuates with vertical sonorities that echo through the glass and steel canyons. Killdeer’s world is unsettled, restless, and seething.

When Nick Flynn enters in “Confessional” with the offhand phrase, “I admit, you haven’t heard from me in a while. In me, there’s a little liar, and a little thief, and a little whore,” we hear the searing honesty of a voice on the edge. The instrumentalists play inside, behind, and around Flynn’s words throughout the album, expressing the restrained cauldron of emotion that lies beneath his often eerie, deadpan delivery. Supové unleashes this latent energy in first of several instrumental outbursts in the opening of “Tattoo,” rumbling piano figures that diffuse before Flynn returns.

London’s clarion trumpet wails take the lead in “Jesus Knew,” with Maoz shadowing his lines with faraway echoes, distorted as if through a pane of impenetrable glass. Flynn’s ruminations on Jesus’ death are accompanied by a doomed pulsation in Barash’s electronics and hints of the glitchy accents from the opening track. In “Saint Augustine,” we hear the musical texture take a strong turn toward hopeful diatonicism, with the piano outlining tonal progressions, veering in and out of functionality and retrogression, reinforcing the otherworldly dream context of Flynn’s texts.

“The King of Fire” crackles with heat, a slow burn of glacially ascending lines in trumpet and electric guitar tremolos and flourishes in the piano over a relentless throbbing in the electronics. The longest track on the album combines three poems - “Parrot / Killdeer / Poem to Be Whispered by the Bedside of a Sleeping Child.” At the opening, Maoz’ processed electric guitar spars with dancing figured on Supové’s keyboard, two creatures engaging in playful mischief. London’s trumpet leads the dialogue with Flynn’s texts for the duration of the movement, before disembodied electric fragments close the track.

“I Will Destroy You” pairs London’s trumpet, struggling to express itself through self-imposed shackles, with bell-like inside-the-piano sonorities from Supové. A haunting figure emerges from Barash’s electronics and brings Flynn back in for a harrowing recollection of a childhood house fire, colored by heavily effected electric guitar. In the final track, “Pied Piper,” piano and electric guitar create a maelstrom of activity over which London’s muted trumpet utters cries of futility. Once again, Barash’s persistent electronics usher Flynn back to the foreground. The mechanistic groove provides momentum towards the final phrases of Flynn’s poetry, recited over the dystopian sonic remains of the album’s last breaths.

- Dan Lippel