Cuban-American composer Orlando García releases la vida que vendrá features four electro-acoustic solo works culminating in an ensemble work for the prolific loadbang ensemble. García invites listeners inside timbre as he explores the interaction between related and contrasting sounds.
On la vida que vendrá, Orlando Jacinto García draws our attention inward in various ways. His careful attention to the full envelope of pitches focuses on attacks, durations, and endings, honoring each detail as a discrete musical event. Despite using pre-composed fixed media throughout these electro-acoustic works, García manages to create the illusion of a dynamic, evolving relationship between live performer and electronic sounds. Altogether, this is music that transforms the listening space, creating a halo of sound in each piece.

Resonating Color Fields opens with trumpeter Andy Kozar intoning several clarion calls, each higher than the last and shaped into elegant swells, in what seems initially to be an acoustic void. As the notes ascend, the ambient space becomes increasingly animated. When it reaches a goal pitch, a more active, swirling timbre surrounds the unison arrival. The textures in the trumpet evolve to articulated repeated notes and later fragmentary gestures spanning wider intervallic leaps. The electronics expand the range of the oscillating pitch cluster for increased intensity before compressing back into the swirling unison. In the final section of the piece, we hear delicate glissandi on the strings inside a piano and the resultant resonance created.

en un universo paralelo for baritone ty bouque, with pre-recorded samples of their voice, is an incantation, a fantasy of layered lines that unfolds with ritual intensity. García pulls us in and out of the solo soliloquy context and heterophonic textures, constantly reminding the listener of the reality and the illusion, only to recreate it once again. bouque moves through long tones, chromatic figures sung with variable timbres, and extended techniques that broaden the range of the “enhanced” baritone that García has crafted.

Conversations with Harry, featuring bass clarinetist Adrián Sandí, establishes a duality from the outset between fragile, high register extended techniques and unsettling multiphonics in the middle register. The electronics in this case are samples of clarinetist Harry Spaarnaay’s demonstrations of a technique compendium he assembled, The Bass Clarinet. Midway through the work, a scurrying ascending figure provides the backdrop for a plaintive two note melodic gesture, providing textural contrast. Overall, the prevailing atmosphere on Conversations with Harry is one of quiet, restless energy, interrupted by the grind of moments of tightly wound discord.

nubes nocturnas for trombone and electronics, played by William Lang, returns to the reverent mood of en un universo paralelo with an expansive low register drone alternating down a major second that highlights the trombone’s rich overtone content. As the piece progresses, García introduces grainy multiphonics that populate the live part and the electronics, and the pitch landscape migrates away from the initial two fundamentals.

The title track la vida que vendrá is scored for the full loadbang quartet, and is the only acoustic work on the album. García takes advantage of the potential for dialogue between instruments to create the most rhythmically vital piece on the album. The work opens with two phrases on a unison pitch passed through the ensemble, highlighting the subtle differences between each instrument’s timbre. bouque whispers and articulates text fragments, then intoning new pitches which the winds reinforce in their sustain. A unison rhythm in the winds signals a new section, a hint at characteristic Cuban rhythms. But García’s point of view on these evocative stylistic elements is from a stance of late Stravinskian detachment; they are extracted from a typically orchestrated ensemble context and considered on their own, as musical artifacts. The instrumentalists are assigned subtle percussion parts, creating momentary polyrhythmic landscapes, before they quickly fade away. García uses these fleeting rhythmic episodes as coloristic elements in the trajectory of the work, emerging and receding to act in consort with the more contemplative moments. Despite the presence of four musicians instead of one, the music retains the quietude that is pervasive throughout the album, an introspective contemplation of the nature of sound and timbre unfolding at a pace that facilitates close listening.

– Dan Lippel