Adam Zuckerman (US composer) scored and recorded Starpermeable (NUENI RECS #11), here played by a small chamber group on viola, harmonica, flute, guitar, and percussion. Three separate named “melodies” have fed into it, although the playback of the CD mysteriously ends up as 21 very short tracks, which start and stop in an endearingly odd fashion as they exude charming and unassuming tones.
Unlike the more severe and testing modernist minimalists we sometimes hear on Insub.Records, Zuckerman is not living in denial of beauty, air, or sunlight, and he has a basinful of conceptual ideas that drive his wispy motifs and gestural wands. If I half-understand his printed statement of intent, he seems to be rethinking melody in terms of time and memory, and mapping out music as a sequence of points – which probably is not the same thing as conventional notation, which is my best guess having only just encountered the work of this fellow who also wishes to engage with the environment and produce art installations too. It may be a commonplace to say as he does that his “melodies…become only through the process of their realisation”, which sounds like an elliptical way of saying that we only hear music when musicians play it, but it might indicate something about his simple joy of discovery, hearing his music unfold like a flower opening. If he was a watercolour painter, he’s be unwilling to stain even half an inch of his textured paper with the merest smidge of eggshell blue if it didn’t feel quite right to him.
Lines of a poem by Paul Celan have been translated into English, and printed here; some of them have turned into “track titles” here, if we can use so vulgar a term; they are evocative, like ‘Gone Into The Night’ and ‘Something Remains for Wild Wasting’. Readers are free to accuse me of shrinking to size of an elf and joining the fairies in a dance around the mushroom ring, but there’s real conviction and moments of delicate beauty in Adam Zuckerman’s gentle interventions. And – oddly for this all-acoustic music, it feels like it’s being played on a very modest soft-spoken Casio. Released on Hector Rey’s anti-copyright label in Bilbao. (04/10/2023)