Various Artists – Monica Pearce: Textile Fantasies (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:08:40 minutes | 1,22 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Centrediscs
Texas-based Canadian composer Monica Pearce’s debut full-length release presents a series of keyboard and percussion-driven chamber works each paying homage to the form and feel of a specific textile. Though she employs smaller instrumental forces throughout it, Textile Fantasies manages to showcase Pearce’s uncanny ability to produce striking and evocative sonorities that seem to maximize her resources and impart an undeniable atmosphere to each composition. In addition to Pearce’s abilities, this recording also features performances by leading Canadian musicians such as keyboardists Cheryl Duvall, Wesley Chen, Barbara Pritchard, and Joseph Ferretti, tabla player Shawn Mativetsky, as well as renowned ensembles TorQ Percussion and SHHH!! Ensemble.The opening composition, toile de jouy for solo harpsichord, shows Pearce putting the ancient instrument to an unorthodox and decidedly modern use. Its delicate, staccato sound is conventionally associated with contrapuntal music, but here Pearce scores it to generate rough-hewn, opaque blocks of fortissimo dissonances. The piano and percussion duet leather, a heavily rhythmic work, similarly creates an almost unpitched-sounding lower register rumble with the piano, which Pearce sets into contrast with the bright timbres of gongs and other metal percussion. Velvet, for percussion ensemble, takes cascades of notes and repeated motifs on mallet percussion and places them against a background hum of thickening and thinning density. Perhaps the most novel combination of instrumental voices occurs in damask for tamboura, tabla, and toy piano.
Tracklist:
01. Monica Pearce – Pearce: Toile de jouy (07:57)
02. Monica Pearce – Pearce: Leather (08:31)
03. Monica Pearce – Pearce: Chain maille (07:59)
04. Monica Pearce – Pearce: Houndstooth (07:49)
05. Monica Pearce – Pearce: Silks (10:24)
06. Monica Pearce – Pearce: Velvet (08:48)
07. Monica Pearce – Pearce: Damask (08:52)
08. Monica Pearce – Pearce: Denim (08:16)
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