Vital Weekly (NL)

You may have heard the name Kenneth Kirschner before, because of his CD with Taylor Deupree, Post_Piano for Sub Rosa. Otherwise there is just music available from his website. An interesting, yet not new aspect to this music, is that it’s all freely available. There are three pieces of music on this CD, all of which are dated on the day the piece was begun. Each piece chooses a distinct soundsource (resp. piano and found objects, software synthesizers and mp3s), but nevertheless the sound quite coherent. Kirschner’s main influence is the late Morton Feldman. In the opening piece “September 19, 1998” there are piano strums and loose percussive sounds playing on kitcheware, which over the course of the piece are slightly changed. A subtle piece that is much to my surprise quite acoustic. This is contrast to the lenghty next piece, “September 27, 2002”, which deals with software synthesizer sounds – unnamed which they are – but are either a washy, ambient affair, or short cut to only form dense and complex clicks and cuts rhythms. The last piece, “February 8, 2003” seems to me a bit of random piece… ‘transforms tiny, unconsciously selected fragments of the composer’s mp3 collection into a flowing assemblage designed to evoke the late-period orchestral music of Feldman’. But it seems to me it’s just a mix of mp3 files, but the ‘orchestral’ feel seemed a bit of out of place with the other two pieces. This CD, while showing three aspects of Kirschner’s music, is quite coherent and yet quite different at the same time. Nice one.