Composer, synth player, and saxophonist Earl Howard's latest disc is a rendition of music inspired by some principles of physics. As the liner notes explain, the title piece is inspired by a physics phenomenon, a lepton, being " any of a class of particles with spin of ˝ that are not subject to the strong force and that are believed to be truly elementary and not composed of quarks or other subunits. The leptons known or believed to exist are the electron and electron-neutrino, the muon and mu-neutrino, and the tau-lepton and tau-neutrino." Despite this academic sounding description, Clepton (which is lepton, with a "C" added up front) actually sounds like something Jimi Hendrix might have come up with, had he had the kind of formal training as a composer that Howard had at the California Institute of the Arts and been accompanied by such people as Howard teams up with here: George Graewe, piano; Ernst Reijseger, cello and Gerry Hemingway, drums.
Along with composition, there is some streaming improvisation, including some live processing. The disc's feature is, of course, the title piece, a 38-minute swirling, everything and the kitchen sink sounds, in a vortex of heightened activity in which the musicians seem to be exploring their material and commenting on it as they go along. There are episodes with textures varying from white noise swooshes, to extended pointillist punctuations, as well as serene contemplations where silence takes a part. The piece, in short, conveys a number of states of mind and being, while have a conceptually center.
Two other pieces, one 6 minutes, the other nearly 15, continue the electro-acoustic odyssey. The first, Improvisation, maintains the same principles of texture as the title track, with the same musicians, although with a more placid and evenly-tempered stream of sounds. Rosebud rounds off the triptych with synthesizer and drums, and the emphasis on percussiveness give this almost a Balinese gamelan feel, but with lots of other textures thrown in, including clashing, crashing walls of sound from the synth and heavy-rock poundings from the drums, with a squeal of seagulls over-flying the whole from time to time: a very dynamic, exciting piece of music that runs a wide gamut of emotions via the varied sounds the electronics can generate and reminds us of the power of the synthesizer to excite and evoke.
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