Here is another consignment of belligerent ‘crossover’, the hard minimalism fostered by New York’s Bang on a Can Festival – Andriessen-inspired, pop-influenced and scarcely definable in terms of easy listening. The Michael Gordon canon on disc already includes at least one major statement: the strangely haunting Industry which lent its name to Sony Classical’s first Bang on a Can collection (2/96). That was an unconventional display piece for electronically treated cello taking a simple Schnittke-like chordal sequence and brutalizing it via an ‘industrial’ process. In six clearly defined sections, five “trances” and a penultimate, inter-faith “trance drone”, Trance takes up similar ideas but in extending them to over 50 minutes is even more reliant on the virtuosity of the performers to sustain interest.
Icebreaker’s realization of its variously pounding and glittering textures is a tour de force of a kind, but I was disappointed by the quality of the engineering. The all-important bass-line is sometimes a little woolly with neither the resonant punch achieved by the Sony Classical team, nor the crispness and definition characteristic of the Paisley Park recording venue. Gordon’s often intriguing collage of sounds needs more space to expand in the imagination: Argo provide plenty of directional information but not quite enough depth of perspective. Hence, “Trance 1” is in danger of sounding tinny, for all the precision of the playing and the provision of distinctive, rock-style hooks to latch on to. While clashes of metre undermine the otherwise straightforward dance rhythms, much of the writing comes courtesy of Philip Glass. “Trance 3” begins with attractively whirring textures and is not without wit amid the developing clamour. “Trance 4” starts like a Reichian study in counterpoint. Thereafter my interest waned as the ambient, world music aspect gained ground. The arrival of assorted sampled chants before the music builds to its unsurprisingly raucous catharsis did not strike me as particularly radical or even peripherally interesting. On the other hand, if wearing a baseball cap the wrong way round and writing without the benefit of capital letters is what it takes to confer street cred these days, the composer may be on to a good thing and the compilers of the booklet can congratulate themselves. The design and packaging as such is well up to the standards of the house.
Don’t let me put you off if you like this sort of thing and have an insatiable passion for repetitive, gradually evolving structures. Only play loud and, if possible, hear live. Is Trance liberating or brutalizing? The choice is yours. There are, you will have gathered, no tunes.'