richard garet l'avenir

Future Tense

In keeping with the title’s reference to the future-as-planned versus the future-as-uncertainty, Richard Garet’s l’avenir strikes a compelling balance between a composer’s control over the unfolding of a kind of Grand Narrative, and an unsettling drift that refuses to resolve into a standard form, scale or reasoning. This tension presents itself most often as a kind of delicious free-floating dread that runs throughout the single long piece, allowing the interplay of tones that comprises its midsection to be genuinely beautiful without a hint of prettiness. Perhaps, then, this is a piece about expectation, for there is never a doubt in this listener’s mind that the piece is developing along a firm declarative line of intent; however that line remains occluded, withdrawn from view to an extent that transitions can be genuinely startling, but are never disjunctive.

Beginning in a field of pointilistic textures that brings to mind both Günter’s “Red Shift” and Xenakis’ “Concrete PH”, l’avenir develops a delicate interplay of tonal structures, bodies of sound that move together and abraid in an oceanic middle ground between organic environment and dramatic composition. The feeling is of a world slowly cohering, pulling equally from the poles of a fragmentary chaos and from the stillness of silence. In a wonderful denoument, this process seems to reverse and we are witness to a steady erosion, as if the surfaces that were under construction previously in the piece were now being methodically worn away by a solvent or acid, until all that is left are the digital underpinnings that support all modern audio.

A very welcome addition to Winds Measure’s already consistently outstanding offerings, l’avenir is a work that truly approaches the qualities of the sublime.

reviewed by Andy Graydon, 04 - 2008