Label: Other Minds

前作から4年振りとなるアルバム!!カリフォルニアの作曲家にして音響詩作家、ラジオプロデューサー、そしてこの米老舗レーベルOther Mindsの主宰者として、数々の名作を世に送り出しているCharles Amirkhanian。氏が長年にわたり探求を継続してきた、騒々しい打楽器である"ラチェット"の実験を纏めた集大成アルバム[Ratchet Attach It]。ラチェットのみならず自動演奏ピアノやカウベルも導入、アルメニア民謡やら意味不明打楽器アンサンブルまでが登場する、実に様々な要素が巧みに融合した全11楽章の組曲。解説に「現代音楽に飽き飽きした耳を魅了する」とありますが、まさに全く別物のコミカルな面白物件。







Contains booklet with notes by the composer and liner notes by Dominic Murcott.

Other Minds is pleased to present Ratchet Attach It by the Bay Area composer, impresario, and Chief-Other-Mind Charles Amirkhanian. The work includes a rollicking miasma of drum cadences, fractured player piano rolls of manipulated Rachmaninoff, Harold Arlen's "Stormy Weather," and Armenian folk music, along with interludes for multiple ratchets and cowbells, tastefully crafted into an 11-movement suite sure to delight the most jaded new music ears.

Commissioned by Errollyn Wallen, the UK’s Royal Composer, for the 2021 Spitalfields Festival in London, Ratchet Attach It continues—and crowns—Amirkhanian's career-long fascination with the noisiest of percussion instruments: the ratchet. "The sound up close of a concert orchestral ratchet can be hair-raising," Amirkhanian writes in his composer's notes. "Also, full of bird-chirping-like overtones. I learned this early on by accident while sitting in the enclosed cab of my Volkswagen Bug and turning the handle of this ear-splitting instrument."

Over the course of its 27-minute duration, Amirkhanian dresses up—and dresses down—the ratchet to explore how percussive noise acts in support of, and in opposition to, the keyboard music. "The act of playing this mechanical instrument somehow relates," says Amirkhanian, "to the mechanism of the player piano, with its constant rotating of the paper roll on which music has been encoded." Besides percussive support from Dominic Murcott and the Trinity Laban Percussion Ensemble of London, the work also features pianolist Rex Lawson subverting piano rolls from his vast collection by performing them in unconventional ways, which then are further manipulated by Amirkhanian in the recording studio.