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Time:Spans’ Provocative Puzzles New York
DiMenna Center
08/13/2025 -
Chris Trapani: Sunk 45s (World Premiere)
Bekah Simms: Spectra (US Premiere)
Rebecca Saunders: Us Dead Talk Love (US Premiere)
Noa Frenkel (Contralto)
Ensemble Nikel: Brian Archinal (Percussion), Yaron Deutsch (Electric Guitar), Antoine Françoise (Keyboards), Patrick Stadler (Saxophone), Aaron Holloway-Nahum (Sound Engineer)
Ensemble Nikel (© Courtesy of the Artists)
“Oh, oscillating wildly, Gut-wrenching sub-bass and piercing treble...”
From Us Dead Talk Love
“Of all the many birds that fly/I like the pig”
Animals, by Hebe Uhart
For a decade now, Time:Spans has given us three weeks of rumbling, shouting, whispering, aleatory, atonal, jazzy simple and incomprehensible 21st Century music. Those accustomed to music of our time (which is the only music heard in the 19th Century) will know the names. Others (me, for instance) will be ignorant, save the recognition of that old‑timer Steve Reich, and last night, Chris Trapani.
Otherwise, like going to an eclectic wine‑tasting, we pick our glasses, sniff, swirl, sip and either swallow or spit it out.
Last night, the most memorable choices were the performers, not the composers. Ensemble Nikel is a quartet of keyboards, guitar, sax, drums and electronic reverbs, which could only be Swiss. That is, they played every hemidemisemiquaver with quantum accuracy.
In Mr. Trapani’s work, they could play cool jazz with microscopic futuristic and archaic background sounds. In Rebecca Saunders’ vocal work, percussionist Brian Archinal had a huge battery of tools, yet one had to listen closely to hear them, since the whole tapestry was so intricately and minutely arranged.
The instruments could have been antithetic, but the Ensemble Nikel created the aural wholeness of a Bukhara carpet.
The trio of works called for different instruments–and the effects were wildly different.
First was Chris Trapani’s Sunk 45s, apparently the “below sea‑level vantage point of South Louisiana.”
I’d heard Mr. Trapani’s previous works, which were electrifying, eclectic, and in one case a post‑Reichian mélange of West Africa, California folk rock and psychedelic San Francisco rock. Here we had (and I get this from the excellent Time:Spans program) “sides from a 45rpm record dug out of the silt.” Those inner sounds were Charlie Parker band sounds in one movement. And that wonderful fuzzy sexy Ornette Coleman style in another.
But was this really Trapani as jazz composer? No, instead we had New York (not Louisiana) night sounds. Tight mournful, a time trip back 80 years ago. First and last movements were less memories, more an abstract painting with sax and guitar slowly up and down a scale. A prelude and a postlude with Mr. Trapani capturing another era.
Bekah Simms’ Spectra had the weirdest premise for music since Strauss set a German philosopher to orchestra. Spectra didn’t refer to spectral music or music of the spheres. It was based on (wait for it), the Spectra Breast Milk Pump. More specifically, Ms. Simms’ own Cesarian operation and the following sounds and rhythms of the machine. “Mechanical, rhythmic and subtly changing in pitch and articulation.”
All of which was apparently replicated (I haven’t heard the Spectra myself) by Ensemble Nikel itself. The work was relatively short, had a marvelous ongoing pulse, color and possibly aural imagery. For Ms Simms knew her Ensemble Nikel for whom it was written. And of course knew the milk of human kindness.
Methinks it could serve as prelude to John Alden Carpenter’s 1915 Adventures in a Perambulator.
N. Frenkel (© Yael Bartana)
The final work brought in contralto Noa Frenkel for a work based around poet Ed Atkins’ Us Dead Talk Love. I twice‑read the poem excerpts, written in the program. But didn’t memorize the text. And such was my downfall.
Ms. Frenkel has a voice usually labeled a “force of nature.” But unlike her virtuosic colleagues, she doesn’t zoom from a tenor to high soprano voice. She aptly and deftly soars from a baritone rumble to high contralto, with all the sprechtstimme tricks of a German Expressionist.
I didn’t get the poem words during her performance, but later appreciated its hyper-emotional textures (“I want to map my mouth with the word ‘smoke’”) and Ms Frenkel did all the leaps, swallows, spits, solar sounds, ghostly whispers and vocal gymnastics which one expects in such music. The Ensemble Nikel provided background sounds which were as intricate, and as well constructed, as the voice of the stunning vocalist.
Harry Rolnick
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