muzycy:
Two-Way Street:
Ashlee Booth, cello
Adam Lion, percussion

Editor's info:
“The Reinvention of Romance,” a new work for percussion and cello that examines the care and empathy that emerge when two lives share space. Over the course of 90 minutes, a series of repeating patterns creates a peculiar kind of harmony in which two musicians are rarely “playing together” but are nonetheless intimately bonded. The Knoxville-based duo Two-Way Street (Ashlee Booth and Adam Lion) commissioned Hennies to compose “a very long piece,” for this recording they step into its two intertwining roles.

acloserlisten.com:
The word “Romance” usually makes us think of grand emotional displays, of an intense and powerful relationship to another, a sublime trip towards the heart of the sun. It is the motif of millions of songs both happy and sad, all of them, whether thrilling or depressing, essentially pointing us towards the same message: love is not only wild, it is perhaps wilderness itself. So what does an experimentally-minded album for cello and percussion mean when it bears the name of The Reinvention of Romance?

Sarah Hennies’ work tends to touch upon the rhythms of everyday life, often through a minimalist approach that emphasizes the repetitions, the quietness, the small shifts and changes. Instead of raising the seemingly insignificant moment to a monumental level as composers like Morton Feldman did, however, she leaves them as is, drawing attention to the fact that the textures of our lives are not really guided by loud irruptive events, but by the firm and barely noticeable cadence of the unimportant. It is the marvelous in reverse: in our times, we are taught to exploit the wilderness within, to seek out significance in disruption, to achieve Romance even if it costs someone’s life – in this music, the value of the everyday lies in its ordinary flows and the recurrence of things and events you will not remember, but that have n.......
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noweidzieodmorza.com
Sarah Hennies zasługuje na osobne podsumowanie w tym roku (polecam Resevoir 1, Spectral Malsconcities i Extra Time a bonusowo tekst w The New York Times). Reintervention of Romance powstało na zamówienie Ashlee Booth and Adam Lion z Two-Way Street – to następujący po sobie zestaw wzorów dźwiękowych, które oszczędnie budują repetycje, rezonujące echem, a czasem wręcz swoim uciążliwym metalicznym wybrzmiewaniem. Duet gra na wiolonczeli i wibrafonie, stosując smyczki na obu instrumentach, okazjonalnie grając na tym drugim w bardziej klasyczny sposób. Kluczowe są zapętlenia, grzebanie w rozjeżdżającym się patternie czy po prostu rutynie. Tę powtarzalność, powracające echo, przeobrażenia, z których Hennies udało się wyciągnąć esencję i piękno, dostrzeżemy obejmując uchem całość. To też odwołanie do wspólnego życia dwóch osób w tej samej przestrzeni. W pandemicznym zamknięciu w te 90 minut zyskuje dodatkowy wymiar.
by Jakub Knera