Dreyblatt's The Adding Machine
Every Labor Day I find myself upstate at an annual county fair, and each year the best display is the old machine display. There's a ton of weird Rube Goldbergian contraptions that wheeze, chug, spew smoke and spit oil as they do things like husk corn or wash laundry. Each machine has its own personality and its own sound. Listening to Arnold Dreyblatt's new CD reminds me of those machines. Every track moves along like old-fashioned clockwork, ticking and sweating away.
Dreyblatt, a second-generation minimalist composer, has been exploring the sound of strings for nearly two and a half decades. His early work literally examined the resonant possibilities of one string by having a musician pluck away over and over, creating a multi-harmonic drone that was surprisingly rich. The plucking was always rhythmic, so that no matter how dry the exercise could get, there was something to tap your foot to. Over the years, Dreyblatt has sought to extend the intimate insight he gained from these early works and bring them to several instruments in ensemble settings. He began to call these groups the Orchestra of Excited Strings, which gives a good description of what Dreyblatt's music is all about. The strings never sit still; they're always vibrating off one another in wildly intense ways, creating a musical equivalent to op-art. In fact, invoking another visual metaphor, Dreyblatt's complex textures give the sonic feeling of an optical illusion. With so much going on, you start to hear entire worlds between the notes being played.
Dreyblatt's success is contingent upon good musicianship. It's a different kind of expertise, though, not so much based on blinding skill or the ability to play kick-ass riffs, but rather involves a musician who's willing to buy into the intensity of sound that repetitive playing can offer in conjunction with other instruments. So although he's got some technically amazing musicians on this disc?including several Bang on a Can members?often their job is to just keep plucking the same string over and over again in increasingly complex rhythmic patterns. His latest orchestra plays a variety of string instruments including cimbaloms, zithers and modified electric guitars and basses. (Dreyblatt's been taking apart and putting together musical instruments for years: his "excited strings bass" has longer strings, giving it a deeper and more resonant sound.) The disc also includes a bevy of very busy percussion, the musicians slamming their instruments with bows, accompanied by more conventional snare drums that sound like they're right out of a high-school marching band, giving the music a beat that won't quit.
Like most minimalism, Dreyblatt's music is likable stuff. It stays far from the academic concerns that have in the past given minimalism a bad rap. It ingratiates itself by being almost danceable, and embraces many qualities that make rock 'n' roll so great, especially amplification and simplicity. But unlike most rock these songs never really go anywhere: there's no real song structure to speak of; instead each track is a static rhythmic field unto itself, making it great music for doing things to. I've been taking it to the gym lately, where it works as well as it does in my office while I'm banging away on a keyboard all day. In a culture that insists on relentless pumping, Dreyblatt might have composed the perfect soundtrack to an urban life.