Starkland Releases Latest Klucevsek Album

Cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of Starkland)

This past Friday Starkland released its latest album of compositions by accordionist Guy Klucevsek. The title of the album is Hope Dies Last. It can be found on both Amazon and Bandcamp sites; but I strongly recommend visiting the Bandcamp Web page, which provides an excellent introduction to the music one will encounter when listening to this album. Mind you, the digital download (which is currently the only option) includes a seventeen-page PDF booklet with a track listing that accounts for the performers for each of the selections.

Klucevsek retired from performing in 2018 to focus entirely on composition. The album has nineteen tracks, seventeen of which are available for listening for the first time. The last six tracks are a suite based on music that he composed for Industrious Angels, a multimedia piece created by Laurie McCants. By way of a caveat, I should observe that the track listing in the booklet I downloaded did not align with the instrumentation one heard on those tracks.

The good news is that the Bandcamp Web page has the correct ordering of those tracks! Klucevsek appears on only two of the Industrious Angels tracks. Jenny Lin contributes to all but one of them, alternating among piano, celeste, and toy piano. Violinist Todd Reynolds appears on four of the tracks (one a solo); and Lin’s toy piano is accompanied by “heavy breathing” by Jerome Kitzke. (I have never had a problem with taking a tongue-in-cheek approach to my Klucevsek albums!)

These musicians jointly contribute to the first thirteen tracks of the album (the last of which is the title track). Only one of those tracks is a Klucevsek solo. “Dear Werner” is a memorial to the sound designer and audio engineer Werner Strobel, who had worked with Klucevsek since the Eighties. There are solo tracks by three other accordionists, Alan Bern, Nathan Koci, and Will Holshouser, as well as two tracks for the Bachtopus accordion quartet. There are also two tracks for the duo called The Smudges, consisting of violinist Jeff Gauthier and cellist Margaret Parkins (who also whistles on the first of the tracks). For the most part the music is unabashedly tonal, but Klucevsek definitely enjoys working with unconventional rhythmic patterns.

I rather like the quote from The Village Voice on the Bandcamp Web page, which describes Klucevsek as writing “the world’s most abnormal ‘normal’ music.” One has no trouble encountering the eccentricities served up on the tracks, but they are always affable. Klucevsek has a knack for tweaking the imagination without rubbing the skeptical listener the wrong way.

Starkland Releases Guy Klucevsek’s Latest Recording

At the end of last month, Starkland released Teetering on the Verge of Normalcy, the latest album featuring accordionist Guy Klucevsek. Unless I am mistaken, I had my first encounter with Klucevsek somewhere around 1988, when he appeared as a guest artist in a recital given by the Kronos Quartet. That was enough to convince me to purchase his Manhattan Cascade album, released by Composers Recordings, Inc. under their Emergency Music Series; and his kick-ass performance of John Zorn’s “Road Runner” did much to maintain my sanity during the years when I was doing multimedia research in Singapore.

Over twenty years have elapsed since then. Both of us are older. Both of us have had many experiences since then; and, with any luck, we are both the wiser for them. It is certainly the case that both of us have had to deal with the passing of others that we have admired, perhaps even as sources of inspiration. This may make me more susceptible to the memorial quality of many of the tracks on Teetering on the Verge of Normalcy than others. However, even in that context, there are still any number of impressive sharp edges in both the repertoire that Klucevsek has formed and his approach to playing it.

Also, while Manhattan Cascade and his more recent Transylvanian Software (another Starkland release) are solo albums, Teetering on the Verge of Normalcy features a generous number of guest artists. Indeed, two of Klucevsek’s compositions are piano solos performed by Alan Bern; and violinist Todd Reynolds plays a key role in the interpretations of many of the more memorial compositions on this album. As might be guessed, the tracks on this new album are not as wild and wooly as the sorts of performances Klucevsek could bring to interpreting Zorn or playing with the Kronos. Perhaps that more subdued rhetoric is what he has in mind by “normalcy;” but it is not out of the question that he also intended a jab at Warren Harding’s abuse of the English language. Nevertheless, the operative noun in the album title is “verge.” Klucevsek may be flirting with blunting some of his sharper edges, but he is still a far cry from being smooth and slick!