Michael Byron’s Vibraphone “Single” on Cold Blue

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

At the end of last month I wrote about, “Splectra,” my first encounter with a CD release in the “singles” series on the Cold Blue Music label. I made note of the metaphor invoked by founder Jim Fox, calling the release a “one-course musical meal.” That release was coupled with another singles album presenting Michael Byron’s “Bridges of Pearl and Dust,” scored for four vibraphones.

All four vibraphone parts are performed by Ben Phelps, meaning that the recording itself is a product of studio overdubbing techniques. (A similar approach was taken in the Cold Blue recording of Matt Sargent’s Separation Songs.) Because the structure of “Bridges of Pearl and Dust” involves an elaborate fabric of polyrhythms, I suspect that one would be hard pressed to tell the difference between this studio product and a “live” performance by four vibraphone players. The music is all “about” the interplay of the pitches associated with rhythmic motifs and the counterpoint that emerges through that interplay.

The intricacy of the resulting fabric calls for highly focused attentive listening. Byron seems to have found a “sweet spot” in an overall duration of roughly fifteen minutes. Had the performance been longer, even the most focused consciousness would probably begin to run the risk of “tuning out” due to the onset of fatigue. Where my own listening is concerned, Byron successfully dodged that bullet. Still, it is worth noting that the result of the studio work tends to undermine any efforts to grasp the underlying part-whole relationships. However, if Byron allowed Phelps to make this recording the way he did, my guess is that Byron expects the listener to attend only to the whole, leaving the parts solely as the responsibility of the performer(s).