Sono Luminus Goes Windham Hill

At the end of last month, while grousing about Summit Records’ release of Scott Routenberg’s Inside album, I tried to make the point that “a uniform rhetoric of blandness” was the last thing we needed to cope with “pandemic blues.” Many of my generation probably remember when such blandness was the calling card of Windham Hill Records during the last quarter of the previous century. I suspect I was not the only one glad to see the back of Windham Hill after it faded into a series of buyouts between 1992 and 1996.

Carolyn Surrick and Ronn McFarlane on the cover of their new album (from the album’s Amazon Web page)

If Inside was a harbinger of the return of the Windham Hill style, it appears that Sono Luminus is jumping on the same bandwagon. This coming Friday it will be releasing Fermi’s Paradox, an album of duo performances by Carolyn Surrick on gamba and Ronn McFarlane on lute (joined occasionally by percussionist Jackie Moran). As expected, Amazon.com has created a Web page for taking pre-orders.

Both Surrick and McFarlane had busy concert schedules prior to the imposition of shelter-in-place in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since they lived within about twenty miles of each other, they decided to get together to prepare a recording. Both of them had a repertoire of works performed by their respective Early Music groups, much of which had been recorded; but they did not want to simply release new settings of material they had previously recorded.

McFarlane saw this as an opportunity to compose “new music for old instruments,” an idiom that has been growing in popularity recently. He had composed “Fermi’s Paradox” in 2018; and it served to orient his sessions with Surrick, becoming the opening track on the album that resulted. Surrick, in turn, created a new piece of her own for the occasion, “The Last Day.” Other tracks that were recorded included traditional tunes from Ireland, England, and Sweden, as well as a very “Windham Hill take” on “Amazing Grace.” There were also arrangements of music by composers from both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, along with Charles Gounod’s appropriation of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach for his “Ave Maria,” originally composed as vocal music.

That said, I am sure that there will be many that will take comfort in the soothing rhetorical qualities of this new album; but, as I previously observed, “vigorous stimulation” has been more effective for me than “soothing comfort” when it comes to enduring lockdown conditions.