Pinna Records Releases Wild Rumpus Album

A little over a month ago Pinna Records released what is likely to be the only album of performances by Wild Rumpus. This ensemble served as a platform for new compositions with a repertoire they described as “an ambitious melding of contemporary chamber music and avant-rock.” The group had at least some of its roots in the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, which, unless I am mistaken, is the last place they performed before merging with Composers, Inc. to form the new ensemble, Ninth Planet.

The title of the new album is Vestige, and it features compositions by two of the founding members of Wild Rumpus: Jen Wang (“Adrogué”) and Dan VanHassel (“Incite!”). Also included on the album is a work presented at the debut recital of Ninth Planet, “Reflect Reflect Respond Respond (Echo and Narcissus in Reverse),” composed by Jenny Olivia Johnson on a Wild Rumpus commission. VanHassel is also represented by his arrangement of “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi,” which was a track on the 2007 Radiohead album In Rainbows. The other composers represented on the album are Joshua Carro (“Spectral Fields in Time”) and Per Bloland (“Solis Overture”).

A 2012 group shot of the members of Wild Rumpus (taken from a Web site that no longer exists and extracted from the first article I wrote about the ensemble)

My own “first contact” with Wild Rumpus seems to have been in June of 2012. This was a concert of five world premieres, one of which was the Johnson composition that would later be performed as part of the Ninth Planet debut. Readers probably know by now that I have discussed problems of attention that arise when too much novelty is delivered in a single sitting. The good news is that five seemed to be a “workable number” when I was faced with writing about that concert. However, as I discovered while listening to the new Vestige album, listening to new tracks on a new recording is not the same as encountering new music in concert. More often than not, the “visual channel” contributes to the “parsing” of the auditory signal that results in appropriately attentive listening.

In other words, in the absence of that “visual channel,” listening to an album is less compelling than being in the presence of a performance. More important is the question of how many of the compositions on Vestige are now actively a part of the Ninth Planet repertoire. If one is likely to encounter any of these pieces at a Ninth Planet gig, then Vestige may well provide the would-be listener with some “initial orientation.” However, with all of the selections on the album, being in the presence of a performance will always take priority over listening to a recording.