Horvath Plays Michael Jon Fink

The “signature” album cover for Nicolas Horvath Discoveries releases (from the Bandcamp Web page)

The end of last month saw the latest release in the Nicolas Horvath Discoveries series on the Collection 1001 Notes label. As in the past, each album consists of Horvath playing the music of a single composer; and the composer for the new offering is Michael Jon Fink. The title of the album is Sunless, which is also the title of the last of the ten tracks.

The advance material I received (which, sadly, was not reproduced on the album’s Bandcamp Web page) describes Fink as “one of the most discreet and secretive composers of the American West Coast.” I can certainly concur, since the San Francisco peninsula is part of that “American West Coast.” Furthermore, I have had no end of opportunities to become acquainted with less secretive composers for the first time, thanks to the many ensembles that perform in my city.

Fink’s music is described as a “dilated and mysterious jazz that would be the ideal soundtrack for a short film by the giant David Lynch.” That description can be interpreted in a wide variety of ways, one of which I was fortunate enough to experience from a theater piece performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. For the record, however, I would say that the music that Lynch has incorporated gets to me for having a steady beat sustained over relatively fragmented motifs. The durations of the ten tracks on the Sunless album are all too brief for such a beat to work its magic as the signal travels from ear to brain.

Indeed, the brevity of Fink’s tracks reminds me of Buckminster Fuller’s commitment to “doing more with less,” one of those precepts that had a significant influence on John Cage. In Fink’s case the sequences and simultaneities of his keyboard work unfold in such a way that the quality of the sounds themselves inhabit the same plane that is occupied by pitches and durations. Each track has its own strategy for guiding the attentive listener through the simultaneities of all three of those factors.

I seem to recall from my past a television commercial with the punch line, “Try it; you’ll like it;” perhaps that is the best motto for getting to know Fink’s approach to composition.