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.
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