It would be hard to improve on the description of Agrippa's 3 Books found in the CD booklet: "This multi-movement piece delves into the expressive and rhythmic extremes of the four bass clarinets and is primarily inspired by occult philosophy and heavy metal music." It's also one of the few absolutely lucid statements found in the booklet, whose notes include extensive references not only to the Three Books of Occult Philosophy by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1531), but to Agrippa's apocryphal Fourth Book, Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, Roman Polanski's film The Ninth Gate, and David Lynch's Twin Peaks. Not that that's a bad thing -- the clever obfuscation in the notes adds to the fun of the CD, and how could music for bass clarinets merging occult philosophy and heavy metal not be fun?
Despite the CD's title, Agrippa's 3 Books by Edmund Welles, the music is composed by bass clarinetist Cornelius Boots, and also includes Boots' arrangements of tunes by Black Sabbath, Brazilian metal band Sepultura, and Spinal Tap. Each movement has three titles, one of which describes the musical content ("Hip-Hop Electronica Pop With Chorale," "Odd-Meter Pop Meets Dirge With Chance Operation Melodies," etc.) and also prepares the listener for what to expect. The music itself matches the titles well, consistently out of kilter, full of disarmingly quirky juxtapositions and rhythmic surprises. Boots has an inventively playful take on his material, and the unforeseen turns that the music makes are both highly sophisticated and highly entertaining, even more fun than the program notes lead us to expect. For fans of new music and/or heavy metal, Boots' original voice is not to be missed.
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