Presented by music director Johnny Reinhard and the American Festival of Microtonal Music, Pitch's 2006 release Electronical is a collection of contemporary works that employ not only a wide variety of electronic and computerized sound sources but also a number of different, non-standard tuning methods. The six pieces vary in mood from the brooding "acoustified" soundscape of Wendy Carlos' Afterlife, Albina Stefanou's haunted dance work The Daemon, and Elodie Lauten's dark XX for bass flute and synthesizer, to Joel Mandelbaum's whimsical Andante Cantabile for Yamaha keyboard, the abstract Blackjack for trombone and electronics by Joseph Pehrson, and David Glazier's kaleidoscopic sampling piece Token. Dedicated students of microtonal tunings will find they range from 15-note equal temperament to as high as 72-note divisions, and the strange effects produced by these unusual intervals and scales are remarkable. They are perhaps even more interesting and attractive than the synthesized sonorities, which at times seem dated, unoriginal, and, at their worst, amateurish. Still, this CD provides the listener a few examples of the directions electronic composers are pursuing at the beginning of the twenty first century, notably moving away from the 12 standard tones everybody knows; though this album as a whole is uneven and not always convincing, there's a lot of fascinating music to be heard here.
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