Unsuk Chin describes her song as a conscious try and render in sound the visions she encounters in her dreams. This ear-catching profile album from Ensemble Intercontemporain items three of the Korean-born, Berlin-based entirely artist’s works: a triptych of visionary panels that glint and swarm with kaleidoscopic colours.
It opens with Gougalon, a prankish suite inspired by the travelling amateur theatres of her native nation. Ready piano and a percussion allotment that hums with gongs, bells, bottles and vibraslap lend a riotous jocularity to 6 contrasting episodes, including the lugubrious Lament of the Bald Singer, the clangorous Grinning Fortune Teller With the Untrue Enamel and the madcap Hunt for the Quack’s Plait. First-class engineering enables the listener to savour every sonic jot and tittle.
Dimitri Vassilakis and Samuel Favre are the certain-footed soloists in the Double Concerto for Piano, Percussion and Ensemble, a 20-minute soundscape with reference facets drawn from both western and non-western song. Beneath the assured steering of conductor Pierre Bleuse, the 19-instrument ensemble illuminates Chin’s complex, freely flowing ranking with rock-solid technique and a deal of panache.
Within the kill, there’s Graffiti, a three-circulation work for chamber orchestra, which oscillates between a tensile textural intricacy and graceful transparency. It opens with Palimpsest, a skittering, polystylistic hurly-rotund, and concludes with the abrasive stabs and jabs of the rhythmic Passacaille. In between comes a haunting nocturnal road scene, dubbed Notturno Urbano, where tolling bells combine with eerie harmonic dissonances to conjure an ambiance that is properly off, peculiar and uniquely Chin.
Journey it on Apple Tune (above) or on Spotify