Erik Griswold & Camerata String Quartet: Hollows out of time
Harrigans Lane Collective

Being instrumental chamber classical music, Hollows out of time would seem to be worlds removed from pop. Yet, strangely enough, it shares with it certain qualities: the music's instantly accessible, for one, and it's also strong on grounds of melody, rhythm, and concision. Erik Griswold clearly has a gift for singing melodies, and the eleven settings are likewise buoyed by spirited rhythms; finally, the pieces are all two to four minutes in length, which enhances accessibility. One track (“Another stone in the wall”) even includes a grinding riff one could imagine played by a hard rock guitarist, strange as that might sound.

Griswold himself acknowledges the polystylistic character of the material, citing blues, jazz, and psychedelic rock as touchstones along with classical and minimalism. An eleven-part suite for prepared piano and string quartet written for the launch of the chamber music venue Lagavulin at Harrigans Lane in northern New South Wales, the work is a fine complement to Griswold's recent Cold Blue outing Ecstatic Descent; available in LP and digital formats, Hollows out of time is also the debut release on the Harrigans Lane Collective label. Griswold himself plays prepared piano on the recording and is accompanied by a string quartet (violinists Brendan Joyce and Jason Tong, violist Anna Colville, cellist Katherine Philp) from Camerata, Queensland's Chamber Orchestra. The album title, by the way, references both the venue (Lagavulin means “hollow before the mill”) and Whispers out of time by Griswold's composition teacher Roger Reynolds, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1989.

The unusual timbres of the prepared piano make for an engrossing listen, but the instrument also exudes a strong percussive character that takes on a pronounced gamelan character when the piano ostinatos are at their most rhythmic. That connection surfaces vividly during the slow, metronomic flow of “Humid hours” but elsewhere on the recording, too. While the “Palestrina's squeaky wheel” title alludes to Renaissance music, the material itself swings with a blues-tinged funkiness when the piano patterns merge with string phrases that soulfully lilt when they're not somersaulting. Camerata has probably never wailed as hard as it does during “Blues intrusion” nor as funkily as it does elsewhere (e.g., “Whorls and eddies”). Whereas the serene “Drifting clouds” is conducive to nostalgic reflection, the gentle meditation “Rock pools” exudes the delicate poetry of a Japanese garden; an air of mystery, on the other hand, naturally arises from the espionage-tinged ambiance of “A touch of noir.”

August 2019