Austin Wulliman: Escape Rites
Sono Luminus

As probably no string quartet operating today is more intrepid and experimentally inclined than JACK Quartet, it makes perfect sense that the latest solo album by the award-winning group's Austin Wulliman would be as adventurous. Given that the quartet's other members, violinist Christopher Otto, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell, join him on the hour-long release, Escape Rites could have been issued as a JACK Quartet release; however, with all but one of its compositions penned by Wulliman (the outlier by John Cage), it also makes sense that it would be issued under his own name.

A graduate of the University of Michigan and Northwestern University, Wulliman was a founding member of the Spektral Quartet and the Program Director of the Chicago-based Ensemble Dal Niente prior to JACK Quartet. His debut solo release, a concert-length collaboration with composer-improviser Katherine Young called Diligence Is to Magic as Progress Is to Flight, appeared in 2014, but his debut album as a composer, The News From Utopia, arrived nine years later. No doubt the experiences he's had with the quartet performing works by John Luther Adams, Philip Glass, Clara Iannotta, John Zorn, and countless others have exerted a profound impact on his own writing, but Escape Rites sees the violinist devising and applying strategies of his own to the four originals on the release.

Relentless energy powers The Late Edition, with the violinist and his partners delivering an engulfing vortex. Strings careen furiously as the music catapults forward, the experience akin to feeling strapped into a machine as it thrusts through the heavens at light speed. Calmer by comparison, Lost One evokes a tranquil realm where one's grip on reality loosens and dissonance creeps in. Tones splinter, bend, and collide, the rawness of their textures amplified as the instruments' breaths overlap and the self dissolves. For the epic Escape Rites, whose six continuous movements total nearly twenty-three minutes, Wulliman used a palindromic twenty-five-tone scale as a foundation for intricate webs of timbral and polyrhythmic gestures. After “Power Switch” inaugurates the work with moves both shadowy and spidery, the material plunges into a zone of scrapes and general wooziness. The work's enigmatic and alien character extends to movement titles “Etude X: a table of contents” and “NOTNA: the crystal” as its dazed drift slowly mutates into convulsive flurries of bowing and plucking.

For Live News, Wulliman looked back to material from The News From Utopia to reimagine it for performance by live string quartet with electronics. In having been fashioned at home during the isolating days of the pandemic, the earlier album wasn't conceived to be executed live; the three-movement suite on Escape Rites provides a fresh update on that hermetically birthed album. A trace of minimalism is audible in the first part, “SYSTEM NOTES,” in rhythmic pulsations that act as a ground for the high-pitched gyroscopic effects that materialize thereafter. Decompression sets in with the advent of “como se vive (ii),” the material now pushing through a thick fog not unlike ones coursing through Escape Rites. An infusion of energy jumpstarts the concluding “Live News,” the four strings plunging downwards and wheezing, groaning, and plucking before assembling for a collective chant to bring the piece home. Wulliman's string quartet arrangement of Cage's Totem Ancestor, created in 1942 for prepared piano, is as much a brief coda to the album as it is a tribute to the iconoclast. The original involves eleven piano harmonically reshaped using screws and bolts; for the new treatment, Wulliman reconfigured the pitches to generate a warped hoedown of sorts.

These are busy times for the violinist and his partner, Alex Sopp, who created the arresting artwork on the release's covers. His schedule's packed with performing, recording, and teaching (at the Mannes School of Music), while she plays flute in various ensembles and produces albums of her own (her recent debut The Hem & The Haw was met with considerable acclaim) when not crafting visual pieces. The inclusion of the Cage piece notwithstanding, Escape Rites is as intensely personal an expression by Wulliman as might be imagined, even if it's in one sense a JACK Quartet release as much as a solo one. Be aware, it's challenging material that makes few if any concessions to listeners accustomed to singable melodies and familiar structures; anyone familiar with the work Wulliman's produced as a solo artist or ensemble member would expect nothing less, however.

July 2025