Nicole Lizée (b. 1973)
ZonelyHearts
Death to Kosmische (2011)
The Golden Age of the Radiophonic Workshop [Fibre-Optic Flowers] (2012)
Black MIDI (2017)
ZonelyHearts (2021–23)
Kronos Quartet
rec. 2024, 25th St. Recording, Oakland, USA (CD)
No recording or technical details given for DVD
Centrediscs CMCCD34625 CD/DVD [63]

This welcome new CD/DVD release from the Kronos Quartet features music by the Canadian composer Nicole Lizée: four pieces pervaded by her fascination with electronic sound. The first, Death to Kosmische, the composer says, ‘could be construed as the faded and twisted remnants of the Kosmische style’. This is played out as a continual mixing and remixing of sound, a frequently glitching texture which includes both a Stylophone and an Omnichord mixed with the Kronos strings. It feels at first without any sense of form or order, but actually the stream of sound, for all its chaos, is accessible and there is a tangible sense of destination by the work’s close.

The next work, The Golden Age of the Radiophonic Workshop [Fibre-Optic Flowers], will evoke for many UK listeners exactly what it’s supposed to, I’m sure. Lizée’s clever, short exploration of the conjunction of those ‘radiophonic’ elements with acoustic instruments is almost as culturally specific for anyone who watched TV in the 1960s or 70s as English pastoral is for an earlier time.

Black MIDI is a multimedia exploration of the underground phenomenon of that name, where music notation software and MIDI sequences are ‘blackened’ by layering thousands of notes onto MIDI data, producing music of extraordinary speed and density. The album contains a recording of the work, but also a visual presentation (what seems to be an earlier performance with a different Kronos line-up) on an accompanying DVD. The DVD is invaluable. The experience of sound and video is unsettling, inventive, witty and outré. Lizée wrote it in the spirit of David Lynch, John Carpenter and David Cronenberg and that creative lineage is evident. It’s a highly enjoyable 23 minutes. It’s worth pointing out that listening to it audio-only on one of the streaming services risks losing what feels like an integral part of Lizée’s concept.

Ditto ZonelyHearts, which is again offered in different audio-only and DVD performances (with some different quartet personnel). It’s Lizée’s tribute to The Twilight Zone. She doesn’t sample the TV series but rather aims for a work that captures what she sees as its recurring subject matter: ‘mind control, censorship … and revisionist history’. To do this she does use Twilight Zone-style narration, shown on screen as well as spoken, along with specially created sounds and custom-made devices which sit alongside the Kronos players and play into the images which unfold. It’s another highly effective dramatic presentation. One might argue that, because of the (relatively) more conventional binding of the text and music, audio listeners lose less than in Black MIDI, but actually once you’ve seen the DVD you realise that even the way the text is presented and formatted on screen is an important part of the experience.

This is being very much billed as the new Kronos Quartet album and, although the quality of their playing is, of course, a given, what struck me again and again in all the pieces was their self-effacement. They’re just one part of Lizée’s extraordinary vision here and it’s salutary to see how they embrace that.

This is one of those discs where I genuinely didn’t know what to expect and came away delighted. But do buy the physical product for the inclusion of the DVD. It has the virtue of being beautifully packaged with a sort of faded, trippy late-70s chic to it, which will form an excellent contrast on your shelves when placed next to Karajan’s 1975 Heldenleben.

Dominic Hartley

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