Bruckmann, Kyle

On Procedural Grounds

Label: New World Records Country: USA

In his compositions, composer/performer Kyle Bruckmann (b. 1971) seeks to integrate rigor and internal logic with raw immediacy while fully engaging his fellow performers as not simply dutiful interpreters, but creatively invested collaborators. Aesthetically, the results evoke much from European modernism, but realized via idiosyncratic modular forms and process-oriented strategies equally indebted to the New York School and the jazz avant-garde.

On Procedural Grounds (2010) is a half-hour work conceived as the framework for a summit between his current Bay Area community and that of Chicago, his former home. The eleven-piece ensemble features his long-standing project Wrack together with boundary-defying West Coast pioneers Rova, Tim Perkis (of the League of Automatic Music Composers and the Hub) and Gino Robair. Orgone Accelerator (2010) was composed for 8-channel sound diffusion, and premiered at the 2011 San Francisco Tape Music Festival. The other two pieces are products of the unique creative environment of sfSound (the collective with which Bruckmann has performed the works of such composers as Braxton, Cardew, Feldman, Ferneyhough, Ligeti, Subotnick and Xenakis) and feature members of that ensemble. Cell Structure (2009) is a duet written for the composer on oboe and Matt Ingalls on clarinet, with an electronic accompaniment realized through modular analog synthesis. Tarpit (2009) is scored for an octet of winds, strings, and percussion with similarly pre-recorded electronics.