Music Review: Kyle Miller, Daniel Conant and Others – ‘Bed of Creeks & Coils,’ Music for Guitars by Kyle Miller, William Anderson & Benjamin Boretz

Has there been a more influential instrument than the guitar in the past 75 years of music? In the West, and in some parts beyond? The seemingly endless moods and sonic worlds that the humble six-string box can create, including when electrified, has defined folk and popular musics across cultures for decades.

When those proletariat strains intersect with “contemporary classical” and experimental music, interesting things happen, as shown in some of the tracks on a new album put together by guitarist and composer Kyle Miller, with Daniel Conant and other collaborators.

Bed of Creeks & Coils takes its title from a piece for four guitars written by Miller himself. But the album is also in part a tribute to William Anderson, whose work is prominent and who also appears on two tracks as a member of the electric-guitar quartet Bodies Electric. The album also includes a piece by Benjamin Boretz, who might now be considered a grand old man of 20th-century music theory. Thus it features composers of three different generations.

Bodies Electric and Acoustic

The album launches with the bracing title track, an adventure for four electric guitars. Incessant if irregular rhythms and soulful mood changes suggest commonalities with progressive rock. Played by the Bodies Electric quartet that includes both Anderson and Miller, it’s intriguing, but also easy for listeners unaccustomed to experimental music to swallow.

Miller sequenced the program to alternate electric and acoustic compositions. So the next piece is one of Anderson’s short classical-guitar pieces, “Grüne Heinrich,” from 1979. Conant gives its deceptively simple-sounding counterpoint lute-like lightness and a sense of quiet distance.

Miller then plays the electric-guitar version of Boretz’s solo piece “O,” which has a spooky modernist weirdness. Every note (and it’s mostly a sequence of single notes, with some dyads) seems to have a different timbre, a different set of harmonics, and its own electronic artifacts, making the piece hold interest even if it’s not exactly friendly and inviting.

Miller and Conant then duet on the former’s “Wavering Radiant” for two classical guitars. The piece approaches time in a free-floating way, with a Spanish-guitar flavor and echoes (especially in a slow middle section) of Albéniz. The ear is frequently caught up in recognizable flavors and rhythms, then suddenly reoriented. The triplets of the final section carry a strong, nervous momentum. Altogether, it’s a pretty approachable modernist piece.

Poems and Fulminations

“Wavering Radiant” wavers easily into the first of Anderson’s three short pieces titled “Poema armónico” (or “harmónico”) for solo classical guitar, performed by Conant. In these, rhythmic and textural variation create a sense of exploration as thematic bits recur. Anderson constructs the second of these pieces upon bends that help form microtonal passages, which often resolve into chords and melodic fragments in standard intonation, resulting in a curious tension.

The “Poemas” alternate with two more complex Anderson works. Bodies Electric performs the relaxing, rather spacey “Epicurean Song,” which has a feeling of wandering and even randomness but also a jazzy flavor in places. “Simple Composition” features Miller on steel-string guitar and Conant on classical. Its simplicity rests largely in its being more-or-less steadily rhythmic. The warm timbre of the classical guitar contrasts subtly with the brighter hue of the steel-string, until the piece ends with a flourish. Again there is a feeling of wandering, but in this case I find the continuous uncertainty more distressing than interesting.

Miller ends the album with his three-part Ven for electric-guitar quartet. The whimsically rhythmic “Emanation” rocks with distortion and something of the air of randomness of the Anderson works. In “Flux,” a four-note motif introduces angular intervals that soar over stuttering attacks, dark power chords, heavy-metal intervals, and towards the end what sounds like pitch-bent feedback, ending with a recapitulation of the opening motif. In the more song-like “Fulmination,” the guitars trade notes, creating bouncing melodies that make way for blasts of distorted triplets and chordal comping. In the gruff last half the triplets become the thematic material, before a sudden end.

I don’t know if it’s the kinship with the progressive rock I grew up listening to, but this triptych spoke to me the most intimately. Clearly there are many, many sides to “serious” contemporary guitar music, facets explored creatively by composers over the generations while referring to a panoply of common traditions from around the world. Bed of Creeks & Coils is an exemplar of the continuing power and versatility of the guitar.

Bed of Creeks & Coils, with music by Kyle Miller, William Anderson & Benjamin Boretz, performed by Miller, Daniel Conant, and others is out now on New Focus Recordings and available at Bandcamp.