Five pieces by composer Stephen Rush acoustic instruments and computer generated sound.

Excerpts from the Liner Notes (by James Borders)

It would be a mistake at the outset to approach [Stephen] Rush’s music intent on classifying it according to a simple definition of style, or seeking in it roots that extend back to a single school of contemporary composition… Rush’s imagination and musical influences are too wide-ranging for such facile categorizations. Instead we must trace to their sources of origin myriad clues to a vast store of rhythms, timbres, melodies, and forms, all of which left a trace on his music and freely metamorphose into contrasting musical moments. Listeners who came of age during the progressive-rock era of the late sixties and early seventies, for example, will hear in the persistent rhythms, syncopations, and virtuosity of Aeneas in Strophades (Attack of the Harpies!) echoes of that time. … Save Changes Before Quitting clues listeners into still more sources of Rush’s musical inspiration. In its shifting from fusion jazz, to funk, to “space music,” to driving blues-rock and back again, this is a musical joyride down wide boulevards and back alleys, all of which Rush knows like the back of his hand.

The centerpiece of this recording, and the work that connects most readily with the Western art music tradition of opera, is Murders in the Rue Morgue. The libretto, which draws freely on [Edgar Allan] Poe’s text, seems intended to take full advantage of the fluidity of the great American writer’s highly evocative prose.

The first movement of Nature’s Course, a 1992 composition for marimba and tape, calls to the mind the synclavier sounds that Frank Zappa meticulously created for such projects as The Perfect Stranger and Civilization Phase III. These associations come closer to the surface as Rush combines parallel consonances in the marimba part with a dissonant accompaniment, a common maneuver in Zappa

In its evocation of musique concrète, “Humandiños” demonstrates yet another facet of Rush’s understanding of the history of twentieth-century music as sound source. The idea that noise can be the essential materiel of composition, an idea widely attributed to Edgard Varèse but which antedates his compositional activity by some decades, is present throughout, though a long, arching, tonal motif eventually does emerge from the primordial clamor of “Dinowalk/Dino Stalks the Environs.”