Etudes 4 Violin Electronix is the Thirsty Ear debut (and the fourth recording overall) by composer, arranger, and violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain (aka DBR). It is a provocative one. Roumain, who plays everything from his preferred violin to piano and synth (and, on one track, bathtub, glass cup, sandpaper, steel fork, knife, and spoon), is above all a composer engaged with notions of melody and rhythm. All but two of these nine tracks are duets. Roumain has no need to find larger groups to express his wonderfully varied array of colors and textures, and that is because he has an utterly impeccable grasp of space and dimension. He understands that in order to find vast ranges of inner space he has to limit what lies on the surface. The beats and flutes in Black Man Singing, which opens the disc, give rise to this. DJ Spooky and Peter Gordon find primary terrain all but uninhabitable in standard time signatures; they reach for whispered pulses and small hidden empty moments to place their own musical heartbeats on the line. Roumain doesn't soar over them or dictate to them with his virtuosity on the violin; instead, he uses it to sing to them and engage with them in finding a new inside track where they can all flourish. On the first of his two duets with Japanese pianist and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto (and the set's longest piece), The Need to Be, Roumain understands the pianist's intricate sensibility -- especially in the high register -- and rather than find a place to create intricate, knotty patterns around that, he plays to the sparse, tempered harmonic structures he has composed for Sakamoto to play. DBR is finding song and a wealth of emotion in the spaces where the keys reverberate, and places his own accents right inside them, tucking them neatly but with enough sustain and tension to offer a newer tonal palette for Sakamoto to find compelling, and the way he nuances his chords tells the listener just how engaged he is. This is dialogue and conversation, intimately and elegantly. The Need to Follow, the latter of the two, is even more involved lyrically. Though the violin and piano share the pulse, repeating phrases with mere hints of difference in tension and dynamic in order to get beneath the surface of the composition, they create a dovetailed sonic palette where the two instruments are nearly inseparable, becoming so entwined that they express in emotion and beauty what is truly unspeakable in words.

1		Black Man Singing
2		The Need to Be
3		Resonance
4		The Need to Follow
5		Divergence
6		Metamorphosis
7		The la la Song
8		Fayetteville
9		Lava

	Like us on Facebook
	@SoundHound	Follow