ELISION Ensemble - Scalar (2024)

Exhibiting their trademark virtuosity and sense of musical exploration, these seven newly commissioned works explore openness, improvisation and instrumental extremes. Scalar captures this seasoned ensemble at their most musically nuanced, bursting with energy but balancing this explosivity with compelling moments of reflection. As ELISION nears it's 40th anniversary, scalar is a testament to the ensemble's ability to tackle the most daunting of musical feats, pushed on by collaborators old and new. Golnaz Sharaiatzdeh's Machine Euphoria opens the record with an ecstatic fanfare as oboist Peter Veale relentlessly navigates a variety of multiphonics and flutterings. Scalar by Einar Einarsson, as well as Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh's 3,6. take a graphical approach to accessing the 'ELISION sound', leading to two distinct but highly visceral and striking duos. Cat Hope's The Aesthetic of Disappearance and Charlie Sdraulig's Ground both explore more contained and interior musical spaces, the former featuring busier material framed by characteristic slow drones, whilst the latter is a slow, unfolding interplay centered around the communication of minute musical details between the two performers. Mary Bellamy's Enveloped fuses the sonic edges of cello and recorder into a single, more complex whole. Meanwhile, long-time ELISION collaborator Richard Barrett's after weaves together delicate and detailed instrumental gestures with beds of electronic texture, revealing yet more depth to the possible musical worlds that ELISION can conjure from the interplay between score, composer, and ensemble. As Evan Johnson writes on ELISION: "There are still things that cannot be done. But there is nothing a composer can imagine that they won't find a way towards... Collectively, these musicians are among the bravest, and the foolhardiest, in the world. " scalar speaks to the myriad musical possibilities ELISION explore and their determination to confront the existing limits of contemporary music.