Nico Muhly - Mothertongue
(Brassland) CD
Nico Muhly is a 27 year old contemporary composer based out of New York. There has been much stirring about his work over the last 12 months, due in part to the deft arrangements he contributed to Sam Amidon’s All Is Well earlier this year. He has worked alongside Phillip Glass, Antony, Björk & Will Oldham & has composed a litany of works (as well as scoring a few films along the way). Mothertongue is a nosedive into Muhly’s modern appropriation of compositional ideas & propositions. Opening with “Mothertongue: I. Archive”, clipped & cut vocal snippets swarm the sound field, augmented with a deep synthetic synth tone. The results are stirring, sometimes off-putting & pretty bloody interesting. Reich-ish rhythmic clatter & Muhly’s “chamber music + electronics“ approach litters Mothertongue, as do vocal contributions from Amidon, Helgi Hrafn Jónsson & Abby Fischer. With a few more producing gigs no doubt in the works, Mothertongue is a great document of this young outsider-music talent still new to the world of indie-recognition.