Noise Trip Explosion
Nolan Hildebrand
Redshift Records TK576 (edshiftmusicsociety.bandcamp.com/album/noise-trip-explosion)
Toronto-based composer/performer Nolan Hildebrand blends his composing for acoustic instruments with electroacoustic processing methods using a live feedback mixer, data-generated noise, and interactive electronics. Performed by Toronto musicians Colin Fisher (saxophone), Veronica Zupanic and Roan Ma (violins), Hirad Moradi (piano), Patrick O’Reilly (guitar) and a host of percussionists, we are treated to five experimental works composed between 2022 and 2025.
Generative open graphic score #1 features Fisher playing from a Rorschach-like graphic score, and improvising. Hildebrand operates the live mixer to capture Fisher’s solo saxophone playing, and to create “noisy” saxophone feedback. Hildebrand either keeps them separated or fused together, making this brilliant harsh work volatile and perhaps difficult listening, but forever worth the effort. There’s more live Hildebrand electronic manipulations of Zupanic, O’Reilly and Moradi in knurl cracked green, with clear instrumental/electroacoustic shorter parts, and fascinating colours.
Ma plays from an open graphic score with an electronic audio part drawn from raw data from hundreds of files in Raw Data Speed Demons. In portals II (everywhere and everything right now) Fisher, O’Reilly and Louis Pino (drum kit, tam-tam) choose to play alone or with each other via coloured shaped portals, without any processing from Hildebrand, but wide spanning electronic sounds create his illustrious sonic self-defined “multiple sound universes.” The disc concludes with DADA Bender for percussion sextet, fixed media electronics, mixer feedback and data bending, resulting in a lighter, more fun work.
Though at times loud, loud, loud, harsh and intense, these are diverse contemporary musical sounds to relish.
