There’s a story behind violinist Christopher Whitley’s new solo album Describe Yourself.  Entering the 2017 Canada Council for the Arts. Musical Instrument Bank Competition, he found himself required to offer a Canadian composition.  The chosen piece was Jeffrey Ryan’s Bellatrix.  He was successful and so this album is played on a 1700 Taft Stradivarius and it opens with the aforesaid Bellatrix.

Bellatrix is a piece for solo violinist but not really for solo violin as the performer, besides playing a very dense and virtuosic violin part, is required to vocalise in various ways including “singing”, humming and sort of shouting.  It’s dramatic and, in places, surprisingly lyrical.

It’s followed by Nicole L:izée’s Don’t Throw Your Head in Your Hands.  Here the violin is partnered with processed excerpts from old karaoke tapes; i.e. pieces where the main vocal line and melody is missing.  It’s interesting as another demanding violin part plays against a very strange background.  There’s all sorts of things going on and it’s quite disorienting.

There’s more electronic trickery in Leslie Ting’s Describe Yourself.  This was recorded over Zoom using the Zoom algorithm that favours speech and reduces/eliminates “background noise”.  Ting and Whitley use the “describe yourself” feature in Zoom to do just that while Whitley plays and Zoom essentially tries to eliminate his playing.  One ends up with a weird mix of banal speech; “I have dark hair with a few white hairs”, mixed with long silences and strangely distorted violin.  It’s oddly compelling.

Kara-Lis Coverdale’s Patterns in High Places is rather more conventional.  It consists of three semi-improvisatory “meditations” played mainly (wholly?  I’m not sure) on open strings.  Each piece has a different tempo and mood but all feel inward looking and reflective.  It’s nteresting.

With Evan J. Cartwright’s Six Tableaux for Violin we are back to electronic manipulation.  It’s a sort of recursive, or cyclical piece.  Whitley improvises a short piece which is recorded and played back while he improvises another piece except that the playback is governed by an algorithm driven by the piece being improvised.  Rinse and repeat.  This produces a large number of short (a minute or so) fragments.  Six of these were selected for the recording.  It produces some very unusual and interesting effects.  Some of it is quite percussive, other parts more lyrical and there’s a lot of channel separation; especially heard on headphones.  Quite fun really.

The album closes with another piece with a story.  In this case a very old one.  It’s Fjóla Evans’ In Bruniquel Cave. It was inspired by the discovery of stalagmite fragments arranged in circles deep in a cave in France.  It’s estimated that they date from 176,000 years ago and, if correct, they must have been made by Neanderthals.  They certainly constitute one of the earliest known non-utilitarian creations by hominids.  This inspired Fjóla to create a piece for multi-tracked violin.  It’s built up of sound loops of different pitches and cycle lengths to form a dense, rather hypnotic piece.  It’s an enjoyable close to a fascinating album.

With so much of the album being electronic anyway it’s a bit daft to talk about “recording quality” but my sense is that each composer and the performer got what they wanted sonically and is often interesting as an exercise in recorded sound as well as violin performance.  It’s available as a physical CD, MP3 or CD quality FLAC and there’s an informative booklet.

Catalogue number: Redshift Records TK529