JHEREK BISCHOFF - Composed

Just two words, really, to get a sense of who this oddly-named gentleman is and what weight he carries in the American indie circuit. Co-founder, alongside Zac Pennington, of the extraordinary venture known as Parenthetical Girls, wide-ranging collaborator for the now-defunct Casiotone For The Painfully Alone, musician and arranger for projects by various bands from the US underground (from Los Campesinos! to Yacht, to name just two of many), our man has used his multifaceted talent to help write some of the most gripping pages of music of the last decade. Someone who has built his reputation step by step through one singular collaboration after another, within an artistic vision that fuses pop immediacy with avant-garde sonic exploration.

His impressive gifts as a musical alchemist were already clearly on display on his 2006 solo debut, which masterfully married delicate singer-songwriter threads, polished experimental surfaces, and even nods to musique concrète and industrial music. Nothing, however, could have hinted at just how delicious a treat he was letting simmer on the back burner. Taking his time, and busying himself in the meantime with other projects (including the realization of the sprawling pop opera "Privilege" with his "parenthetical girls"), Bischoff took more than five years to release "Composed", a work that bears the unmistakable mark of a coronation, rightfully placing its author among the sharpest and most perceptive minds of recent times.

And, as with most of the finest things in the world, the starting elements on this record are anything but complex — rather, their simplicity comes through bright and clear to the listener's ear. Be careful, though, not to mistake the whole endeavor for something simplistic, because there isn't the faintest trace of banality here. As ever, the "originality" of our times lies in an artist's ability to transfigure and recast, in a new synthesis, features and ideas that have by now become conventional, and Jherek Bischoff has every qualification needed to never fall short on that front. In the beginning, then, there was orchestral pop, the kind thoroughly explored by figures of the stature of Burt Bacharach and Scott Walker, leading up to the more recent work of Neil Hannon, Rufus Wainwright and Richard Hawley. In the beginning, precisely, because Jherek refuses to be labeled as the new sensation of some vaguely pop, vaguely alternative strand, instead leaping back and forth through time, forever in search of the most sumptuous garb in which to dress his compositions.

Composer, composition, "Composed": it's no coincidence that this semantic root crops up so often throughout this review. The theme of composing is, in fact, the pivot around which the whole work turns — a kind of composing, though, that should be understood more in the "erudite" sense given to it by visionary geniuses on the order of Ravel and Satie, which is only later put through the blender and spat back out with an urgency that feels thoroughly contemporary, yet at the same time worlds away from any kind of nostalgic pastiche. Across the eight songs (nine, if you count the brief but nonetheless exhilarating strings-only overture), the American composer arrives at a use of the orchestra that inevitably recalls its deployment in film, yet manages to look beyond that, toward unexpected and atypical combinations.

Lacking an actual corps of session musicians, if only for obvious budget reasons, Jherek recorded each part played (and sung) by his various collaborators one at a time, assembling them only at a later stage — a prodigious assembly line in which the finished product betrays nothing of its true nature.

In the end, this certainly proves not to be a problem; the secrets and stimuli nestled within the folds of the songs deliver a listening experience of the highest caliber, adorned by the precious collaborations that dot the album's path. From start to finish, it's a parade of some of the most moving and extraordinary voices on the world music scene, enriching the polychrome of musical solutions put into play. No surprise, then, to find a seasoned dandy like David Byrne in the pseudo-bolero of "Eyes". Even less surprising is how the passionate inflections of Caetano Veloso are hurled into the breaks and restarts of "Secret Of The Machines", a kind of Arcadia of mechanization, in which machines and gears (simulated by pizzicato violins) reveal, with exquisite poetry, a thoroughly human warmth at their core. Bischoff takes familiar figures and transplants them into unusual contexts, delving into facets of them that until now had remained adrift in the shadows.

Not that the rest is of any lesser significance; indeed, how could it be, when we're faced with one of the finest performances ever by the one and only Carla Bozulich, even more blues-inflected than on her solo work, her torment turning into faint, nineteenth-century air ("Counting", hear it to believe it)? Or how could one not wander into the woodland atmospheres of "The Nest", in which Mirah Zeitlyn rises again as a new Papagena, singing her own lovesick anguish? And even amid the imposing parade of names continually giving way to one another (also worth noting is the exquisite, feather-light crescendo of "Your Ghost", underscored by the feminine grace of Craig Wedren's timbre), the compilation-like effect is averted by our man's careful direction, which wields the vocal element as a trump card without ever letting it take over entirely.

The rigorous yet disarming expressive power of "Composed" marks a new milestone in the realm of orchestral pop, an extraordinary vademecum in which past, present and future are balanced with surprising ease. And that alone (so to speak) is enough to make it a remarkable album, among the high points of 2012.

The album is streaming in full on Bandcamp.

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27/06/2012