LANG, D.: Pierced / Heroin / Cheating, Lying, Stealing / How to Pray / Wed (Real Quiet)

We Say...

Review by John Schaefer

David Lang won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in early 2008, capping a remarkable rise to prominence for a composer who, 20 years ago, co-founded the New York new music organization known as Bang On A Can so he and colleagues Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe could actually get their music performed. This album features some of Lang's close musical colleagues, like Bang On A Can All-Star members Evan Ziporynand Felix Fan, and Gil Rose's redoubtable Boston Modern Orchestra Project, or B-mop, as it's affectionately called. It also offers a look at the diverse sounds that Lang has created over the years.

In general, Lang's music alternates between dreamy, ambient soundscapes that grow out of his love of Brian Eno, Morton Feldman and electronica on the one hand, and choppy, rhythmic scores that have a definite urban excitement. The oldest piece here, "Cheating Lying Stealing," is one of the latter — a chattering, chugging piece of attitudinal chamber music that helped announce David Lang as a composer to watch. "Pierced" is a more recent work in this vein, and even more restless in its treatment of rhythmic and melodic fragments. "Heroin" takes Lou Reed's classic song from his Velvet Underground days and recasts it as an art-song, with the text intact and the music stripped away, replaced by a mournful cello solo that's somewhere between Bach and Philip Glass. Like the original, it's a hallucinatory experience — but in a very different way. And in "How To Pray," Lang brings together both sides of his musical persona, with a lovely flowing cello melody soaring over a bright, post-rock ensemble. It's a good place to start if you're not familiar with his music.