Out of a stack of new CDs from Innova I pick out John Morton’s Solo Traveler to start with – and realize that I once reviewed another of his CDs, also from Innova: Outlier! That is a very interesting CD, and Solo Traveler proves that Morton hasn’t become any less interesting since then. It’s a magnificent, beautiful and ingenious collection of works, with startling sonorities.

Liane Hansen interviewed John Morton on NPR (National Public Radio in the USA) about his previous music box CD in 2001. You can listen to the interview here.

I submit a quote from NPR’s page about John Morton in connection with the interview:

Track 1. Teetines (2006) [5:12]
John Morton [music box comb / sound processing]
Miguel Frasconi [mbiras / toy pianos]

The beginning is so brittle, like a wristwatch contact-miked and amplified, inviting the listener to a tour of the wristwatch interior, which has grown to a large hall with shiny metal walls disappearing into the ceiling up in obscurity and an array of heavy metal alloy wheels turning: a clean and orderly machine hall of perfect motions.

The music develops further, into intricate sonic patterns, analogous with modern computerized carillons that can be programmed to make wonders.

The sense of entering a miniature world is very strong, and you could swear that these sounds are made up of air compressions that are so weak that you wouldn’t hear them – at least not in this glary aura of overtones – without a stethoscope or state-of-the-art contact microphones connected to high-end amplification. It’s sheer beauty! It’s a golden and bronze and silver ballet of cogwheels and springs and gears. I recommend listening over a pair of high-resolution earphones, to really get into that chronometer cranium of Time!

Seriously, I have never heard this exact way of getting into these miniature sound worlds – and yet it’s only my imagination taking off on the sounds that John Morton actually achieves with music boxes, together with the mbiras and toy pianos of Miguel Frasconi! Outstanding! I can listen forever to this. The rhythms are so intricate, so catchy: you can’t sit still, and yet, no matter how much you listen, you always find new sonorities in here that you didn’t catch the time before. Wow!

You could easily associate to Indonesian Gamelan, Harry Partch instruments, John Cage’s prepared pianos, Conlon Nancarrow’s senseless player piano patterns – or rather a combination of these! Rich, rich sound worlds!

Track 2. Solo Traveler for five voices and five music boxes (2002) [15:42]
Dare To Breathe Ensemble, David Moore [cond.]
Cynthia Nadelman [text]

Here John Morton brings the human touch into his intricate music box world. At first the music boxes are louder than the voices, but that changes gradually, so that the vocals grow in and come closer, while the mechanical sounds retreat some into the background.
It’s a mix of female and male voices, coming across in clean, almost vibrato-free vocals, in clear, sometimes dissonant layers, but at first in a Medieval style of singing – much the way the S.E.M. Ensemble under the direction of Petr Kotik deals with Gertrude Stein’s text in the large-scale work Many Many Women. Later in this remarkable piece Morton throws some minimalistic views on the text, sounding a little like Steve Reich’s Tehillim. The voices come in a layering that might include high pitches and medium range pitches, or really low pitches, as well as all kinds of intricate combinations, like ice floes moving above and under each other, kaleidoscopically. There’s not one uninteresting moment in Solo Traveler.

In spite of the many analogies I have made to other works above, this piece comes all by itself. It’s a completely new kind of music to me, the way Morton let’s this mixed choir sing in various vocal techniques – sometimes in unison, sometimes in choral speech, in ferocious canon, sounding Medieval, Renaissance, 1960s’ happening-like, minimal, … - on a backdrop of, or behind, a soaring, clicking grasshopper quintet of music boxes that emits the most tenderly beautiful and grainy gravel mist music ever heard on this space rock!

The voices shine like the rays of a low sun coming in diagonally through the forest, lighting up the intense and autonomous activity of an ant mound that is re-enacted by the music boxes! This music is an ant mound and sunbeam forest organ.

In this composition John Morton shows that he masters many strands of complex scoring, and that he has a place at the Parnassus of contemporary AND classical composers.

The words of the work are Cynthia Nadelman’s:

Track 3. Ta-wee (2005) [12:27]
John Morton [music boxes / music box comb / sound processing]

Like a stylized short-wave incident, little tweaky, glary sounds pop forth in a teeny weenie cartoon version of Morton Subotnick’s Silver Apples of the Moon, while a distant drone paints a barely visible/audible gray/brown band of mist just above the horizon of hearing.
The patterns appear like drops of condensation on a glass filled with a cold, white wine, or like frost emerging out of the stillness on branches of trees an early winter morn.

Gradually, the glassy activity escalates into a frenzy of small objects, tiny tracks appearing in the snow, everywhere! Where did they come from? Are we on the island of the Hattifatteners?

Later a brittle, groaning, melodic and very rhythmic passage pleases me with embellished little bird chirps from chilly moments outdoors, while permuted elves’ bells keep gleaming out of magic fairytale worlds. Incredibly beautiful!

Towards the conclusion the music is a tangled pearl necklace in a glass bowl in an old lady’s room

Track 4. Through the Wall (2004) [5:16]
John Morton [music boxes / piano wire / sound processing] (for motorized music boxes and piano wire pulled through holes in the music boxes)

My immediate feelings when I start listening deal with Childhood’s Christmases – or the cliché of them, the way you still see them in sentimental American movies around that time of year… Through the Wall presents an incredibly beautiful and brittle music box melody, mixed up in itself, in a double vision of lustful regression, a kind of essence of purity and cleanliness and pristine innocence without blemishes: white fluffy cotton snow on the roofs of nursery churches… but this picture is slowly, very gradually, bent out of shape as if seen through a distorting mirror, where short things suddenly look loooong, and wiiiide things turn desperately narrow! The music does not get threatening or anything; it’s just that some aspects of the tune are blown out of proportion – or are they heard through a sonic magnifier of some unknown kind? The core trickling motion of the music boxes do keep up all through, but a darker, distantly roaring sound, like the sound of cars and trucks gearing up outside – on the other side of a thick wall – get closer and louder by the minute.

These sounds of trucks outside were very disturbing on a three-box set of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin with Gidon Kremer, on Philips – enough to have me return the CDs and get my money back. The trucks were especially disturbing since edits had been made here and there, so that a the sound of a truck stopped all of a sudden, or came on full blast just as suddenly. In John Morton’s Through the Wall, the sounds are deliberate, though, and not edited into abrupt shreds!

If the wonderful music of the music boxes – which is drawn very slowly into a permuted mist of a fairytale dream – represents the electric activity in our brains, the humming, droning glissandi upwards and downwards represent the blood passing through our blood vessels, heard behind our ears and inside our temples. Magnificent!

Track 5. Amazing Grace Variations (2002) [16:27]
John Morton [music boxes / sound processing] (performed on a set of 17 recomposed and altered music boxes)

This is what it says; variations on the well-known song. However, you have never heard this song this way, in trickling, layered, crackling, crunching, soaring, roaring, fuzz-boxing, Star-Spangled-Banner-by-Hendrix-at-Woodstock-style Grace!

The generous duration allows for numerous sound worlds to emerge before you, for you to travel. Some of these worlds are oral cavities of enamel and porcelain, through which heavy drops of silver saliva fall, echoing away behind palisades of well-kept teeth!

Other worlds are pearl necklaces groves, shining white and pristine on a backdrop of dark velvet skies.

Yet other worlds are desert floors of twanging, sharp springs that emit their twangy sounds, like someone playing the needles of tall cactuses, traveling the parallel worlds of mescaline.

Sometimes this music just sounds like someone poking about in a shoebox of screws and nails!

John Morton’s Amazing Grace Variations is a hallucinatory masterwork of unparalleled ingenuity.

As I reach the conclusion of John Morton’s CD Solo Traveler, I am puzzled, startled – yes, amazed – at all the beauty and all the intricate sonic adventures that he has conjured up out of these music boxes. I ask myself if this could have been done any better, any more thrilling and artistically/musically overwhelming, and I have to answer no! The only one that can possibly out-do this, is Mr. John Morton himself, so I’ll be on the lookout for his next CD – but this one will last me a long time, for every time I listen I hear new things, over and over again, new sounds, new combinations, an ever-changing aura of overtones and myriads of sonic diamonds perfectly cut, dispersing the light of Apollonian starshine!