PETER GARLAND

PETER GARLAND
THREE STRANGE ANGELS (2008)
320 KBPS

Originally released in 1992 as Border Music on What Next? Recordings/Nonsequitur, a local Santa Fe, New Mexico, record label, then picked up by Joseph Celli’s iconoclastic O. O. Discs in 1999, Three Strange Angels gets new life on John Zorn’s Tzadik label in 2008, with a couple of never-before-released tunes, "Two Dances from the Conquest of Mexico," recorded live in concert in November of 1989.
The music would be entirely worthwhile as a rerelease without the two new live pieces, especially because of the fine sound that emerges from Scott Hull’s careful remastering, but it’s a real bonus to have the previously unreleased material.
If you’ve never encountered the music of Peter Garland, this is perhaps as good a place as any to start; if you’re already are familiar with, say, Love Songs or Walk in Beauty, you will certainly want to pick this up. Since it features music from two distinct periods in this important New Music/classical/folk-minimalist composer’s career—the more expressionistic music of his seventies period and the decidedly more austere music of his eighties and beyond period—it gives a wonderful overview of what he’s up to. Although I prefer his more mature later music, it’s altogether fascinating to hear the earlier and somewhat more obscure music from the seventies. Especially striking are "Three Songs from Mad Coyote," with their eldritch bullroarers and lion’s roar, and "Obstacles of Sleep," with its disconcerting siren-like instruments, ominous piano figures, and hypnotic percussion motifs. Perhaps most beguiling is "Apple Blossoms," which sounds like a classical/ambient hybrid. This is music unlike almost anything else out there, eerie, yet accessible, hugely evocative, yet somehow simply ordinary, alchemically metamorphosing quotidian experience into the ecstatic.
In the informative liner notes, the composer speaks of his time in Santa Fe in the 1980s as "not easy conditions." It isn’t hard to imagine why: Garland, an Easterner, sojourneying in the American Southwest (is he a carpetbagger?), producing music strange and exotic, for the authentically tri-cultural (Anglo, Hispanic, Indian) yet intellectually insecure milieu of Santa Fe. Probably pretty difficult to find gigs, let alone recording opportunities, under such circumstances. Combine that with the ad-hoc nature of his Ensemble—everyone working day jobs and coming together in the evening worn out and faced with challenging, outré compositions—and you have the formula for dicey music-making.
Yet the results are uniformly striking and occasionally transcendent, marking Garland as not only an outstanding composer but as a musical coordinator/leader/impresario of conspicuous accomplishment.
What makes his music so special? It’s the moods he conjures: menacing, extroverted, even eldritch in his earlier compositions, achingly sad and evoking lost cultures and grand vistas in his latter works: ambient/minimalist/classical program music? Perhaps, but that would be to unfairly pigeon-hole this altogether singular music and thereby diminish it.
One reason I’m so attracted to his later works is their sing-songy simplicity masking the most deeply delved and heartfelt sentiments. The simplest, starkest instrumentation—harp and violin, recorder and primitive percussion—evoke music of profoundest longing: elegiac, mesmeric, folk-eternal. Sui generis genius music, that’s what’s happening here, approached only by, perhaps, Omar Sosa and Egberto Gismonti at the height of their powers.
Music of extraordinary achievement: rigorous yet gloriously accessible, earnest yet glowing with a weird and wonderful splendor, simple yet profound. What more do you want?

Cantares De La Frontera
1. I - Long Song "Galisteo Basin"
2. II - Cancion De Villanueva
3. III - The Waldo Waltz
4. Apple Blossom
5. The Three Strange Angels
Three Songs Of Mad Coyote
6. I - 8 Tom Toms
7. II - 2 Bullroarers & Lion's Roar
8. III - 4 Tom Toms, 2 Bass Drums, 2 Pianos
9. Obstacles Of Sleep
Two Dances From The Conquest Of Mexico
10. I - Mayacamas Songs No. 3
11. II - Flor De Los Muertos
Old Men Of The Fiesta
12. I - Dance 1a; 1b: 1c
13. II - Dance 2a; 2b: 2c
14. III - Dance 3a; 3b
15. IV - Percussion Interlude "Tlaloc"
16. V - Dance 4a "Abo"
17. VI - Dance 4b; "The Hair Of The Dog Coda"