Wild Up - Julius Eastman Vol. 4 The Holy Presence

A Closer Listen

Wild Up, the Los Angeles band/new music ensemble, has been releasing recordings of their performances of the work of Julius Eastman for going on five years now. It is as much a work of archival recovery as a creative endeavor in its own right.

Eastman has been described as misunderstood, forgotten, and singular. Active in the downtown New York avant garde art and music scenes of the 1970s and 80s, contemporaries with Philip Glass and Steve Reich, his work went mostly unacknowledged for decades after his death in 1990. When critics and historians began recovering it in the late 2010s, they were confronted with an oeuvre that is vast and challenging but Wild Up, under the direction of Artistic Director Christopher Rountree, have proven themselves up to the challenge of interpreting Eastman’s spare scores and recording them across now four albums, each more jubilant, propulsive, and surprising than the one before. 

Eastman’s music defies categorization, trained as both a vocalist and pianist, he has most often been described as a minimalist composer (his minimalist masterpiece Feminine pre-dated Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians), but while much minimalist music threatens thrillingly to go off the rails, few achieve the chaotically unpredictable yet powerful force that Eastman does.

Wild Up’s latest dive into the Eastman repertory, Julius Eastman Vol 4: The Holy Presence, digs deep into his archive, performing several works they describe as representing a “musically charged and spiritually reflective vein” of his oeuvre. The resulting album is a shockingly diverse listening experience.  

The album begins with “Our Father,” a vocal duet, both parts of which are performed by classical singer Davóne Tines. The sound of Tines rich voice as he harmonizes with himself imbues the song’s lyrics of praise, “Glory to God, the one and only,” with a haunted, almost sinister quality. It manages to sound both ancient and modern at once. 

On the second track the voice (along with every other instrument) disappears and Wild Up ensemble member Richard Valitutto performs Eastman’s “Piano 2” for solo piano. The piece begins furiously before transitioning to a slow spare dissonant melody only to increase in volume again as the piece draws to a close. The playing feels frustrated, full of angst, but it also opens onto piercing moments of beauty and fragility.

The album concludes with two pieces dedicated to Joan of Arc, a figure drenched in symbolic importance for Eastman. First comes the return of Tines in an acappella performance of “Prelude to the Holy Presence of  Joan D’Arc,” a minimalist vocal piece in which Tines somewhat drearily intones a list of saints before proclaiming, “She Said, He Said, They Said” over and over again. The repetitive circuitous lyrics attest that the words they all speak are Joan of Arc. Tines’ pacing of the repetitive phrases shifts ever so slightly throughout, and the unpredictable jumping around between the more staid repetition of names and the boisterous uncontainable vibrato of his delivery of the “He Said, She Said” lines, only barely getting to what they said, Joan and Joan again, refuses the hypnotic effect often sought with minimalist work. 

Concluding the album is “The Holy Presence of Joan D’Arc,” a piece for solo cello performed on the album by Wild Up member Seth Parker Woods in ten multi-tracked cello parts. The piece is an unrelenting ride, Woods’ layers of strings drive and soar and cry as the piece builds and builds and builds until it abruptly ends with a slow fade.

Every piece on this album sounds like nothing that has come before. It’s drenched in almost impossibly rich musical expression and while it’s full of emotion, it leaves the listener totally disoriented, sure only that Eastman was a genius. (Jennifer Smart)