John Luther Adams, Jack Quartet Waves And Particles

"Darkness and Scattered Light" is an album of composer John Luther Adams’s darkly beautiful, mesmerizing, virtuosic music for double bass (two solos and a bass quintet), performed by the late bassist extraordinaire Robert Black (1956–2023).

Adams (b. 1953) writes music that draws much of its inspiration from earth's primal forms and forces. These large, elemental concepts are never far below the surface of the music on Four Thousand Holes. The two works that comprise this album—constructions that grew from a blending of process and intuition—maintain a tight focus on music's inherent sensuality. The title piece, a bold, wonderfully quirky work, amasses and blends multiple tempo streams of simple triads with electro-acoustic "auras" to create a sense of beautifully suspended time. The other piece, ...and bells remembered... for percussion quintet, spins forth a quiet and gently clangorous world of ringing tones.

"When asked about three of his signature orchestral works — the Grammy-winning Become Ocean, its sequel Become Desert, and the original source Become River (previously unreleased as an official recording until now) — composer John Luther Adams refers to them collectively as “a trilogy that I never set out to write.” Collected here for the first time, with newly remastered versions of Become Ocean and Become Desert by acclaimed engineer Nathaniel Reichman, The Become Trilogy pays tribute to a magical partnership between Adams, conductor Ludovic Morlot and the renowned Seattle Symphony. As a whole, the music speaks both to the meditative solace of solitude, and the universally shared experience of living, giving and interacting as a citizen of the world."