Malcolm Goldstein The Seasons: Vermont XI Records The one thing that most people forget when talking about Thoreau is the fact that across the pond--always in eyesight--ran one of the Northeast's busiest railroad lines. Although Thoreau was on a nature trip, his observations were constantly accompanied by the rumble of commerce and industry; Thoreau was as much about coping with the culture around him, as he was about getting away from it. Over the years, while many musicians have invoked the more obvious straight-up-nature side of Thoreau, very few have delved into the more complex relationship of natural sounds to man-made noise. The violinist Malcolm Goldstein, on this new re-release of a 1983 improvisation for magnetic tape and instrumental ensemble, tackles the problem by mixing the sounds of rainfall and birdsong with chainsaws and motorcycles. The results are both unexpected and unsettling, made even more so by a group of six improvisers, who react to a pre-recorded tape of found sounds. Just when you've settled into the gentle sounds of leaves rustling, the percussionist throws a metal tube across the studio, jarring you out of your shoes. On this disc, Goldstein takes on the classical theme of The Seasons. During the time he wrote the piece, he was living in Vermont and made a tape catalog of the different sounds that happened during the different seasons. He then scored some rough rules for a half dozen musicians to follow and came up with a pretty convincing modern opus to nature. The four part structure of the work moves along fairly conventional lines: Summer is bustling with energy and sound, Fall starts off noisy and slowly simmers down, Winter is a long quiet stretch, and Spring eventually comes to life. However, it's the hundreds of small acoustic events that take place within each season that make this record intriguing. Summer throws in everything from motorcycles to skittering saxes; Fall uses Stomp-style trash can percussion to invoke the crackling branches of trees; Winter features the amplified sound of rubber boots walking on snow; and Spring is invoked by diddling guitars, dripping water and a tape of a fiddler's contest looped over and over again to sound like a swarm of cicadas. It's rich fare that only gets better with each listening. Every time I put he disc on, I hear something new depending on my focus and mood. On first listening, this record sounds like European improv. There's not a whole lot of structure as instruments trade turns with pre-recorded sounds. It's easy to imagine that you're listening to the London-based Spontaneous Music Ensemble or Ennio Morricone's late-60s Gruppe Nuova Consonanza. However, as you delve deeper into the disc, you realize that the work is extremely American, not only in its philosophically-based Transcendentalism and in its quotations of Charles Ives, but in its outward-looking chipper Romanticism. Where as European improv generally tends to look no further than itself for its subject matter (all references to the outside world are generally shunned in favor of the structuralist formalism of the music at hand), Goldstein's disc is awash in symbolism and sentiment. It's a circuitous way to arrive at content--but it works--at once keeping the emotional threshold high, while keeping the music cool. It's a disc that helps us come to terms with what we might generally consider "obtrusive noises" in our life, whether we live in the city or the county. After listening to this record, you'll learn to love the sounds of BMX motorcycles ripping through the woods during your Sunday walk in the county and it'll help you make peace with the ubiquitous squeal of rats foraging through metal garbage cans on your block. New York Press, 1998 home