When I saw the album artwork, ‘dirty bubblegum’ was the first phrase to pop into my head; when I listened to the music, it was ‘Richard Strauss TikTok’. This is exuberant, virtuosic, at times beautiful, often impatient, energetic, juvenile, colourful, funny, messy, annoying and, yes, happy music. Textures and styles morph and meld with an astonishing speed across the six pieces on this disc. Prominent stylistic elements include but are not limited to cartoon music, math rock, movie music, free jazz, commercial jingles, cheerily little diatonic tunes and ironic fanfares, all piled into the same score. It's like the downwardly mobile neoliberal rococo of a hoarder's living room. The music is dizzying and impressive, equally for the density of different elements as for the degree to which it still works. I encountered a phrase in a meme somewhere that applies to this music: ‘I am neither serious nor ironic but a secret other third thing.’ Post-ironic? That which is subsequent to post-irony? The music feels very contemporary: very very complicated emotions that are no less earnestly and strongly felt for it. In general, each bit of musical clutter is given just enough rhetorical space to be recognised and indeed expressive before another element comes along. Each piece gets a quiet moment and there's something very special in them. Again, these moments convey a very contemporary feeling: there's a listlessness and a crash, like lying down on a couch completely exhausted but still scrolling on a smartphone. The sheer superabundance of novelty and thrill certainly leaves an impression. But I find the more interesting aspect is the way that the musical collaging perches on the very edge of coherence.
At less than four minutes, the opening piece for orchestra, Love Kittens, begins with a cute little tune on the trombone, Paxton's instrument, with clever ornamentation and padding. It's a humble and unassuming start to the piece and to the album. But before 15 seconds has elapsed, a dazzling mixture of high metallic percussion and high winds interrupts, like a cluster of arcade games. It’s difficult to tell what exactly the orchestration is at this moment. Electronic and acoustic instruments here are fused in a unique way. A sudden quiet section for murmuring strings creates a crisis point which gradually brings about a conclusion.
Od Ody Pink'd is a kind of outlandish Straussian tone poem trombone concerto with Paxton's hyper-virtuosic noodling as a more or less constant fixture in the foreground. It is perhaps the strongest piece on the album. The first section alternates between a schizophrenic John Williams-style Christmas movie score and a Gershwin-esque brassy portrait of the big city. A reflective and sentimental undercurrent surfaces from time to time. Around the five-minute mark, Paxton goes for a climax in the form of everybody-does-everything-as-fast-as-possible-at-the-same-time. Undoubtedly exhilarating at first, it does start to drag after about three minutes. Ultimately it lands on a quite lovely extended murmuring coda, similar to the ending of the first piece.
Strawberry begins with moody low synthesisers, mumbling low brass, sine tones unsettlingly beating. Somehow that moodiness is maintained even as a soaring anthemic melody emerges and the material characteristically goes crazy. Eventually a groove is established, and the voice of countertenor Patrick Terry enters singing in a post-(post-post-post-)punk style. As the vocal lines unfold, they get more and more unwieldy and wild, more silly in their aperiodic extensions. A quiet section like exhaustion sets in. As the first section somehow managed to maintain an emotional state as the material morphed around, so too this exhausted feeling persists as the amount of activity picks back up.
Water Music features improvised water percussion from Beibei Wang. As water is constantly changing, so too is this music. Other than an ironic reference to Handel in the title, this is a rather enigmatic piece. The strongest moment is a triumphant fanfare accompanying the flushing of a toilet. This happens several times. Sweet Wishes has Paxton return to his trombone. This is even more enigmatic than the previous piece. It would seem that Tim Rutherford-Johnson would agree; his discussion of this piece in the liner notes doesn't actually discuss it at all. The interesting edge-of-coherence explored elsewhere on this album I think has been missed here.
In stark contrast, Bye is the most focused and restrained piece on the album and is a welcome gesture of settling down. Saxophone, clarinet and wah-wah trombone play a stately chorus, like the pilgrims’ chorus from Tannhäuser. The compositional task here is the effort to get out of this material, because, as beautiful as it is, it is like an endless loop of self-similarity. A very large-scale everybody-doing-everything climax tries mightily to achieve this. But once this train is in motion, Paxton seems unable to really alter its course – he can only add surface elements more or less in tension with a deeper momentum.
There is so much to enjoy in this music, not least the extraordinarily vibrant and virtuosic playing from the Dreammusics Orchestra and Ensemble. From what I can tell, this group essentially is Alex Paxton and his friends, and this album is very much centred on him. He is credited for conducting, recording and mixing all six tracks, and the ensemble has no footprint unaffiliated with him.
While listening, I found myself constantly evaluating how annoyed I was. I doubt this is a desired vector of listening. It went like this: somehow I had the impression that he was watching me, evaluating my response and throwing some shiny new thing as soon as my attention flagged. While it demonstrates an extraordinary musical situational awareness, it is also a rather exhausting dynamic. Rutherford-Johnson writes that Paxton was a music teacher to young children while in graduate school. That experience has clearly informed his compositional approach. I really do think that there are wonderful elements to this music, though I also feel as though I have been treated like a child. But perhaps this is not such a bad thing.
