Equally at home in the posh concert hall and the mosh pit at St. Vitus, composer and guitarist Brendon Randall-Myers writes energetic yet melodic music whose deconstruction and distortion of haunting refrains is featured on this portrait album by Exceptet. Writing for composer Igor Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale septet with its odd concatenation of solo winds, brass, strings and percussion, Randall-Myers summons his distinctive compositional focus in these works to conjure three entirely unique sound worlds.

Randall-Myers describes the opening Chopsticks as drawing equally from modernism and metal, with a heavy dose of hazily-remembered West Virginian folk music thrown in. A guitar tuned to an open D minor chord is laid on its back, strings woven with the eponymous chopsticks, amplified, and played by Exceptet’s percussionist David Stevens with another pair of chopsticks, creating a distinctive sound redolent of a hammered dulcimer. Driving rhythms trigger high register melodic fragments flung out like shards. A stuttering refrain then begins, propelling a sequence of irregular blasts from the brass that announce an abrupt yet satisfying finale.

Lie Down is considerably darker. Initially drawn to the gothic Anglo-Scottish murder ballad “Lord Randall” by the similarity of their names, Randall-Myers subsequently reworked the song into an evocative, lilting song for Exceptet, having discovered it to be the same lyric that inspired Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.” Lord Randall returns to his mother from visiting his lover, only to discover his hounds dead from eating poisoned eels. The same slimy eels he realizes she has perfidiously fed him, spelling his own doom. Illustrating this morbid medieval tale, violinist and singer Sarah Goldfeather’s rich alto voice outlines the terms of Lord Randall’s will as he lies dying over a ringing vibraphone chiming unsettled harmonies, around which slides the lithe trombone of Daniel Linden. The winds howl and the violin growls increasingly dissonant double stops, descrying the queasy inevitability of Lord Randall’s imminent demise.

The second half of this album comprises a twenty-five minute odyssey. Episodic Memory (learning to hurt) builds on Randall-Myers’s practice of amplifying meditative trance states until they explode into cathartic release, an approach born not only from his career in rock and classical music but taking inspiration from his singular concentration on demanding physical tasks such as weight lifting and distance running.

How do our brains process trauma? When as a child you burn your hand on a stove, you remember not to do it again. But why? Episodic memory is the brain’s way of storing the unique memory of each specific event. Yet as the composer stresses, Episodic Memory (learning to hurt), is not specifically about the time he burned his hand on a stove as a child. It is about consequences. That we must grow and change lest we continue to make the same mistakes. 

In the pointedly titled “new muscles,” microtonal inflections emerge from a murmuring, pulsating single pitch that gradually accumulates polyrhythms until, suddenly, a breaking point is reached and “all in your head” begins. The high, shrill screams of Chuck Furlong’s clarinet clash with shrieking violin harmonics and a cacophony of hard-struck wine bottles. Eventually, the rest of the ensemble enters squirming and trilling as if trying to escape the composition’s tight confines. Claustrophobic and almost nightmarish, this cramped geometric construction eventually burns out into the shifting, irregular humming of Catherine Deskur’s double bass to begin the slow build of “correction / contraction.” Over ten hypnotic minutes the ensemble recreates itself after trauma into a new, resonant machine, stacking the microtonal harmonics of Taylor Smith’s bassoon over asymmetrical patterns as it accumulates huge, oscillating masses of sound that culminates in the climactic trumpet solo by a shredding Evan Honse which brings this album to its thrilling conclusion.