Kronos Quartet : Short Stories

The Kronos Quartet album "Short Stories" is aptly named, take the twelve and a half minute song "Cat O' Nine Tails," continuously morphing from one extremely short story into the next without warning.

The first minute is relentless with change of style and genre, like a commercial with too many images packed in for you to take in at once, its audio-overload. Brief moments of tonality disperse madly into chaotic dissonance over and over, landing someplace entirely unexpected each time. This is a quartet with serious multiple personality disorder. just when you think you are getting to know the piece it morphs into something different. The photo on the cover of the cd with a birds-eye-view picture of a typewriter with flames coming out of it does a good job of representing the madness that goes on in these songs. you can picture the performers hammering away their skittish story on the typewriter which releases a fire fueled by a curiosity driven to madness. It is enough to spark your interest. It is easy to forget in moments of extreme dissonance and discontinuity that there is an incredible skill at work, and here there is.

If nothing else you could come to this saying you've never heard anything quite like it. They use all kinds of inventive techniques to play each of the four stringed instruments, making a cello sound like an angry dog, and the slapping and stretching of strings sound like bamboo being pushed and snapped in a creepy forest. The instruments take on a human or animal quality in what seems like a short horror story, arriving at times in moments of beautiful sadness. Half way through the song, diminished chords fade into silence and then get scooped up into a tacky version of a hoe-down dance from your middle school country-line-dance class, departing into something less familiar just in time to keep you from skipping to your next track on your shuffle setting of i-tunes. One can only imagine how this piece is notated for all of the strange sounds that manage to come out of these traditional instruments (presumably a cello, viola, and two violins). The creaking of a door sliding slowly pulled out of the cello into the casual strum of a violin, they throw you into snippets of familiar genres, and sweep you right back out of them with haunting sound effects and precise chaos. this music is refreshing and alive, and a bit frightening, you would have to be brave to play this one loud with your windows down in the summer time (and a bit neurotic feeling). But its worth listening to in a safe secluded place, for an experience all together unique and difficult to understand.