Noah Creshevsky, Hyperrealist Music 2011-2015 (EM Records EM1140CD)

Hearing Noah Creshevsky's music for the first time is like being pushed off a
cliff, into the universe of Roadrunner cartoons: you are the coyote in that
moment between realizing that there is no ground to support you, before the
inevitable, comical plummet begins.

Keep listening, though, and you'll never hit the ground. Creshevsky's music,
unlike the cartoon, is real, and obeys the laws of physics that rule sound as
much as they rule the motion of our bodies through space and time. But like
the cartoon, it is a different view of reality. Not an alternate viewpoint on the
reality we all share, but a completely different universe in which a different
music—one that cannot be made in our reality—is possible. The familiar
features of pitch, rhythm, tempo, and timbre are there, as are identifiable
(and even ancient) forms, but structured in unfamiliar and impossible ways.
Surreal, beyond real, hyperreal.

Creshevsky is a unique composer. He creates music with the tools and

craftsmanship that come out of the rigors of the Western classical tradition,
but his medium is entirely electronic. Imagine a sonata written in a
sequencer and a Digital Audio Workstation, and imagine that the sonata is
not written for musicians to play, but instead plays musicians in a virtual
way, and you’ll have a grasp of Creshevsky’s means, which already set him
apart from his peers in both contemporary classical and electronic music.

Creshevsky’s sound is different from anything you’ve heard before. It is

hyperrealism, his term. Creshevsky takes samples of playing and
singing―an individual instrument, a bit of an ensemble―which come from
either pre-existing recordings or are specially made for him by musicians,
lightly edits them, and then uses them to realize his compositions. He makes
pieces that produce music just beyond the skills of the most virtuosic
musicians―figurations that are a little too fast, attacks that are a little too
exact, changes and superimpositions that are a little too quick―and that
elide your ability to perceive music made by man or machine. Everything
sounds so human, because the sound sources are human, yet it's all covered
with a sheen of artificiality; people are playing, but they can’t possibly be
playing what you’re hearing―surreal, beyond real, hyperreal.

Hyperreal music is exciting and unsettling, which makes it dazzling. There is

the sense of the uncanny, the human sounds played in ways that are
superhuman, that touches on Burke’s concept of the sublime as the
attraction to things that are incomprehensible and even a bit frightening. It’s
language is based in familiar, even prosaic, grammar, but the vocabulary and
syntax seem to come from the future, or another dimension. It produces a
powerful, complex psychoacoustic experience of having your perceptions
constantly stimulated and challenged while also hearing a formally
structured composition, with counterpoint and cadences. It’s not uncommon
to laugh in both amazement and disbelief. On top of that is Creshevsky’s
humor, the jump-cut aesthetic and juxtaposition of absurd combinations that
he shares with Carl Stalling and John Zorn.

But there’s more to his style. Even with the unerring precision of digital
music making, and Creshevsky’s admitted preference for sounds with a
hard-edged attack (“I don’t want a blur, I prefer Manet to Monet”), his ear
for space and his sensibility for the human origins of the sounds he uses can,
when he chooses, produce lyrical, evocative, and haunting music. The
hyperreality is there, but rather than super powered, it is metaphysical.

Creshevsky’s music also opens up an open ended, ontological consideration

of the nature between recorded music and real-time music making. Our
experience of music is so pervasively mediated by recordings that it’s
common to forget that humans made music for thousands of years before
the advent of recording technology, and only had their own memories, or
descriptions made by others, to carry musical experiences through time.
Recordings have also had an indelible effect on how music is now played—it
was the limits of early recording technology that led to the standardization of
vibrato for string players (vibrato helped the instruments cut through early
acoustic recordings), and jazz is an entire genre of music that was taught
through recordings.

Music is so woven into the story of technology that there are unusual cultural
assumptions about musical styles and ideas. Technology has generally
gotten better, lighter, more powerful, and cheaper over the past 100 years,
single-handedly creating the façade of linear civilizational progress.
Concomitant has been the development, accumulation, and refinement of
musical ideas, of new musical problems and new ways to solve them (more
or less true for Western classical music). On the obverse is the assumption
that music, and playing, of the past was somehow less advanced. I
remember the first time I heard Art Tatum, a scratchy 78 transferred to CD,
and the juxtaposition of the early audio technology and prodigious, advanced
musical thinking and piano playing made me immediately think, “I didn’t
know they could play like that back then,” as if in the 1930s, someone could
play only so fast, so well, have so many ideas.

Creshevsky collapses and explodes that. He admits that he has always been
attracted to virtuosity, and mentions the pianistically challenging music of
Rachmaninoff, Liszt, and Domenico Scarlatti—there have always been
composers who could write technically challenging music and musicians who
could play it. What Creshevsky creates with hyperrealism/technology is the
musician as superman, an Art Tatum who is both identifiable—the source is
human—and who doesn’t exist, except as digital information transmuted into
sound waves. The music collected on this recording is both impossible and
real, something no one can play because, as of today, we don’t yet know
how to play that fast, that well, with so many ideas. The technology reveals
our own limitations, but Noah Creshevsky’s hyperrealism shows that it’s
possible to imagine far beyond the limits of technique and technology. Look
behind you, Noah, maybe you can see us catching up.

- George Grella

(These notes are adapted in part from an article in the May 2015 issue of the
Brooklyn Rail.)