My debut album Brightest Threads combines my fascination for American post-minimalism, new Australian sounds, and the bass clarinet. It’s an eclectic collection of chamber and solo works; bucket list pieces, brand new works, things that make me smile. David Lang’s tour-de-force solo “Press Release” is basically why I play the bass, Reich’s “New York Counterpoint” is a chance to let my hair down, and Ryan Walsh’s “Bled Out” is maybe the playing I’m most proud of, period. I’m joined by Stuart Byrne, Natasha Fearnside, and Robin Henry (bass clarinets) on Robert Davidson’s masterful quartet “Brightest Threads” (Stuart also plays on Akiho’s mesmerising “Karakurenai”), and Thea Rossen (vibraphone) on Tim Hansen’s heartbreaking “North Head”, commissioned by Enyato Duo. I’m very proud for this first offering to be released by my friends in Brisbane at Made Now Music. The bass clarinet here is punchy, guttural, sweet, tender, and raw, and I hope that you find something new to love in this album.

released July 10, 2020

Alex Raineri and I first performed together at the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music (BIFEM) in 2017, playing an explosive new chamber work by Elliott Gyger. We then decided to see if he’d written anything for clarinet and piano and stumbled across the behemoth that is Liquid Crystal. After performing it along the east coast in 2019, we decided it had been a large enough endeavour to put it together in the first place to warrant recording it.

This album is a bit of a mixtape. I’m old enough now to remember recording my favourite daggy songs from the stereo onto a blank cassette so that I could listen to them on my Walkman on the bus, and definitely old enough to remember giving friends burnt CD’s of whatever peculiarities I was listening to at the time. They were always disparate collections, and so too is this album.

These are pieces that Alex and I love; cherished pieces of the clarinet/piano repertoire, a new arrangement that I hope stays the course, and a unique piece of Australiana that I’m glad we spent the time to put together. We’re very proud to share them all with you on a mixtape of our own called ‘Liquid Crystal’.

Myth of the Cave is a suite in five movements for clarinet/bass clarinet, double bass and piano, composed by Yitzhak Yedid in Jerusalem, Israel, 2002, and premiered in Frankfurt, Germany, October 2002.

The fundamental idea of the composition was inspired by Plato's philosophic metaphor, The Allegory of the Cave:

Human beings sit in a cave, in chains, their backs to the entrance. The shadows of things moving outside are projected by the light onto an inner wall of the cave. As the prisoners have never been outside the cave since birth, they believe these shadows are reality. One of them succeeds in freeing himself and walks outside into the light. He realises that he has lived his whole life in the shadow of an illusion. Delighted by his discovery, he returns to the cave to communicate it to the others. Violence erupts between the one who ventured outside and those who do not want to understand. The story ends with the death of the person that had gained insight into reality.