Review of “Mother of Balloon Music” by Michael Anton Parker:
"Over the course of a seriously diverse 57 minutes, this long overdue follow-up to Dunaway's groundbreaking 1998 Balloon Music release on CRI finds the mother of balloon music (as true and literal an epithet as possible) documenting some stunning technical and conceptual advances in collaboration with violinist Tom Chiu and the other members of FLUX Quartet. Even for folks like myself for whom balloon music has long ceased to be a novelty and has become nothing less than the inevitably unfolding future paradigm of human sound culture, this is pretty shocking stuff. Like Radulescu's String Quartet no. 4, some of the material on here is both musically revolutionary and viscerally devastating in its spectral intensity. This is microtonality as crafty violence. In the second movement of the 21-minute opus "For Balloon and String Quartet", the bowed strings and rubbed balloon become indistinguishable swirls in a relentless swarm of dizzying circular pitch motion. Dunaway's two duo improvisations with Tom Chiu also use the primary balloon music technique of rubbing (or otherwise agitating) the surface (a technique insightfully labelled by Dunaway as an "orb-shaped string"), which allows for a flexibility of sound production far exceeding any other known instrument, but the big surprise here is the flexibility of the violin because Chiu somehow manages to make it sound like a balloon! The high-pitched acrobatics and sound mergers they achieve is breathtaking and will surely change many people's lives. In general, across the 37 minutes of various balloon techniques combined with the violin family, Dunaway's compositional methodology of using inherent qualities of balloons to constrain the string vocabulary represents a major breakthrough for bowed string music in itself. You've never heard a string quartet anything like this before. Balloon music purists may turn up their noses at Dunaway's "anything you can do with a balloon" kitchen-sink scope, which extends beyond rubbing to include balloon-as-reed (bracingly precise and beautiful arcing drones in the first movement of the FLUX Quartet piece), balloon-as-resonator ("with the tones excited by the subtle vibrations of hand-held tape-players and vibrators"), balloon-as-koto-preparation (in the 12-minute game-based performance by Ryuko Mizutani on bass koto with "impositions" by Dunaway), and the inevitable "real-time MAX/msp sampling/processing" (two pieces in collaboration with Damian Catera), but the bottom line is that Dunaway delivers something or another in this program to strike anyone with both terror and joy (not necessarily at the same time) at the very core of their being. Her years of dedication to balloon music have brought her to a level of refinement in a handful of aesthetic fixations for which there are no peers. Anyone who still hasn't been initiated into the future of music yet must hear both this unbelievably impressive disc and Ricardo Arias' entirely different and equally impressive balloon music treatise Musica Global. It's urgent. (Please note: the balloon revolution goes beyond sound and has layers of philosophical and sociologial depth beyond the scope of this blurb. Read Dunaway's great liner notes and ask me about this if you bump into me on the sidewalk sometime.)
-Michael Anton Parker
Judy Dunaway is an internationally known sound artist whose works have been presented throughout North America and Europe including the Roy and Edna Disney Center, Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors, ZKM, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Everson Art Museum and many other venues. Awards/grants/residencies include Aaron Copland Fund, American Composers Forum, Meet the Composer, ZKM, Harvestworks, NEA. Education: Master of Arts, Experimental Composition, Wesleyan University (Connecticut); PhD, Music Composition, SUNY Stony Brook.
