Bill Brennan & Andy McNeill
Bill Brennan, in addition to his professional work as a musician and composer has had a long involvement with the Toronto-based Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan who, in addition to working with traditional repertoire, also perform works by contemporary composers from Canada and beyond. The origins of Dreaming In Gamelan go back almost a quarter of a century, when fellow composer and multi-instrumentalist Andy McNeill was invited to provide the soundtrack for a documentary film and he asked Brennan to join him on the project. The music they came up with combined composition with a good deal of improvisation. Recently the two of them revisited the material, proceeding to develop it further, and this is the result.
One of the joys of listening to music which is multi-layered in its stylistic approach is the way it can sometimes catch you out, suggesting surprising associations. For me “Dreaming In Gamelan” was a case in point. As I was settling into the captivating style of Javanese gamelan on offer, the underlying repeated sequence suddenly brought to mind nothing less than "Hang on Sloopy," despite what I might have thought was my better judgement. Such musical punnery, which may have been unintended, can act as a reminder that for all our rich musical differences, there's not always so much separation as we might imagine.
“Dawn Invocation,” one of the shorter tracks at less than three minutes, is for the most part led by notes from a bonang, but before too long other synthetic sounds begin to transport us to a quite different place. As elsewhere, various electronic processes and treatments are invoked, but applied with a subtlety that ensures a smooth continuum from one sound to the next. While studio effects play an important role throughout the album, these are used with great subtlety, never being allowed to dominate. While gamelan is clearly at the heart of the concept, it is the way it goes beyond that which is so interesting. Dreaming In Gamelan never feels like a forced marriage between east and west, traditional and contemporary. Produced by people who have an understanding of the sensibilities of gamelan, Brennan and McNeill allow a range of other music (which may have included the McCoys) to provide the building blocks for their work, rhythmically and harmonically, while maintaining the spirit of this ancient musical form. In an interview about the album, when asked how to categorize the music Bill Brennan said he thought of it as “being in that ambient world.” While they clearly opt for understatement in preference to excess, the music goes beyond the passivity of ambient music, being for the most part thoroughly engaging.
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The album title gives it away, but from the outset it's clear that the sound world we are entering into on this new release from Canadians Bill Brennan and Andy McNeill has a strong relationship with Indonesian gamelan. In particular the music relates to the Sundanese form of gamelan from West Java, but its references stretch well beyond that. The opening track, “Tunnels of Light,” begins with a rapidly repeated single note on a metallophone, followed up by what sounds like a form of gong, albeit treated electronically, with a melodic pattern played on a type of bonang. All pretty much characteristically gamelan, yet it soon becomes evident that rhythmically and texturally there is also something different and more occidental going on. But this is no half-hearted attempt at blending genres: everything here gels musically, as it does on each track. Traditional gamelan instruments are at the center of the proceedings, but western instruments also play a part, with “Tunnels of Light” and the title track “Dreaming in Gamelan” both featuring an electric violin played by Hugo Marsh. On “Golden Voices” there is some piano, the discrepancy in tunings between that and the Javanese instruments presumably being resolved in the careful production.
