ANTHONY CHEUNG’S CYCLES AND ARROWS
In which I bury the lede for a full five paragraphs
Any devotee of sci-fi knows that The Ratio lives somewhere beyond the 1:5,000 range. For every The Left Hand of Darkness (if not there already, get on board with Ursula K. Le Guin, post-haste) there are at least five thousand Battlefield Earths (yep, that’s L. Ron Hubbard, son).
Well, these aren’t the liner notes you were expecting, are they?
So, one of the standout novels of this, our precarious 21st century, is Annihilation – the 2014 effort by American author Jeff VanderMeer. Please, for the love of all that is holy, read the book and avoid at all costs the Paramount Pictures debacle starring Natalie Portman.
But back to the subject at hand, I contend that what makes Annihilation so successful a piece of writing is that the sci-fi aspects of the book are all tethered to familiar sights and sounds. Heightened sights and sounds, for certain, but eminently familiar. Beasts are simply amplified versions of our own fauna, and the most sinister creature inside these pages carves esoteric poetry on the wall of an inverted tower, the text of which flowers into iridescent flora.
It’s terrifying because the reader inevitably possesses a distinctly first-person point of reference. There are no laser canons or A.I.-enhanced operating systems with which protagonists improbably fall in love.
This is an unnecessarily circuitous way (for you), but necessarily circuitous way (for me), to get to why I love the music of Anthony Cheung. Anthony’s music deposits me in a chromatic space in which I feel alternately at home and in the tempting realm of the unfamiliar. His profound love of jazz is often hovering in the vicinity of many of his scores, and yet what leaps forth from the page in these cases is something not borrowed or extracted from that idiom, but a music transfigured through the singular lens of this savvy sonic architect.
Experiencing Anthony’s creations is something akin to memory, and all of its beautiful delusions…like the familial – and incrementally hyperbolic – tales recounted annually at a Thanksgiving dinner table. The listener’s synapses light up as a fragment conjuring up Coltrane or Beethoven slips by, but this is an altogether footprint-free landscape.
Sitting within the intensely self-conscious sphere of a recording session, I’m obliged to enter into electron microscope-level inspection of Anthony’s writing. Every detail is scrutinized in the effort to capture the best version of the piece in question. What strikes me in this scenario is the composer’s hyper-attention to the way sound transforms as it passes from cello to viola to violin to flute to create an eloquent gesture, for instance – and more importantly, the way in which each instrument instigates and provokes and inspires the next. This is a flavor of music in which the initial, unadulterated listening experience is just as vivid and captivating as an in-depth examination of the score…say, during Take 16 of measures 10-through-35.
Finding this elusive middle path, between compositional rigor and organic musical result, is what I believe makes Anthony’s music so enticing. It somehow swerves the vector of linear music history while at the same time recollecting the remarkable traditions that precede it. It is a mesmerizing glimpse of our future that animates us because it so bewitchingly misremembers our past.
– Doyle Armbrust