REVIEWS

The Wire

“Its paradoxical title, fusing intractable mass with delicacy, suits this music well. New Yorker David Bird hatched Iron Orchid in collaboration with Yarn/Wire pianist Ning Yu. This intense yet finely detailed electroacoustic work was conceived initially as a component of Mark Regelman’s sound sculpture Echo Chamber, channeled through speakers concealed within a stack of metal tubes. Computer-generated sounds respond in kind to the piano’s intrinsic articulateness, and despite the sustained density there are a multitude of subtleties to be discerned and discovered within its skeins of microtones and restless variations of texture and timbre.”

An Earful

"Ning Yu & David Bird - Iron Orchid Yu's debut, 2020's Of Being was mightily impressive, but this album, a collaboration with composer David Bird, is a whole other animal. Bird, who first caught my ear on andPlay's wondrous Playlist, is obviously a deep thinker about sound, refusing to accept any limitations on what an instrument can do, in this case the piano, which is pushed to its limits as an object of wood and metal and plastic. Surrounding the sometimes startlingly heavy sonics generated by Yu are not only electronics but recordings collected from the Echo Chamber, an 11-foot tall sculpture created by Bird and Yu with Mark Reigelman that contains a speaker in each of its 56 metal tubes. That's all fascinating to know, but the overall experience of the album is of inventive, mind-expanding electroacoustic soundscapes, some spiky and herky-jerk, like a malfunctioning Terminator taking baby steps, others, like the staggering album-opener Garden, nearly overwhelming oceans of wall-shaking sound. I'm no audio elitist, but that latter quality is only fully realized on my good, old-fashioned component stereo. If there's one nearby, you owe it to yourself - and the dedicated team who made this extraordinary album - to play it there and at high volume.”

Best of Bandcamp Contemporary Classical

“Pianist Ning Yu (Yarn/Wire) and composer David Bird originally created this music to be used as part of an interactive sound sculpture by Mark Reigelman in 2019, so it’s remarkable that it not only holds up on its own, but thrives as a piece of music. As the title suggests, the work revolves around the idea of metal, and in this context it sparkles, crashes, decays, and clangs. Bird’s electronics alternately seem to emanate from the acoustic patterns played by Yu, whether she’s playing dark left-handed clusters or scraping the strings inside of her instrument. Some of the electronic elements are objects inside of the piano, which generate odd harmonies with the keyboard. A series of shorter pieces reveal Yu’s artistry as a pianist, with electronic responses that alternate between shadowing and abstracting her playing, fighting against it, or finding harmony within it. Bird never settles for a single approach in his writing or in the application of electronics, yet the music never lacks cogency.”

Vital Weekly

‘Iron Orchid’ is an electroacoustic work for piano and electronics composed by New York-based composer David Bird and performed by Ning Yu. The work “builds on materials generated for the interactive sound sculpture Echo Chamber, an 11-foot metallic structure that Bird and Yu collaborated on with site-specific public artist Mark Reigelman II in 2019”. Composer David Bird is interested in electroacoustic music and multimedia environments and the relationship between individuals and technology, between human and computer-generated sounds. He worked with ensemble Intercontemporain, The Bozzini Quartet, Ensemble Proton Bern, to name a few. Ensemble TAK is the name of his own New York-based ensemble. Ning Yu is an essential pianist in performing music from 20th and 21st centuries. She premiered compositions by Bang on a Can-composers like David Lang and Michael Gordon and many other recent compositions. It is often difficult for me to gain a clear picture of the procedures followed with projects like these. This usually ends up in my thought, concluding that in whatever way this music came into being, it counts if it talks to me for me as a listener. For sure, this is the case with this recording. In all tracks, the electronic textures have something omnipresent. They are not just background or context only for the acoustic piano. The relationship is a different one, resulting from unusual strategies. ‘Prism’ is built from detailed floating and bubbling electronics with a dynamic piano solo. ‘Petals’ starts as a spooky and atmospheric texture of electronic sounds make fine whole and embedment of sparse piano sound sometimes generated by playing the inside of the piano. Near the end, a melodic line occurs. ‘Garden’ has almost cosmic ambient-like textures combined with restless piano movements. A good trip of overwhelming sound constellations. Continuously changing sound vehicles full of details. Fascinating! (DM)