Bloom - Ben Rieke (JACK Quartet)

Recorded by JACK quartet as part of New Music on the Point 2021.
Program note-
Spring is a vague season for me. As is the case with many others, my mood usually improves with the lengthening days and new buds returning to dead branches, but it comes with an existential flavor much more visceral to me than that of autumn. Seeing the life return to the world around me every year does more to erode the lines in my mind dividing being from non-being and myself from everything else; I am just a small part of the system of organic material being used, disassembled and put back together, but even my identity as a discrete part is called into question when I consider something like the conjoining of two tree trunks or the small ecosystem of insects they might support, not unlike the network of trillions of organisms in my digestive system that I host just as I depend on for my good health. I am equal parts unsettled and exhilarated by the erasure of what separates me from my environment, and Bloom is a study in this feeling-ideas morph into other ideas, lines come out of nothing and jump from instrument to instrument before vanishing, and individual gestures are recontextualized into larger textures in the manner of the pulsating, yearning, unending process of growth that the spring months bring back to the foreground of my life.
Incredibly grateful to NMOP and JACK for this opportunity.
www.benrieke.com

[@katrinaconcepcion1447]

this is very good i very much like as well as the program note.

[@gregschwaegler]

Excellent, Ben! I love the organic development of this whole thing. You seem to have nailed your chosen concept

[@benrieke5504]

Thanks! Great to hear.