DAWN | GRAMOPHONE - REVIEW

GRAMOPHONE - Sounds of America

by: Pwyll ap Siôn | March 2025

As its name indicates, Grand Electric is the grand-piano-meets- electric-guitar duo creation of guitarist Mark Dancigers and pianist Aaron Wunsch. Dancigers is best known for his work with the New York-based NOW Ensemble - often linked to composers associated with the so-called indie classical movement such as Judd Greenstein, Missy Mazzoli, Nico Muhly and Sarah Kirkland Snider while Wunsch has evolved a solo career specializing in new music alongside teaching keyboard studies at the Juilliard School.

As might be expected, ambient and minimal influences filter through on this debut release on Bright Shiny Things. Composed by Dancigers, Aurora begins understatedly with gently falling and rising patterns in A minor on piano against pulsing Es on electric guitar. This still atmosphere nevertheless becomes increasingly animated through the gradual introduction of syncopated patterns and subtle incremental layers on guitar aided by liberal use of the loop pedal. The mood has shifted almost unnoticeably from the quiet ambiance of dawn to the hustle and bustle of daily life. An invigorating sense of carpe diem is sustained through to the end of Aurora, punctuated by assertive ascending lines on Wunsch's piano and chiming bell-like chords on Dancigers's guitar.

The only track on 'Dawn' composed by Wunsch, Take Chants, possesses an altogether more visceral and immediate quality, its dark, threatening tone enhanced by distorted bursts on electric guitar that recall 'Larks' Tongues in Aspic'-period King Crimson. As with their performances on this album, Wunsch and Dancigers's compositional styles also complement each other, with the latter's more continuous, incremental, luminous, process-based pieces a foil to Wunsch's ominous quartal harmonies and gritty juxtapositions.

The slow-burn-and-gradual-reveal that underpins Dancigers's aesthetic works especially well in the five-movement Image and Gravity suite, where minimalist-style cross-fading and dovetailing patterns exchanged between piano and electric guitar combine to create a continuous tapestry of expansive wavelike gestures and sweeping sonic vistas in the third and fourth movements, before circling back to silence at the end of the fifth.