Jack Sheen’s Press featured in The Best Contemporary Classical Music on Bandcamp
“A few years ago I covered composer Jack Sheen’s mysteriously gripping Solo for Cello, deftly performed by Apartment House leader Anton Lukoszevieze. It’s an intensely stripped-down work of minimalism with a reduced dynamic imparted by a mute on the cello. I’ve since explored some of Sheen’s other work, all of which deliciously build music around weird bowing gestures—a kind of collection of angular sounds and phrases that almost seem like sonic detritus on their own, but which form a wonderfully odd edifice. Suddenly The Vestige, his file-swapping acousmatic project with Giuseppe Ielasi, is no longer an outlier, but part and parcel of his composed work. His instantly recognizable aesthetic has come into sharp focus for me with Press, a mesmerizing piano quintet with mutes on the string instruments, tackled with exquisite transparency by Apartment House. The 14-movement work is filled with creaky gestures akin to those on the solo cello piece, as well as some sustained tones here and there. But with multiple instruments tracing these cycling patterns, the music transmits a ghostly harmonic glow of broken, back-and-forth gestures that evokes a long row of playground swings in desperate need of oil, moving to and fro. Those gestures are in a constant state of transformation and variation, pulling the listener in and revealing hidden melodic fragments and evolving rhythms. The piano, played by Kerry Yong, dwells mostly on the periphery, dropping ominous chords and haloing the strings with sustained overtones until it seizes control in the 12th movement with an unexpected series of dark, numbing runs. The music is confounding in the best way, and the confusion it imparts has proven addictive.” Peter Margasak
