Talea Ensemble / Jim Baker / JACK Quartet - Huck Hodge: Life Is Endless Like Our Field of Vision (2014)

The music of Huck Hodge (b. 1977) draws extensively, if obliquely, on experiences from his northwestern American heritage. Uniquely Northwestern light patterns act as an inspiration in much of his music - the way that a piercing slant of light, breaking through a dreary Seattle cloudscape, casts an intense, otherworldly chiaroscuro on the landscape - the ethereal yellowness of the light in bas-relief against the yawning darkness of the sky. These stark contrasts in light and dark find their way into his striking combination of pure and dissonant harmonies, widely spaced orchestrations and vast, diffuse timbres. The works on this CD, written over a period of half a dozen years, display a breadth of conception that is refreshing to encounter in such a young composer while also indicating the process of rapid development that has characterized his trajectory so far.