Listening to Mary Lou’s multimedia art on this album taken the listener on ten adventures in sound. No two works are alike. Each is creative and sophisticated, informed by Mary Lou’s classical training and virtuosity on the instruments, as well as her well-developed craft of music composition.
Composer and electronic violinist Mary Lou Newmark thrusts listeners into refreshing and innovative territories with latest release “Further North”.
Unflinching in its dynamic, this feels entirely singular and incomparable to many artists on the landscape. Some may pay slight comparison to Björk but there is something wildly different in the classical washes she paints.
Ambitious and quite rightly so, there’s an instinctive approach in her playing but there is also a pushing of boundaries throughout. This is highly inspiring as far as modern composers and sound designers go.
Experimental sounds, emotions and a lot of energy to spend, make these two compositions an epic sensory journey that waters fascination with imagination.
“Space Walk”- Growing like the visual wonder of the edges of the universe, this sound grows in excitement and structures, making the heart race with the tonal possibilities to come.
“Stitch”- tuning into existing forces, the chords play at instigating the mind and making intrigued smiles appear in the environment and in perception, erupting in outbursts of sensorial pleasure.
Mary Lou Newmark dispenses with rules of how a song should begin and conventional structure as “Horses of Grace” begins with a string of couplets of what horses are doing or their status and how that is an example of a form of grace. Then sweeping, moody strings over textured samples and distorted synths, sounds of horses neighing, percussion that sound like something out of a 1980s Art of Noise song. What are we hearing? If you don’t think about it too much this composition offers a dreamlike experience of the essence of a horse as perhaps created a far future AI based on ancient literature, art forms and the fossil record and casting that expression of horsekind in all its glory in this sonic form that could be a style of sound art that would readily be recognized as music crafted on principles very different from notions of music we now possess.