John Morton
Solo Traveler
Innova 2007

01. Teetines
02. Solo Traveler, for five voices and five music boxes
03. Ta-wee
04. Through the Wall
05. Amazing Grace Variations

John Morton takes apart music boxes, reconfigures their innards, and builds new instruments out of them, manipulating both manually and electronically. The result is unmistakably still the sound of music boxes, but with a density and depth that combines the human with the mechanical. One critic describes Morton's compositions as "at once soothing and disturbing". It all started, he says, when his wife, sculptor Jacqueline Shatz, persuaded him to help her with a piece she was working on. After building their first music box together, he was hooked, and grew interested in using music boxes to create new sounds. One of the attractions was that music boxes "allowed me to play with giving up some control". Because his contraptions play at different speeds, and because they behave differently each time they are played, the outcome is "unpredictable". Relaxed as in 'Teetines' or hectic as in 'Ta-wee', culminating with a version of 'Amazing Grace', on a set of no less than seventeen "recomposed and altered music boxes". Highly minimal, and highly hallucinatory too.

The exception to an overall mood of metallic bliss is the title piece, 'Solo Traveler', for five voices and five music boxes. With vocal work performed by the Dare to Breathe ensemble, this is one of a kind, sounding at times like medieval polyphony then shifting to more abstract tonalities. How the vocal passages were determined and integrated with the myriad of clickings would make for a curious story, and as an exercise in reconciling two vastly different forms into a single piece is no small task.

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