Through decades as contemporary classical music’s reigning style, there’s no denying minimalism is here to stay. You can’t look at today’s composed music without finding phasing or repetition somewhere; you’ve maybe dabbled in deep listening; or perhaps you got so far down the rabbit hole that you now see Terry Riley as your hippie grandfather. As minimalism persists, the question becomes less about its history and more about where it will go. Will it make its final arrival in John Luther Adams’ endless Earth waves or the 24-hour drone? Or will it shift somewhere we haven’t yet imagined, a new lattice of looped melodies in which to get lost? Brendon Randall-Myers and Annie Blythe’s Only in the Dark poses one answer to the question: perhaps minimalism can live in a Bach-meets-Philip-Glass cello concerto mixed with world-building ambient electronics, a dash of intensity, and deep attention to tactility. It’s at once an album of familiarity, the kind of music that draws on the well of history to inform its present, and one that finds a new path in music’s physical potential.
This is well-trodden territory for composer Brendon Randall-Myers, who deals in immersion. Take his album with Miki Sawada, A Kind of Mirror, which blends swirling piano with crashing electronics, or dynamics of vanishing bodies, for Dither, a piercing exploration of an electric guitar quartet’s mass, or his work with black metal band Scarcity and no-wave group the Glenn Branca Ensemble, both operating at the peak of sonic intensity in their own right. The visceral is always at the center, and Only in the Dark also puts tactility at the thematic core. Blythe and Randall-Myers developed the album from shared experiences as neurodivergent people, and their music is a means of forming connections between body and emotion. A sensory kit, created by Blythe, accompanies the record, offering ways of changing the listening experience for audiences depending on their needs. It’s not just about the way the music feels, but how we process it, and how it manifests beyond the amorphous.
While many cinematic works find sweeping textures, Only in the Dark is far more focused on the details. It’s composed in the vein of minimalism, where short phrases are introduced, repeated, distorted, and reshaped as time progresses. They could become a soup, but instead, they’re manicured, and as they’re stacked all the edges remain visible. When a melody is introduced on the cello, each bow stroke can still be heard; slurs don’t muddy together; plucks echo but don’t seem to lose their force even as they fade away; electronics shapeshift with precision. Most movements begin with a delicate melody and gradually expand outward, taking stock of every additional layer, and picking up the pace and crescendoing as it grows. Once the music reaches its pinnacle, each element is pulled apart until all that’s left is a wisp.
Only in the Dark is also a showcase for the cello, highlighting Blythe’s flexible approach to the instrument. Many of the tracks harken back to solo Bach, weaving together lengthy phrases of rolled chords that travel across the instrument’s pitch range while others demand virtuosity. In all, Blythe emphasizes continual change. Her dynamics shift with each bow stroke, finding the emotional core of chords as they move from dissonance into consonance; her strokes themselves quickly seesaw between long, sweeping motions and volatile ricochets.
Indeed, if there’s any constant to this music, it’s change, and the album’s most immersive tracks emphasize continual evolution. Take “Aurora,” for example: The poppiest track on the record, this song emerges from a folksy melody into a sea of syncopations, bright trills, and blossoming electronics, swooping, soaring, and then swerving into quietude. With “On Fire, Quietly,” a deep drone conjures a sense of melancholy and simmers as electronics churn and chords swell. By the end, the whole thing explodes high up the cello’s strings, leading to a sense of immense relief. Even the quieter moments, like “Swivel” or “Tenderly, With Gold,” are still running. So yes: repetition, phasing, and all the elements that served as building blocks for minimalism might be everywhere. They’re certainly here, alive, fully formed, and so tangible. But Only in the Dark is also a reminder: There’s still a lot of ground to cover and even more left to feel.