Hologram Crackers is an album of solo cello music. But I guarantee you it’s like no other cello music you’ve ever heard, unless you’re one of the growing cadre of Gideon Freudmann fans.
To say that Freudmann plays the cello is akin to saying that Jimi Hendrix played the guitar. Freudmann is pushing the boundaries of the instrument in a manner similar to the way Hendrix enlarged the guitar’s vocabulary, although a better comparison might be to Todd Rundgren and electronic music. Mostly, though, as with all innovators, Freudmann’s music defies comparison.
By turns dark, moody, pensive, playful, soothing and raucous, Hologram Crackers is a fascinating listening experience. Crackers, Freudmann’s seventh release, moves fluidly among the worlds of classical, jazz, pop and rock, and various fusions of all these. The 17 tracks cover the entire spectrum of modern music in their 62 minutes.
Thanks to modern recording and performing gadgetry, Freudmann performs most of these pieces “live,” even though he often plays several parts, seemingly at the same time. Various computerized devices manipulate loops of the music, allowing him to lay down a bass line, then layer different melodic segments over it via foot-operated pedals. The disadvantage to this approach is that sometimes the music sounds mechanical or sterile, because of the strict tempo to which he must hew in order to keep time with himself. There’s no opportunity for the rhythm “section” to tinker with the beat as the song progresses.
And in his attempt to capture different textures from his startlingly futuristic, custom-made electric cello (which has been aptly described as a cross between a ship’s anchor and a crossbow), Freudmann often pushes it into the realm of synthesized sound. Yes, it’s interesting that such a wide variety of voices come from one instrument, but I sometimes find myself longing for it to just sound like a cello, which is surely one of the most beautiful instruments ever created.
That said, if approached with an open mind and a sense of play and adventure, Hologram Crackers is entertaining and rewarding.
Some of the most interesting pieces are those that apply classical techniques and structures to jazz and rock idioms. That’s the case with the opening track “Excursion.” This piece is constructed like a concerto, with three distinct sections: The opening jazz-rock fusion part, in which a swooping melodic line is laid down over a driving sixteenth-note rhythm played by what sounds for all the world like an electric bass guitar; a quieter but still driven section that suggests a bustling beehive or busy marketplace; and the final section that calls to mind a night highway, with bowed notes dopplering downward over a series of dark, plucked bass notes.
Most of the tracks on the album are similarly programmatic; that is, they suggest images and scenes, much the way Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony suggests a summer meadow and a thunderstorm. I wasn’t surprised to learn that Freudmann has worked on several movie scores — some of the pieces here, including “Haunted Merry-Go-Round” and “Cocoon,” seem to draw on Carl Stalling’s cartoon soundtrack work. Call it “Bugs Bunny noir.”
Similarly, the title track, an immensely likeable number, uses the jazz technique of increasingly embellished repetitions of the melody, laid over a Bo Diddly beat full of starts and stops, and chorus-like quieter interludes alternating with up-tempo sections.
“Robin Hood Changes His Oil” is a clever suite that, true to its title, “steals” from pretty much the entire history of Western music, from Mozart to “Mary Had a Little Lamb” to Gershwin to the blues. Two numbers — “Back Porch” and “Carpal Tunnel” — use a strong boogie-woogie beat. The latter especially has a lot of swing to it, and an endearing melody. This may have been the first time I ever wanted to dance to a cello piece. “Fish Food” is a psychedelic confection in seven-eight time, full of Hendrix-like shrieks and whistles pulled from his instrument. Go back and listen to “If Six Were Nine” for a comparison. “Licorice Particleboard” is jazz with a bit of Celtic fiddling mixed in. Well, Celtic cello-ing. With its playful melody-rhythm interplay, I was reminded of Danny Thompson’s Celtic-inflected jazzy bass work.
“Mango” is a mid-tempo tango with a Beatle-esque melody right out of the “I Am the Walrus” period. Freudmann draws a series of blurry swoops and swirls out of his instrument, and manipulates them electronically until they suggest a backwards-played record. By the third verse, the melody is all but lost in anguished chords torn from the strings. On “Haunted Merry-Go-Round,” Freudmann uses a waltz tempo and a setting that is somehow both whimsical and dark. The melody line has lots of sweeping ups and downs that perfectly suggest the motion of carousel horses. “Flume/April” evokes April in Romania, with a jazzy, bluesy Gypsy-like melody over a plucked rhythm background.
Several of the pieces are even more experimental in nature, compositional exercises that are as far from pop as can be. “Bayou Barn Dance,” “Blind Man’s Bluff” and “Transcendental Zombies” are variously trancelike, repetitive, anti-melodic, discordant, even irritating.
The final piece, “Molecule,” however, is a fascinating and soothing tone poem in four parts. It begins with a series of percolating notes, over which a lazy, contrasting melody is laid down and then developed in a lengthy exposition. Just when you expect it to taper off and fade out, a series of deep bass notes enters, and the melody merges into a series of long notes that advance and recede like ocean waves. Then the piece fades to a false ending, after which it comes back briefly, like an echo.
There’s a lot of variety on Hologram Crackers. The pieces range from less than two minutes to more than six, and are cleverly sequenced to avoid sounding too repetitive. With the exception of a few of the more experimental works, most are pleasant and even fun to listen to — except as previously noted, when the rhythm becomes overly mechanical.
Freudmann, tiring of trying to explain that his solo cello music isn’t at all what most people think of when they hear the words “solo cello,” coined the term “cello bop.” It’s an apt description for most of what Freudmann does on this album, although I sometimes wish for more cello and less bop. Some of the most enjoyable moments on Hologram Crackers are the rare times when he just lets his instrument speak in its natural voice.
(Gadfly, 1999)
