It is beautiful, haunting, immersive. A meditative sound world to live in for a time and think about once you’ve left… In Davis’ hands, the psaltery soars and twangs, pings and croons. Gentle and meditative at one moment, sharp and melancholy the next, the music on Neutral Buoyant reveals the bowed psaltery as an instrument capable of producing tones in surprisingly varied spectrums of texture and color, evoking fluid shapes and celestial voices moving together through a complex, slowly shifting soundscape. It is both of this world and somehow beyond it. - Megan Westberg
Read More“These are old and new ways of composing that involve improvisation music as well as a skillful reworking of ethnic sounds, and inspiring, in the end, new further timbre researches. Dense working-outs in field recordings, overtones and tunes that fit together with textures’ architectures in an evocative and sensitive narration. Eight short tracks made by Kaija Saariaho, and dedicated to the mystical Kyoto gardens, are part of the tracks selection made out of percussion and electronic instruments.”
- neural.it
“It’s the perfect project for Davis, a percussionist fascinated by the mechanics of instruments, whose work brings out the acoustics of sound-making devices and the physicality of playing them.”
- Christopher Munden, FringeArts
“macrocosmic masterpiece…here was music of spheres, both as tiny as a grain of sand and as large as a world.”
- Zoë Madonna, The Boston Globe
“hauntingly beautiful”
- Philip Brandes, The Los Angeles Times
“The excellent Calder Quartet performed " Echeia" by Nathan Davis in the Mozart Hall of the Donauhallen(Composition commissioned by the SWR) with multifaceted tremolo effects and additional sound intervals on the computer.”
-Ralf Brunner, Online Merker
“Hagoromo is magic…stunningly beautiful. The score is lyrically evocative”
-George Grella, NY Classical Review
“Contrapuntal passages of Mozartean elegance emerge unexpectedly from chaotic textures, and the expressive motives of Baroque composition provide a Western equivalent to Noh’s stylization.”
- Joe Cadagin, Opera News
“ “Limn” for bass flute, contrabass flute and electronics employed extended techniques to produce expressive sounds of painful fragility.”
-Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, The New York Times
“An eerie resonance has been added to the minimal percussion sounds making everything shimmer or hum cautiously, the effect is quite hypnotic.”
- Bruce Lee Gallanter, Downtown Music Gallery
“It's an ingenious piece you can access in any number of ways, and consequently, everybody has their own experience.”
-James Chute, Chicago Tribune
“Nathan Davis writes music that deals deftly and poetically with timbre and sonority.”
- Steve Smith, The New York Times
“Nathan Davis, The Bright and Hollow Sky (New Focus) - Long a tremendous asset to the International Contemporary Ensemble as both a brilliant percussionist and a resourceful composer, Nathan Davis finally documented five of his sonically beguiling works, with predictably rich results.”
-Steve Smith, TimeOutNY
“There is compelling air of mystery the links all these pieces here together. With a little time and reflection, the mystery will be revealed."
- Bruce Lee Gallanter, Downtown Music Gallery
“The choicest setting has the singer declaiming Dadaesque nonsense accompanied by a chorus of twanging jaw harps, to wonderfully whimsical effect. Also arresting is the third section, in which lines from a Rimbaud poem are sung on one pitchover softly pattering guitar and metallic percussion.”
- John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune
“Tony Arnold offered dramatic, multihued interpretations of the four texts that anchored the work”
-Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times
“A melancholy, beautiful choralelike middle section teetered between dissonance and consonance. It gradually increased in intensity, becoming an uplifting and harmonically intriguing explosion of activity.”
-Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times
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Read More“...deftly illuminated its eclectic moods and myriad timbres — which ranged from breathy, guttural noises to rhapsodic melodies in a high register, interspersed and contrasted with digital sounds.”
-Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times
“an alluring and pensive musical experience.”
- Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times
“a fantastical litany of squeaks and squeals, followed by a warm, wooly thicket of resonating overtones.”
- Steve Smith, The New York Times