TO PLAY NICE WITH TWISTED TUTU ,
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Available on OO Discs

"This disc is the way 21st century music sounds"
- Kyle Gann, The Village Voice

Gone is the 20th century, and with it ideas about what constitutes genre and form. In a world where 200 channels of cable TV are available at the flick of a button, music from every era and genre is available for purchase on a single website, and instantaneous communication with far-flung reaches for the globe is a norm, there is a need for a music that addresses the complex spirit of the age.

Cue twisted tutu. Composer/vocalist/performance artist Eve Beglarian and pianist/keyboardist Kathleen Supové are poised to bring down the walls and introduce the concert hall to the sounds of the global village. Beglarian, product of Uptown's finest academies, brings her impeccable training together with bleeding edge technology and one of the keenest ears for pop music in the New Music scene. Equally at home with Mahler and Fat Boy Slim, she is relentless in her pursuit for new sounds and new ways of making them. Similarly, Supové started out a pianist in Boston's most proper tradition, but soon threw off those confining shackles with her Exploding Piano series. Dramatic costumes, innovative programming and fiery technique breathed new life into the dusty halls of academia.

The duo comes together in a fusion of adventurous vision and technical prowess, fiercely committed to exploring "physicality, spirituality, and sexuality in music making." Onstage twisted tutu splice together original compositions with all manner of "covers" (from Machaut to Duke Ellington to Downtown compatriots). Songs and styles overlap with seamless segues - creating the type of unified dissonance usually emanating from the studio, not the stage.

What makes this collage of ideas work is the singular voice of the composer. Beglarian understands the range of possibilities available to the creator in the digital age. To supplement and amplify her own substantial musical ideas, she is free to appropriate and manipulate sounds, tunes and idioms to her own artistic ends. By fitting outside ideas and references into her own framework, Beglarian creates a work that works on multiple levels - at face value but also with considerable subtext. This approach is not news to the hip-hop generation, but is a welcome paradigm shift for the concert hall, particularly engaging in these well-versed and classically trained hands.

Although twisted tutu mixes Beglarian's compositions with those of Kitty Brazelton, Duke Ellington, Arthur Jarniven, Guy Klucevsek, Robin Lorentz and Randall Woolf, Play Nice is held together by twisted tutu's vision. Jumping from disco to Asian folk-song to post-minimalism to conceptualism, interspersing the electronic and the acoustic, utilizing talking dolls and phone personal ads, Play Nice is an intensely personal conversation with a wide-ranging mind.

Play Nice explores twisted tutu's preoccupations through a fascinating landscape of sound: Boy Toy/Toy Boy fuses beats and orgasmic breathing in a fashion that invokes both musique concrete and Donna Summer's I Feel Love - an historically-informed gay disco anthem. Duke Ellington's I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart is a wonderfully quirky piano version inspired by Oliver Lake's arrangement for the World Saxophone Quartet. The real-life tensions and interplay between passion for a lover and passion for one's creative activity are vividly documented in Kitty Brazelton's I Touch Your Cheek. In Randall Woolf's One Tough Lama, the conflict between the spiritual ideal and the temporal reality is rendered both humorous and funky. The Buncanan Song uses a simple additive process to create "Dada roots music." And Written on the Body sets Jeannette Winterson's powerfully erotic words, to a slow tone progression based on a short-wave recording.

Enter the 21st century - NOW!