Mode 351 Grady
Crow on the Dark Side of Gloss - Image 2
Kraig Grady


mode 351

Crow on the Dark Side of Gloss

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mode 351 Kraig GRADY: Crow on the Dark Side of Gloss – The Molten Wind; Crow on the Dark Side of Gloss.

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Crow on the Dark Side of Gloss

KRAIG GRADY (b.1952)
Crow on the Dark Side of Gloss

1. The Molten Wind  19:59
Stephen Adams, voice
Michael Dixon, French horn
James Eccles, viola
Kraig Grady, hammered dulcimer
Lamorna Nightingale, flute, bass flute

2. Crow on the Dark Side of Gloss  28:03
Michael Dixon, French horn
Aviva Endean, clarinet
Anna Linardou, voice
Rufus Olivier Jr, bassoon
Melinda Rice, violin, viola
Giorgos Varoutas, pedal steel guitar

FIRST RECORDINGS

Kraig Grady, an American based in Australia, is a microtonal composer. He explains it thus: “Alternative tunings are a major inspiration for my compositional explorations. The pivotal point for me was meeting with tuning theorist Ervin Wilson and witnessing Harry Partch’s U.S. Highball in 1975. I was convinced that working with different instruments and tunings was going to be a major artistic movement.

I began studying tuning with Wilson which continued for as long as we knew each other. … I’m interested in using acoustic instruments as sound sources to explore new acoustic phenomena that cannot be mistaken for electronic manipulation.”

The starting point for the works on this CD was to record each performer playing individual notes in the given microtonal tuning with extreme pitch accuracy. The recordings are edited to capture the personal expressivity of the players and the individuality of their gestures in the recordings become inseparable from the composition process. These recordings of individual notes are then weaved together to form melodic lines and combined to build harmonies and shifting textures.

Liner notes by Grady with illustrated samples.

Kraig Grady is an Australian-American composer, born in Montebello, California in 1952. He studied with Nicolas Slonimsky, Dean Drummond, Dorrance Stalvey and Byong-Kon Kim. Since meeting tuning theorist Ervin Wilson in 1975, he has worked in alternative tunings based on Wilson’s theories. He has composed and performed with an ensemble of his own exclusively acoustic microtonal instruments tuned to just intonation scales.

He has also worked as a shadow puppeteer, tuning theorist, filmmaker, world music radio DJ, and concert promoter as the president of the Independent Composers Association in Los Angeles.

Since moving to Australia in 2007, he has presented his works at Liquid Architecture, NOW now Festival and Aurora Festival. He collaborated with Ensemble Offspring in a performance at the Sydney Opera House which featured his Centaur scale as the chosen tuning of the project. He is the co-founder and presenter of Sydney MicroFest, an annual festival of Australian microtonal music.

Reviews

The Australia-based American composer Kraig Grady has largely followed a path blazed by tuning outsiders like Harry Partch and theorist Erv Wilson, a lonely road that has often relegated his own work to the fringes of contemporary music. Like Partch, he built custom instruments to accommodate his tuning system, a self-fulfilling prophecy that limited performances of his work, in part, due to the bulkiness to those inventions. His music is overdue for assessment, and hopefully this excellent new recording will clear some of the cobwebs out of the way. Given that most of the liner note essays are devoted to the mathematics of Grady’s tuning studies, it’s no surprise that his methodologies are heady and I can’t say they help me parse his process. But I would argue that these two rapturous chamber works don’t require such an understanding. “The Molten Wind” references the idea of molting—a loss of animal feathers of hair to make way for a new coat—which Grady applies to the instruments used in the pieces, recast with his tuning to produce something new. Densely clustered sustained tones produce deliciously uneasy sensations, the blend of flutes, wordless voice, viola, French horn, and Grady’s own hammered dulcimer transmitting a spooky otherworldly atmosphere. Strands of sound drift in slow motion like gossamer fabric occasionally interrupted by a sudden violent dulcimer chord. The title piece touches how our visual perception of gloss relies on the darkest areas that if removed, destroy the illusion of gloss,” which Grady musically translates into a stream of sounds focusing one particular instrument which can be broken by groups of other instruments, cumulatively proposing a kind mutual acceptance. We can mull upon that, but we can also simply immerse ourselves in the transportive din.

— Peter Margasak·, Bandcamp Daily “Best Contemporary Classical,” 9 July 2026 
https://daily.bandcamp.com/best-contemporary-classical/the-best-contemporary-classical-music-on-bandcamp-june-2026

 

Microtones merge in the morning mail. A great new release from Kraig M Grady of music building layers of textured acoustic richness. Tiny intervals transform sound into synthesis unplugged. Dark and light, past and future, stasis and motion, all breathe new life into each other.
— Ian Parsons, June 2026