image recordings: Press

Contemporary composers have long made use of electric guitars,
keyboards, and other pop-music implements. But Detroit-born New Yorker
Randall Woolf is one of the few to adapt tactics such as sampling and
hip-hop turntablism as viable elements in a post-modern compositional
vocabulary. Hee Haw, the work that opens Woolf’s new CD, provides the
perfect introduction: A prerecorded square-dance caller sets a chamber
orchestra aswirl, with only a brief, heartsick-ballad interlude
allowing the players to catch their breath.
In Stones, Woolf stitches together the coarse fiber of Robert
Johnson’s Delta blues and the dark shimmer of strings, winds,and
keyboard. No Luck, No Happiness pits Todd Reynold’s muscular violin
riffs against the composer’s inventive beats and scratching, while in
Everything Is Green, Rinde Eckert’s deadpan narration of a David
Foster Wallace short story is offset by a poignant ”enactment” by
flutist Ransom Wilson and pianist Kathleen Supové. The concluding title
work is a 19-minute arc of bristling, Stravinskian rhythms, split by a
luminous intermezzo....For fans of provocative contemporary music,
Modern Primitive is the Randall Woolf record we’ve all been waiting
for.