"Look out world, here comes a monster." - American Record Guide
"The entire album is a knockout." - Chicago Reader
"In our shared air, in the artist’s active breathing, adventure. Aliento, “breath” in Spanish, reminds us of the body’s trafficked borders (alien air in, exhaled sound out) and calls us to recall ourselves as strangers, giving welcome to the wondrous strange. Over and over, the voyage out, a risking of everything, and a profoundly transformed return to an origin also changed. At once vulnerable and powerful, Claire Chase’s debut doesn’t feel like a solo album: the completely involved player, astonishing in her range, becomes exemplary, communing, communicating—and a listener (taken with her to the edge of what is possible to utter and take in), involved and active, one more among a number of presences invoked. Chase’s breathtaking physicality gives her the uncanny ability to sound, at points, like a crowd, and the mixture of the electronic and acoustic makes these works by international composers both urgent and echo-y, present and distant, equally physical and cerebral, wild and controlled; always in motion, emotional. Pushing off into the frantic breakers of the opening, Nathan Davis’ pneApnea struggles toward some centered presence to make what follows possible, finding a way to a shimmering wisdom, a charm-like rhythm, and the deep grace we want in order to be honest. A hard reminder that the breath which centers us can carry lies and spell out death, Jason Eckardt’s 16 violently enacts the costs of alienation and interference, the scribble of its opening monologue loosening into muted chaos against which, at last, music reappears as precarious gesture toward a future, perhaps. But that complex hope has to be balanced against the unthinkable past Dai Fujikura makes tactile in Poison Mushroom: here horror is sensual, immediate, seething through a widened, meditative present. The work by Edgar Guzmán, Prometeo & Epimeteo, goes inward, locates its permeable listener as the site of restless inspirations, completely finished with every kind of denial and so (at moments) close to divine madness. The album’s turn is the title work by Marcelo Toledo. In Aliento/Arrugas what we have gone through becomes what is going through us—transformative, consoling, exasperated, grieving, clownish, insistent and unsettling—as if what ought to be still is moving and what should move, still, waits. Come out: layered caress, improvised ritual measurement of life against death, Du Yun’s Run in a Graveyard is eerie and seductive, stark and immensely generous. Completely present at every instant of her playing, Chase keeps reminding us of the electric, fantastic charge of existence itself, and the apparent contrast of the final setting becomes an assertion of connection. “After a while,” Du Yun writes, “the motion and stillness are inseparable”—after a while to be lost is to be home and to be home is to be lost. Each of these extraordinary compositions (many written for Chase) discover or create a renewed spaciousness past various barriers, going farther in—and farther out—than most artists dare. Take a deep breath—if you think you know what the flute can do, if you believe you know what music is, you haven’t heard Claire Chase…" - Laura Mullen, poet
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