Daniel Wohl | photo by Nathan Lee Bush | courtesy of the artist
Daniel Wohl crosses sonic boundaries with Holographic
The line between the organic and the electronic tends to get blurred in our modern digital world. Daniel Wohl’s music makes that boundary even fuzzier, crafting cyborg compositions that force the listener to question where the acoustic ends and the synthesized begins.
On his second album, Holographic (New Amsterdam), Wohl collaborates with virtuosic acoustic musicians – the Mivos String Quartet, Mantra and Iktus Percussion ensembles, Bang on a Can All-Stars, experimental duo Lucky Dragons, and vocalists Olga Bell (Dirty Projectors, Chairlift) and Caroline Shaw (Roomful of Teeth) – and mutates their sounds into a mesmerizing, richly textured electronic haze. At times it resembles gamelan music or the insistent repetitions of minimal composers like Philip Glass or Terry Riley; at others Eno-like ambient mists or the funhouse mirrors of Aphex Twin.
Listening to the music alone suggests a visual experience, something like gazing on a natural landscape through a kaleidoscope, only for the scene to be distorted by an unexpected digital glitch. But when Wohl brings Holographic to FringeArts on Friday, February 5, it will be accompanied by appropriately hypnotic visuals created by visual artist Daniel Schwarz. For this performance, Wohl will be joined by Mantra Percussion and a string quartet assembled expressly for the project.