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press
Time Out New York | Steve Smith
"The hardware and software Gardner employs on Luminoso respond to her commands like a pianist's Steinway or a fiddler's Strad; her electronic elements seem to move with the same volition and flexibility as her human collaborators. Even so, nothing meanders: Each work on Luminoso has a shape, a momentum and a destination."
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The New Yorker | Alex Ross
"In Gardner's Luminoso, flamenco strummings are digitally processed in a way that evokes a lone guitarist wandering around a sun-baked ruin."
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The New York Times | Steve Smith
"Alexandra Gardner's Tourmaline surrounded the saxophonist Brian Sacawa's graceful lines and flutters with bustling electronic counterpoint and ghostly echoes."
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Give Me Take You
"It's not often that I'll post a promotional mp3 on this site, but this fine
album's title track, Luminoso, deserves it, being in my estimation more
likely than most to break through the slurred imposition of surfing the net
and all the content that goes with it.
This is one of the few recent composition albums to really grab my attention
as virtuosic, tasteful, and exploratory all at the same time. Gardner,
though perhaps a little too keen on using the Papyrus font on her releases
(yet endearingly so), is one of the most unique and rewarding musical voices
engaged in electro-acoustic composition that I've heard in a long, long
time. She seems to have equally good footing in minimalist practices as she
does in rhythmic complexity and electronic techniques."
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NewMusicBox | Molly Sheridan
"If the darkness of brief winter days is getting you down, Alexandra Gardner has proffered a cure. Luminoso, a six-minute work for guitar and samples which also lends its title to this disc of "solo with sounds" pieces, is inspired by the sunlight in Barcelona. The rhythms and timbres of flamenco-style guitar playing dominate the opening measures, but the bed of processed guitar sounds underneath pull things in a more ethereal direction.....the music's movement - both in the acoustically finger picked and in the electronically crafted - generates an inherent warmth."
Primetime A and E | Mark Keresman
"To some acoustic music fans, electronics are the Devil's Tool. But, regardless whether it's a wood flute, a turntable, or a synthesizer, all are means to make sounds most humans can't generate on their own. That said, contemporary composer Alexandra Gardner finds a nexus between both worlds - each piece here is for a solo instrument (acoustic guitar, marimba, soprano sax, bass clarinet) playing in tandem with some variation of electronic media (sampler, computer, etc.). One of the cool things about Luminoso is it's often difficult to tell where the "human element" ends and the "artificial intelligence" begins. The other is the meditative (though not always soothing) aspect of Gardner's compositions - fascinating, stimulating stuff, smack-dab in the middle of the post-serial cerebral (Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman) and the "repeating patterns" crews (Terry Riley, Steve Reich). Fine by me."
The Rambler | Tim Rutherford-Johnson
"Alexandra Gardner's Luminoso is an album of warm light and cool evening breezes...The strength of Gardner's often spellbinding music on this CD is its thoughtful composition. You sense at each turn that everything has been considered and weighed before proceeding, and that soloist and electronics are ultimately in the service of a compositional form, rather than a loosely-imagined concept."
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Revista Musica Catalana
"La compositora
Alexandra Gardner, demostrando un auténtico y profundo
conocimiento de los medios electrónicos, con Tourmaline
plantea un verdadero contraste entre los dos medios sonoros que
enmarca magníficamente dentro de una forma bien trabada,
en que tiempo y sonido se amalgaman en un ágil discurso
y unidad."
San Antonio Express-News | Mike Greenberg
" ...(Crows) is a thoughtful, compact and deeply beautiful
work that one fervently hopes to hear again."
The Vassar Quarterly | David Ezer
read the feature article (Summer 2000)
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