George Flynn Is a Punk Rocker
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Four Pieces starts quietly. A chord spills out of the piano and hangs in the air, -loose and glittering. Then the violin begins a slow, measured melody. You follow it as you might follow a sleepwalker, into a strange, nocturnal world. At one point, the two instruments spit out a barrage of noise- like an orgasmic electric guitar solo- punctuated by bursts of stunning silence. For the entire second movement, the pianist is limited to playing one chord, and the violin to a single pitch. They jam. The violin’s single pitch extends through the air like a thread of wire. Again, you follow it, and feel you’re entering unexplored territory. Flynn doesn’t make the journey easy. He doesn’t give you a tune to whistle, or a rhythm to tap your feet to. He fills the air with clouds of sound, strange twisted shapes, murmurs, and turbulent flurries. It’s mind-expanding stuff. It is, by the way, also very political.
“When I think about certain things, like the Vietnam War, for example, or the student revolts, sound images will come to me. Whether I want to or not, I’ll hear a very frenetic band of white noise, say, or a cloud, or a certain musical gesture. Then I work out how to write it. I’d like to think that these pieces can stand on their own -that people who aren’t politically aware can listen to the music as music- but this is my way of saying something about political events. It’s a way of releasing my own outrage, my own feelings.
Drummond still enjoys covering organized crime. “I try to do my homework, and maybe I get some respect for that,” he says. “I really feel that these people are a threat to America.”
