Biomei.i is a work in thirteen parts commissioned and performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble. Gentile composed the music and joined the ensemble on drums. The music is as intense as it is imaginative, and its rich detail rewards repeated listening. The visuals that Gentile created as album art are as meticulous as the music, and the liner notes function as a miniature encyclopedia for an imagined world, defining invented words like bippf, nionine, and isth, which are used as track titles. Fans of Gentile’s previous work will find a familiar clarity and intensity, pushed to even wider extremes.
Flagrances finds Gentile in a duo with guitarist Andrew Smiley. Running a little over thirty minutes, its thirteen tracks are concise, focused vignettes. The catalyst for the project was an urge to document the duo’s improvising, which benefits from shared rhythmic and harmonic concepts developed over a decade of collaboration. “Andrew and I are both very compositionally minded, of course,” Gentile says, “which resulted in the album being not simply an improv record, but an album where the pieces were crafted using raw improvisation as the material.” It’s an intriguing, if somewhat veiled, description. The pieces may have been crafted, but the result retains an improvised edge. A wildly varied exploration, Flagrances twists and turns through hypnotic rhythms, quirky twangs, and frenzied melodies.
