CLASSICAL
Alarm Will Sound
"Acoustica: Alarm Will Sound Performs Aphex Twin."
Cantaloupe Music. 69 minutes.

Grade: B

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There's a petri dish subculture where avant-garde styles collide, merge and find rebirth. A techno-classical hybrid, "Acoustica" is a disc of Aphex Twin's electronica tracks — which are themselves sampled tunes — rearranged for the all-acoustic Alarm Will Sound, a 22-member classical ensemble.

Call the result "unremixed." I can't say how the dance-floor crowd might react, but to my classically honed ears, "Acoustica" nestles comfortably alongside recent works by several young concert-hall composers. (Has Thomas Adès, a Brit, or Michel van der Aa, a Dutchman, been listening to techno? Has Aphex Twin been listening to them?)

Aphex Twin, aka Richard D. James, assembles music as a robin builds a nest, mud-packing bits of sonic debris till it's a pleasingly shaped whole. But where digital automata can feel chilly, futuristic or robotic, Alarm Will Sound's live-musician interpretations give it a breathing, fallible quality.

AWS' starting approach is literal: They're faithful to the beats and subtle details, catching the frenetic rhythms of "Cock/Ver 10" or the sweet, pentatonic pop of "Fingerbib." But they are human, too, so sometimes it seems they're about to go off the rails. The dense crash-and-burn sonic layers of "Mt. Saint Michel" — the most interesting and exhilarating composition on the CD — pushes the players almost to the breaking point. This is extreme virtuosity and, more interestingly, heart-felt playing.

— Pierre Ruhe