The Review

A dazzling album, fiercely contemporary and profoundly human: Davor Vincze’s first monographic release on Kairos confirms him as one of the most lucid and intense creators in contemporary new music, capable of transforming memory, technology, history, and ethical consciousness into a sonic experience of overwhelming force. Davor Vincze: Ashes; #MeMyselfAI; Oltre il conflitto (Or Why I Left Croatia); Inflection Point; Na Crti Crta; acousti©remations. Roberto Alonso Trillo, violin. HIIIT. JACK Quartet. Alarm Will Sound. Ensemble Modern. Vertixe Sonora. Zafraan Ensemble. Reinbert de Leeuw and Alan Pierson, conductors. Constantin Basica, Justus Beyer, Cory Brodack, Felix Dreher, Iván Ferrer-Orozco, Stephen Gardner, Tom Gelissen, Daniel Neumann, and Laura Picerno, sound engineers.

My first encounter with the music of Croatian composer Davor Vincze took place in Lugo on December 18, 2021, during the ninth edition of the MIHLSons-XXI Contemporary Music Cycle. That evening featured a concert by violinist Roberto Alonso Trillo of Vertixe Sonora, who, together with Iván Ferrer-Orozco on electronics, performed five works, among them #MeMyselfAI (2021), a piece by Davor Vincze that we heard there in its world premiere.

The recording of that concert has been included in Vincze’s first monographic release on Kairos — an album that, like #MeMyselfAI itself, is filled with acoustic landscapes as heterogeneous as they are fascinating, marked throughout by radical modernity as well as the Agramite composer’s reflections on his own biography and artistic trajectory. This allows the extraordinarily rich palette of musical resources employed here to serve a narrative and a humanistic mode of thought that are as personal as they are compelling.

At the premiere, five years ago, Davor Vincze said of #MeMyselfAI: “In my recent work, I have been deeply intrigued by the idea of latent spaces, a term borrowed from computer science and machine learning. They are defined as an embedding of a set of elements within a manifold in which the most similar elements are located closest to one another. My artistic hypothesis is that any musical work could be placed within such a multidimensional space, stored there as a multitude of points, and then creatively reconnected in various ways. That is precisely what I did with Alban Berg’s famous Violin Concerto in this piece. My artistic work consisted in searching for new pathways connecting fragments of existing music in order to generate a new composition. Through the compositional strategy I call ‘microllage’ (micro + collage), I generate new compositional constructions using certain aspects of Berg’s concerto on both macro and micro scales. Berg, in his work, paid tribute to the premature death of Manon, Alma Mahler’s daughter, while indirectly evoking the disappearance of Europe as he knew it. Starting from this idea, my composition speaks about the loss of biodiversity and humanism as a consequence of the current pandemic, and the resulting isolation and digitalization. From a strictly musical perspective, the interaction between violin and electronics attempts to blur the distinction between human performer and machine. Indirectly, I ask the following questions: Is the electronics artificial intelligence? Is the violinist artificial intelligence? Are both artificial intelligence?”

Listening again to #MeMyselfAI almost five years later, now on compact disc, proved just as rewarding an experience as hearing its premiere. Although the spatialization and enveloping sound we experienced in Lugo are inevitably lost, Iván Ferrer-Orozco’s sound engineering remains astonishing in both power and transparency — two crucial qualities for this work. On the recording, we can no longer see the dramaturgy of concealment and shadows developed in the premiere staging, when Roberto Alonso initially performed behind a curtain. That staging functioned as a parallel correlate to Vincze’s own idea — already articulated in his text — of multidimensional concealment within Berg’s Dem Andenken eines Engels and its latent spaces.

This dialectic of concealment and latency saturates the listening space with data in the form of musical materials that the audience must integrate: a network of acoustic information emerging both from Roberto Alonso’s febrile virtuosity and from the electroacoustic multiplication of his violin sound. Electronics, acting as a repository of memory and data, insert the music of the past into the acoustic-electronic continuum — Berg’s concerto, which, true to its title, allows the memory of Manon Gropius to drift like an angel in dialogue with the live violin, producing moments of violent and highly expressive collision between the two media. On disc, due to the intensely foregrounded sound mix, these moments become even more powerful.

From all this it becomes evident — as already suggested at the beginning of this review — that the presence of electronics, computational media, or artificial intelligence in Davor Vincze’s music is by no means an exercise in mere fascination with technology itself. Rather, these media serve to summon the perpetual coming-and-going of ghosts emerging from our encounters with scores of the past and the people evoked within them.

For this reason, Roberto Alonso’s own presence in #MeMyselfAI unfolds through varying degrees of exposure. In the hyperactive first movement, Singular Value Decomposition, Alonso physically hides from the audience, whereas in the second movement, Breaking Symmetry, he appears openly on stage. Vincze uses this transition to create an electronic interlude that expands the urban sonorities of the first movement through pulsating granular tension.

After this electronic interlude, from the particles into which the violin had dissolved at the end of the first movement, the second movement gradually reorganizes, synthesizes, and multiplies the material, achieving an almost orchestral presence through a sumptuous acoustic-electronic polyphony. The listener feels as though the means deployed far exceed those of “merely” an amplified violin and electronics.

Within the programmatic logic of the work, Breaking Symmetry gives the reorganized materials a greater sensitivity than the more mechanical first movement. The way Vincze works with spatialization creates the sensation that the violinist is literally absorbed by history into a musical superstructure that does not annihilate him as an individual, but rather blurs his limits and contours in order to expand them within that structure. The resulting sonic plasticity resembles a true sculpture of sound. Yet within this process of absorption lies something sinister and threatening: the realization that technology’s vampirization of the self can often erase rather than expand individual potential. This is precisely what #MeMyselfAIcompels us to reflect upon — although there can be no doubt that, in this case, technological means have been placed at the service of transcendent art.

Yet if moments of sonic violence already appeared in #MeMyselfAI, they are redoubled in the abrasive opening of Ashes(2024), the work that opens the album and the most recent of the six compositions gathered here. We are confronted with a work written for a much larger instrumental apparatus: a large ensemble that evokes a long Taoist procession witnessed by Davor Vincze in Hong Kong during the celebrations of the Chinese New Year in February 2024.

That procession — with its clouds of incense smoke and its peculiar form of organized chaos — became intertwined in Vincze’s memory with the Yugoslav Wars, which he himself experienced firsthand in his childhood. Those wartime experiences caused numerous traumas that even affected his musical vocation and studies, which — as Laura Emmery explains in her superb liner notes — shifted in Vincze’s case from music toward medicine.

All of this generates different layers of sound, at times dense and overcrowded, at others stripped bare, in which we seem to hear everything from the timbres of Asian instruments in the percussion and woodwinds to sounds resembling a battlefield: bombs, sirens, distant alarms. A tumult of successive acoustic waves — such as the one emerging around the fourth minute of Ashes — integrates the materials carried along by this true twenty-first-century passacaglia, filled with cracklings that oscillate between the complete atomization of the ensemble, when individual elements seem to acquire lives of their own, and the cohesion of the work’s most massive and energetic passages.

All this culminates in the final resonance of the cymbal, which leaves behind the halo of incense and the timbres of the procession like a fading trace in its wake: an abyss opening toward silence and memory, progressively dissipating like the smoke generated by the procession itself, leaving behind only a trail of ashes.

In the case of Ashes, another musical reference joins those employed by Vincze in the score: David Bowie’s song Ashes to Ashes. Not only because the song suggested the title of the work, but also because it functions as a personal musical memory associated by Vincze with what he describes as the last great festive act of the former Yugoslavia: Bowie’s concert at Zagreb’s Maksimir Stadium on September 5, 1990, during the Sound+Vision Tour, shortly before Yugoslav unity collapsed in 1991 and Europe once again descended into bloodshed through a chain of wars.

One of the artists who reflected most intensely on those Yugoslav Wars in his paintings, particularly in France and Spain, was Leopoldo Nóvoa, who frequently used ashes as a material in his canvases in order to extract, from the horror of what had occurred, a glimmer of hope through critical reflection on history. This is visible in late twentieth-century series such as Next Time the Fire. The same dialectic of critical reflection aimed at constructing new hope is also present in Vincze’s Ashes. In his case, however, the perspective is widened through the spirituality evoked by echoes of the Far East.

These reflections take shape in a strongly directional music that itself compels us to continue moving forward — as does this extraordinary performance by Alarm Will Sound under the direction of Alan Pierson. Particularly striking in their interpretation is the powerful individuality of the ensemble’s instrumental timbres, as well as the cohesion Pierson gives to a work that could so easily fall apart given the enormous proliferation of details, rhythmic layers, and microforms converging within Ashes.

If the memory of David Bowie surfaced in Ashes (2024), then in the string quartet Oltre il conflitto (Or Why I Left Croatia) (2017), the influences explicitly acknowledged by Davor Vincze are, on the one hand, Martin Scorsese’s film The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and on the other, the retrospective exhibition Oltre il conflitto, which the Croatian composer visited and which focused on the work of Roman photojournalist Marco Longari. The exhibition portrayed the brutal everyday realities of inhabitants living in cities devastated by crisis, terrorism, war, or misery — places such as Nairobi, Jerusalem, or Palestine, as Laura Emmery notes in her liner essay.

Once again, this brings Vincze back to his own youth in Croatia. We are thus faced with another work concerned with memory and, above all here, with the anxiety produced — both in the composer and in ourselves — by the awareness that the serpent’s egg of violence is incubating everywhere, ready to hatch at any moment anywhere in the world. The return of war to Europe through the current conflict in Ukraine, or the reactivation of violence in the Middle East through the genocide perpetrated by the State of Israel in Palestine, only renders a work such as Oltre il conflitto (Or Why I Left Croatia) even more painfully timely, charging it with sorrow and dark premonitions.

What Laura Emmery’s notes do not specify is the relationship between Scorsese’s film and Vincze’s quartet. Yet, considering the second influence mentioned above, it is not difficult to recall the old proverb suggesting that “from those dusts come these muds,” and to place speculative capitalism — with its countless transnational economic networks driving wars across the globe — at the root of so many contemporary conflicts. This may well lie behind the febrile hyperactivity of Oltre il conflitto (Or Why I Left Croatia), a quartet of overwhelming energy capable of exhausting even the protagonist of Scorsese’s film.

This energy expands and rarefies itself, multiplies and fills with shadows, in what again feels like a hidden dramaturgy linking the film to Longari’s photographic exhibition. One hears echoes of American musical styles within the quartet — from minimalism to rock — injecting the work with new forms of directionality and urgency.

Laura Emmery does emphasize the enormous palette of techniques that Vincze places before the formidable JACK Quartet in this recording. These extend far beyond overpressure, harmonics, glissandi, or constant articulation changes: what matters is the way these techniques serve a musical flow that, precisely at the moments when it appears to attain serenity, fractures through spectral quarter-tones, sul ponticello, or the use of mutes that denaturalize the quartet’s sound.

Once more, this connects directly to the extra-musical references invoked by Vincze — more specifically, to Marco Longari’s photographs and to our frightening contemporary ability to consume dozens of such images of horror almost without disturbance. Vincze’s quartet calls us toward the opposite response: to remain alert, never forgetting that behind every photograph lies a personal tragedy. Those tragedies are transformed into successive eruptions of violence and agitation exploding through the instruments of the JACK Quartet, an ensemble incapable of finding peace within music perpetually undermined by dark forebodings.

Inflection Point (2011) is the oldest of the six works gathered here by Davor Vincze, reflecting the moment when the Croatian composer was preparing to leave behind his twenties — and, with them, what he then considered youth — in order to enter maturity. This transition is mirrored in a work for ensemble and magnetic tape in which these two media represent those two stages of life: the first section is entrusted primarily to the instrumental ensemble, while the second increasingly foregrounds electronics, whether alone or accompanied by sporadic, flickering interventions from scattered instruments resembling stars.

A magnificent Ensemble Modern, under the direction of the great musical sage Reinbert de Leeuw, guides us in the opening minutes into a universe of harmonics and constellations of notes in extremely high registers that evoke an auroral glow: a texture of marked serenity and restrained dynamic levels that progressively becomes rhythmically more complex. At the midpoint of the score, magnetic tape enters, attaching itself to that same combative and polymorphous climax in order to unfold a new language that anticipates — like a mirror of forms not yet fully crystallized — what would become the next stage in Vincze’s life.

Here, the notion of “inflection” must also be understood in its mathematical sense, since the entrance of the magnetic tape compels a transformation not only in the timbral palette employed by Vincze, but also in the work’s directionality. What initially appears convex within the ensemble — through the progressive opening of materials, rhythms, and dynamics — gives way, in the electronics, to concave forms imploding inward and converging in the low register of the harmonic spectrum.

For this reason, gesture and techniques such as glissandi acquire enormous importance in the ensemble writing, which seems simultaneously to imitate mathematical curvature and the waves of life that carry us upward and downward, endowing Inflection Point with a new autobiographical significance. Added to this is the critical dimension inherent to Vincze’s compositional work, whereby the appearance of the machine — here in its electroacoustic form — alters the very personality of the instrumental discourse itself.

Considering the reflections developed by the Zagreb composer in works such as #MeMyselfAI and Inflection Point itself, it becomes evident that Vincze once again chooses to place technological media at the service of artistic creation rooted in personal, ethical, and humanistic concerns. In Inflection Point, this is reflected in the acoustic/electronic relationship produced by the irruption of tape: initially capable of displacing the ensemble from the acoustic space, yet progressively granting it increasing presence until both coexist, mutually enriching our listening experience.

This dynamic can also be interpreted as a metaphor for the maturational “inflection point” to which the work autobiographically refers. The fervor of youth — dominant in the final moments before the tape’s entrance (around the fourth minute of this recording) — does not disappear; rather, it is assimilated into the maturity attained by the work’s conclusion. Forms derived from the germinal opening minutes acquire new contours and a more serene, refined musical substance, both in their harmonic development and in the way they integrate with the surrounding sonic environment. Thus, alongside the biographical and technological readings of the work, we must also add a social one.

Na Crti Crta, however, is constructed through a kind of funeral transformation of materials that Davor Vincze derives from an earlier work in his catalogue, the Laibach Concerto (2016), a composition for marimba, percussion, string orchestra, and electronics. Its title refers to the old German name for the Slovenian capital Ljubljana — Laibach — which is also the name of the Yugoslav music group founded in Slovenia during the 1980s, a band characterized — according to Laura Emmery — by its “provocative recontextualization of pre-existing music.”

This provides Vincze with the opportunity to engage, for just over eight minutes, in that very same game — one which, in the case of Laibach, ranged from neoclassical music to industrial rock — by taking quotations from music history and placing them into new forms and contexts, whether by altering their melodic and harmonic development, or by transforming their timbres and instrumental techniques.

This connects, first of all, to the Laibach Concerto itself within Vincze’s catalogue, but through it also to other historical musics that trace a descending gesture — much like the minor third shaping the harmonic trajectory of Inflection Point — evoking a lament, a contemporary mourning song for a world undergoing progressive death and disappearance. Thus, once again, the critical and political dimensions reappear within Vincze’s music: a body of work deeply shaped by ethical consciousness. Having reached the maturity already foreshadowed in Inflection Point, Vincze’s music now connects the individuality of the composer far more broadly and intersectionally with the network of relationships surrounding him in society, extending even to the environment itself, since the degradation of nature is undoubtedly one of the principal sources of those “tears of resonance” that collapse harmonically throughout Na Crti Crta.

This process of gradual decline and final dissolution of previously flourishing materials unfolds across the five brief funeral miniatures that constitute Na Crti Crta. One of these historical “flowerings” emerges once more from the title itself: from Laibach, Vincze extracts the final syllable “Bach” in order to invoke the music of the Kantor, particularly works such as Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 in B-flat major, BWV 1051 (1721). From this concerto he extracts phrases that are processed through algorithms in a deliberately naïve manner, thereby giving meaning to the first part of the title, “Lai(e),” which in German means “amateur.”

Again, it is Laura Emmery who explains that the treatment of these historical materials relates to another Slovenian reference: philosopher Slavoj Žižek and his concept of parallax vision. Vincze applies this idea in order to allow listeners to perceive fragments drawn from Bach’s BWV 1051 from different parallel perspectives, while the music nevertheless continues developing like a perpetuum mobile, superimposing densely intertwined layers, rhythms, timbres, and harmonies — one of the defining characteristics of Vincze’s current compositional language.

Bach therefore appears as both source and historical echo, primarily articulated through the marimba because of its expanded harmonic possibilities within the percussion family, though filtered through a rarefied harmonic language. Electronics alternately create delay effects or harmonic shadows ranging from immersive presences to the faintest brushstroke. At times Bach’s presence is highly recognizable and explicit (as in the Third Miniature), while at others it becomes concealed and chameleon-like (as in the Fourth Miniature), eventually evolving into the textural landscape of the Fifth Miniature. Yet rather than transforming this lament into an exercise in pessimism or self-pity, Vincze turns it into fertile ground for another possible future, one in which a genuinely twenty-first-century aesthetic emerges from the historical currents that have shaped our present. Thus, despite all the darkness contained within it, the message transmitted by Vincze ultimately calls toward hope — provided one possesses the kind of historical consciousness demonstrated by the Croatian composer throughout this recording.

The magnificent performance by HIIIT (formerly known as Slagwerk Den Haag, one of the truly emblematic percussion ensembles in Europe) is fascinating from every perspective, especially because of its timbral subtlety and its devilishly complex rhythmic control. The performers are capable of layering Bachian echoes together with the materials that Vincze contributes, colors, and develops from these spectral presences of the past. Particular praise must be given to Niels Meliefste on marimba, as the leading voice of the duo completed here by Mexican percussionist Pepe García, who fills the acoustic scene with echoes, shadows, and nuances. Both are supported by electronics as delicate as Vincze demands in Na Crti Crta, allowing those musical ghosts of the past to move with the transparency and weightlessness they achieve here.

If, in the transition from Inflection Point to Na Crti Crta, we highlighted the timbral and harmonic continuity linking both works — as though the second had emerged from the fading resonance of the first — then the passage from Na Crti Crtato acousti©remations (2022) is characterized precisely by the opposite: a forceful contrast that brings us to one of the most overwhelming works on the album. The recording closes by invoking entirely new musical and stylistic echoes through the way the stunning Zafraan Ensemble performs acousti©remations, bringing it close to an aesthetic that one might associate with early French saturation music — that is, the finest period of a school that has since effectively disappeared as such.

What nevertheless persists from Na Crti Crta — thereby once again creating continuity between the two pieces — is the enormous importance of percussion in acousti©remations. Although the ensemble includes only a single dedicated percussionist within its ten-member instrumentation, aggressively percussive attack techniques proliferate throughout the other instruments as well. This harsh and virulent aggression within the instrumental discourse once again possesses an entirely programmatic significance, one that Vincze directly relates to the atrocious wartime past carried by humanity.

In this case, the historical reference is the Second World War and the Ustaše movement, whose fascist religious supremacism found its most extreme expression in the concentration camp of Jasenovac, where tens of thousands of Jews, Serbs, Roma, and political prisoners were tortured and murdered by Ustaše by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

It was in memory and homage to those victims that Davor Vincze composed acousti©remations, a work whose very title invokes the cremation process so notoriously associated with extermination camps, transforming it into an abrasive acoustic process that continuously ignites sparks throughout the ensemble through collisions among the ten members of the Zafraan Ensemble. The work reaches the highest levels of violence on the entire album in its mirroring of the horror and fear experienced at Jasenovac.

As already suggested, this historical and existential tension is made audible through an extended use of attack techniques privileging highly dramatic percussive sonorities: fff piano clusters struck with the forearm; screaming altissimo passages in instruments such as clarinet and tenor saxophone; or piccolo multiphonics oscillating microtonally — a passage of considerable technical difficulty magnificently realized by New Zealand flutist Liam Malley of the Zafraan Ensemble. Naturally, the contribution of Berlin percussionist Daniel Eichholz is fundamental in the opening of acousti©remations, especially through the noise saturation he brings into the ensemble.

Yet the most distressing passages of acousti©remations are not necessarily its violent and overwhelming opening. Rather, they emerge from the sections beginning around the second minute, where an apparent serenity of a more textural character unfolds in pianissimo. These passages evoke both the suffocating atmosphere of the concentration camps and the night itself, haunted by the specters of those who lost their lives there. Here harmony thickens and the acoustic scene becomes populated by countless noises: drumsticks scraping against piano strings, breath sounds without pitch in the winds, harmonics in the strings, and the use of mutes that estrange instrumental timbre, intensifying the sensation of acoustic bodies torn away from their original nature, like musical ghosts.

From this transformation of music into space and specters, the work progresses toward the gradual organization of an entire chaos of screaming high-register sounds which, despite never reaching extreme dynamics, become even more terrifying because they evoke the muffled cries of those imprisoned at Jasenovac — true screams of silence, to which Vincze gives body and form so that their voices are not buried by history.

Laura Emmery therefore evokes another powerful image here: the continuous traces of resonances superimposed in space, creating impulses that answer one another and guide the ensemble through its profusion of contradictory elements. All this produces another image at once immensely powerful and profoundly sad: that of an acoustic crematorium where screams, ashes, and energies coexist within the same space, progressively dissolving into silence — though not into oblivion, as Vincze demonstrates throughout acousti©remations.

To this must be added the more mechanical sounds heard in the second half of the work before the acoustic space dissolves entirely — sounds that may resemble the machinery secretly driving all the horror perceived here: the machinery of the camps themselves, but also that of fascism and every form of greed, dehumanization, and intolerance that continues to destroy the world, as we currently witness in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, Sudan, or the Congo, among many other examples.

Thus, these six works provide yet another example of the strong historical, civic, and political consciousness transmitted throughout the album: a musical portrait in six chapters that is simultaneously autobiographical and reflective of Davor Vincze’s relationship to the world surrounding him. From his traumatic memories of the Yugoslav Wars to his reflections on Artificial Intelligence, through environmental destruction and the horrors experienced in twentieth-century Europe, Vincze offers a musical proposal that unites ethics and aesthetics to an exceptional degree: the former articulated through a profoundly humanistic perspective, the latter through the full range of techniques and resources associated with contemporary music, yet always shaped by an unmistakably personal voice. The result is a recording of outstanding significance and one that can be wholeheartedly recommended.

As is common in this kind of release, which assembles recordings originating from many different contexts, the sound engineering is the work of various engineers. Yet because the recordings themselves are relatively recent, the technical standards are consistently very high. This allows the listener not only to breathe the acoustic space in works such as #MeMyselfAI, but also to physically feel the avalanche of sounds crashing upon us in furious performances such as Ashes, Oltre il conflitto (Or Why I Left Croatia), and acousti©remations. At the same time, the recording beautifully clarifies the acoustic-electronic layers in works such as Inflection Point and Na Crti Crta.

As for the album edition itself, it is exceptionally well produced, including the already-mentioned liner essay by Laura Emmery, Associate Professor of Music Theory at Emory University, whose text ASHES – Music Between Chaos and Reflection undoubtedly constitutes one of the fundamental writings for understanding the music of Davor Vincze. The unusual length of the booklet — forty-four pages in English and German — significantly deepens the listener’s understanding of the six works gathered here, thanks to the level of detail Emmery achieves in each section devoted to the individual compositions. Photographs and biographies of the composer and performers, together with complete recording information, round out Davor Vincze’s first monographic release on Kairos — an album whose continuation we eagerly hope to see in the future.

More information can be found on the Kairos label website. © Paco Yáñez, May 2026

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