Formed only ten years ago in New York, and already one of the grittiest ensembles dedicated to the performance of contemporary music, the Mivos Quartet offers two European premieres by George Lewis and Sam Pluta, as well as a Quartet by Mexican composer Hilda Paredes.
In Playing with Seeds by George Lewis, inspired by the experiments with various cultivation techniques in a village in Sierra Leone, the music is produced, so to speak, by seeds that generate new varieties through trajectories of register, temporal flux and sudden reversals of apparent fortune.
Cuerdas del destino by Hilda Paredes revolves around the consequentiality that guides the development of the music, creating the direction, the dramaturgy and the structure of a piece in which the quartet is treated as a mega-instrument.
Various modes of implied composition are combined, finally, in Chain Reactions/Five Events by Sam Pluta: the first part of the work is improvised by instruments and laptops, while the second is fully notated for ensemble with improvised electronics.