Navona Records’ release of Loose, Wet, Perforated

Posted on October 13, 2017

 

Midwest Record, 8 October 2017, Chris Spector

“… Vines has a strong knowledge of the experimental works that were in vogue a little before his time and does his thing without homage or using tracing paper… if you like modern music that hits it out of the park, this left-leaning, nu-classical set is really going to float your boat.” 

 

Gramophone, December 2017, Laurence Vittes

“… highly resourceful pocket opera…

This studio recording is dazzling… suggesting an everybody’s opera destined for the street, where it could theoretically take place and where the sex appeal of its heady musical eclecticism lies.

With only two exquisite instrumental interludes to interrupt the 67 minutes of intense dialogue, Vines wields a wonderful toolkit of insinuating words and rhymes… and punctuates them with quick, deft touches including lyrical woodwind riffs and Wagnerian brass.”

 

Opera News, February 2018, Joe Cadagin

“PRUDES BE WARNED: Nicholas Vines’s Loose, Wet, Perforated is a dirty, dirty opera. But if you can stomach some naughtiness, this recording from Boston-based Guerilla Opera is hilariously bizarre. 

Vines matches the gratuitous vulgarity of his libretto with a grotesque and often disturbing musical language… Busy-sounding accompaniments sputter, snigger and gurgle below the surface, suddenly bursting out with jarring ejaculations, siren-like screeches… and suggestively drooping glissandos… But there’s also a quirky, carnivalesque quality to Vines’s music that suits the opera’s Lewis Carroll-style puns and paradoxes. The composer sets up colorful passages… that unfold in a cartoonish sequence of noise events… like a Rube Goldberg machine. Playful musical parody abounds…”

 

Loudmouth, 1 March 2018, Gwen Bennett

“… an avant-garde piece for a modern audience and hugely entertaining.

… brilliant, playful, outrageous, yet with an underlying dark side.

… an unusual and stimulating work… it has “legs”.” 

 

Limelight Magazine, 16 March 2018, Lisa MacKinney

“”… at once hyper-modern but grounded in ancient forms, and in the utterly assured hands of Nicholas Vines, it succeeds excitingly.”