The New York Times on Alarm Will Sound

From "A Classical Approach to Electronic Sounds" by Allan Kozinn:

"It is hard to tell whether Alarm Will Sound is finding itself or losing itself, but it may be a bit of both. A reasonably straightforward new-music band in 2001, when it made the jump from college orchestra (at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester) to professional ensemble, it has preserved its freshness by thinking about repertory in ways that most groups do not...

Mostly the group slips these transcriptions into programs otherwise devoted to composers with more solidly classical pedigrees, but it occasionally devotes an evening almost entirely to its adventures in electronica, as it did on Wednesday evening at Le Poisson Rouge. The occasion was the fifth anniversary of “Acoustica” — the CD of works by the electronic composer Aphex Twin it released on Cantaloupe in 2005, which has become its biggest-selling disc — celebrated a bit early...

...Caleb Burhans’s melancholy “oh ye of little faith ... (do you know where your children are?)” moves deftly from gentle Minimalist scale figures to electric-guitar power chords, touching on murky brass figures along the way. Mr. Burhans’s work was written for Alice Tully Hall’s reopening festivities this year. It delivered a more visceral punch in the tighter confines of Le Poisson Rouge."

Read all of "A Classical Approach to Electronic Sounds."