Arnold Dreyblatt is a minimalist who never forgot that music is still the human mating call. Anyone who has experienced the composer's recordings with his marvelously-dubbed Orchestra of Excited Strings knows how madly Dreyblatt's pieces swing. They flaunt time as precisely as a Swiss watch. Indeed, music like this can put you in the mind of the whirring cogs and pulleys of some small mechanized device. Everything's moving, twitching about, a bunch of individual sounds racheting up and down in a modulated relationship to all the other individual sounds. This animated playfulness exudes a real charm. Springy rhythms dance with each other, as clipped percussion and purposefully bowed strings generate delightful harmonic chatter.
