New compositions for quartet as well as music from the recently released album, Hard-Boiled Music.
$20/$17 early-bird
Man In Space
A culmination of over four years of studio work by Emmy-nominated composer and guitarist David Dvorin. Fascinated by the concept of “space” while growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, Dvorin ponders the loss of the collective dream of looking outward towards the stars, while simultaneously exploring inner worlds during times of upheaval and crisis. Spurred on by the pandemic lockdown of 2020, Dvorin began collecting massive amounts of space-age media including vintage news reels, film footage, and TV toy commercials, concept artwork created for the space program, and audio of historical space missions mined from NASA’s deep depository. Reminiscent of his contributions to Terry Riley’s epic space-themed piece, Sun Rings from twenty years prior (commissioned by Kronos Quartet and NASA in 2002), Dvorin transformed and abstracted the audio material via sampling and signal processing, creating entirely new instruments with which to compose and utilize in his music.
For this guitar-oriented project, Dvorin played his prized 1956 Fender Duo Sonic, providing the compositional starting point for each piece. Working exclusively in the studio allowed him the ability to thoroughly explore his interest in signal processing, including a deep dive into fuzz, filters and reverb pedals used to augment the bold, rich and sometimes aggressive timbres of the electric guitar. Another instrument featured on the recording was one used by Dvorin in his professional life as a teacher of composition and electronic music at California State University, Chico - the modular synthesizer. Over the years working on the album, he amassed a collection of recordings made while improvising on the versatile instrument (itself an analog/digital flight computer of the mind) which provided the complex shifting rhythmic patterns and many of the unclassifiable timbres heard throughout the release.
Poetically, each track of the album reflects on aspects of isolation, personal relationships and the external and internal forces that shape our existence in the universe. Circumstantially feeling like a “man in space” (a term widely used in the 1950s and 1960s) due to the pandemic lockdown, Dvorin oftentimes would imagine himself living in a capsule orbiting the Earth, reaching out to the rest of humanity via projected images and sounds (furnished by online video conferencing), inexplicably locked into an earthly pull while being detached from all the goings-on down below.
Previous events
New compositions for quartet as well as music from the recently released album, Hard-Boiled Music.
Review
Optimism and joy are the buzzwords this week, emphatically and without apology—because sometimes when things seem bleak all around, there’s nothing wrong with engaging in a bit of escapism and pure pleasure. I didn’t know David Dvorin before a mutual friend sent him my way, but it turned out I knew at least a bit of his work: the Emmy-nominated composer, guitarist, author, and educator provided sound transformations for Sun Rings,the elaborate 2002 collaboration by composer Terry Riley, Kronos Quartet, and vocal ensemble Volti. Dvorin’s also part of a busy Northern California community of composing improvisers documented on Cure-All Records.
Like that piece, Man in Space is a paean to space travel, human ingenuity, and limitless possibility. The album, fully instrumental apart from the voices of vintage media samples, captures the giddy delight earlier generations of Americans felt about space exploration, with its acknowledgement of human achievement, embrace of the unknown, and view of scientific advancement as cause for civic and national pride.
Paradoxically, perhaps, Dvorin conceived his expansive celebration of the endless cosmos during the isolation of pandemic-era lockdown. Leaning into a peak Space Age frame of mind, he fashioned retro-futuristic sounds with spacious reverberation, stinging fuzz-guitar leads, pulsating rhythms, and modular synthesizer (described as “an analog/digital flight computer of the mind”), with literally cosmic sound samples processed and deployed like fantastical new instruments.
Listening, I sometimes imagined kinship with fellow art-rock guitarist-composers like Steve Tibbetts and the late Scott Johnson. But Dvorin is his own kind of eclectic, slipping with ease into silky jazz modes, riff-rock grooves, and elegant, emotive lead-guitar soloing.
The album is dotted with playful signifiers of yesteryear, like an earnest Carl Sagan proclamation in “We Are Starstuff” (“We’re made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”). In the eerie abstractions of “Dark (Cold),” Dvorin evokes blueman Blind Willie Johnson’s recording “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” hurtling through space on NASA’s fabled Golden Record—and, perhaps, what an alien consciousness might make of the song.
“Deluxe Man in Space,” the album’s extravagantly media-drunk finale, packs in ebullient vintage TV commercials, futuristic rock band The Way-Outs from a 1965 episode of The Flintstones, a sly bite of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” and clanging tubular bells that might have wandered in from a Phil Spector vinyl single taped off an AM broadcast on a transistor radio. It’s totally over the top—but in a way that signifies embracing the impossible earnestly and infectiously.
Start to finish, Man in Space is a joy. Cue it up, strap in, and enjoy the ride.
- Steve Smith, Night After Night, “For the Record: May 30, 2025"