Cantaloupe Music releases “Dystonia”, an album in which Mivos Quartet performs the music of J. G. Thirlwell, better known by his alias Foetus.

Australian composer James George Thirlwell (Melbourne, 1960) is one of the most prominent figures in the alternative rock scene of the 1980s. He moved to London in 1978 and then to New York City in 1983, and began to be known under various aliases: J. G. Thirlwell, Clint Ruin and Foetus (this one, with numerous “surnames” is the most common), among others. With an intermittent and tremendously varied career that exceeds thirty record referentes (not to mention his work as a producer), his name appears alongside those of other personalities from the more underground scene, such as Nick Cave, Lydia Lunch, Marc Almond, Thurston Moore, Matt Johnson, etc.

His cacophonous sound, a mixture of post-punk and industrial rock, always had, however, an iron compositional discipline that since the beginning of the century he has transferred to the field of contemporary music, with pieces performed, among other groups, by chamber ensembles as prestigious as Bang on a Can, Alarm Will Sound or Kronos Quartet. The latest example of his work in this field is entitled Dystonia and has recently been released by Cantaloupe Music, the record label owned by Bang on a Can. Here, Thirlwell is a composer, not a performer. That task falls to another prestigious ensemble, the Mivos Quartet, made up of violinists Oliva de Prato and Maya Bennardo, violist Victor Lowrie Tafoya and cellist Tyler J. Borden, who have made five pieces composed between 2014 and 2021 their own. Knowing Thirlwell’s musical background, it is not surprising that Dystonia – a title that refers to a medical condition that causes involuntary and repetitive contractions of the muscles, while those in each of the five movements that comprise it (Narcolepsy, Fibrositis, Ozymandias, Heliophobia and Apeirophobia) are names of the same number of nervous or muscular diseases – has an intense and aggressive sonority that Mivos resolves with visceral instrumental ferocity in the 45 minutes that four of the compositions last in total – the second, Fibrositis, is the shortest (barely two minutes) and the only non-“explosive” one, with pinches of the strings that imitate the glitches of electronic music.

Michael Gordon himself, one of the three founding composers of the Bang on a Can organisation, defines it this way in the disc’s liner notes: “You’re about to listen to a powerful collection of string quartets written by JG Thirlwell, dynamically performed by the brilliant Mivos Quartet. Released collectively under the title Dystonia, they represent Thirlwell’s dark and jagged vision of past, present and future. Although Dystonia refers to a medical condition that causes involuntary contractions of the muscles, I can’t help making associations — Dys-Ton(e)-ia, Dissonance, Dysrhythmia, Destiny. All five works here project different shades of a bodily, psychological, and societal Dysfunction through a bold, insistent music that grabs you and takes you where it wants to go”.