For this concert they [Phonochrome] have hooked up with the Guerrilla Composers Guild… I love that name… they're new music impresarios in San Francisco.

Nick Benavides’ “Magnetismus” concluded the program with a rich use of the full ensemble (without the harp). This is music that sought out its own approach to the use of “repetitive structures” (that phrase that Philip Glass prefers to “minimalism”). There is some sense of ostinato, but there is also a broader impression of a general flow of energy. Benavides seems to have found an intriguing middle ground between mechanistic repetitiveness and the more expansive rhetoric of McIntire’s “naturalism.” The result amounts to an abstraction depicting something far more concrete, even if we cannot quite pin down what that “something” is.

...The result was an engaging blend of lush sonorities often exploring subtle harmonic ambiguities... this particular brass venture is a sign of promising things to come.

Benavides had the courage to take on two of the poems that Copland had already set, “Heart, we will forget him!” and “I felt a funeral in my brain.” Fortunately, he had no trouble finding his own voice to express his own interpretation of these texts... the performance emerged as a highly individual approach to poems that tapped into the soul of a highly individual woman.

This was followed by music by the oldest composer, Nick Benavides... For me this was a rather engaging bit of nostalgia, leaving me thinking about how the source material predated the composer’s birth by about two decades.

This made for a unique approach to get the listener involved in the embellishment process, situating the soloist in the middle of a cloud of seemingly unrelated pitches.

Benavides' funky and the horse you rode in on inspired some rump-shaking and, I believe, the Harlem Shake.

http://www.loosefilter.com/the_loose_filter_project_/2013/03/does-it-smell-like-a-dance-party-in-here.html#more