Includes liner notes by Arnold Dreyblatt.

Arnold Dreyblatt has been called “the most rock ‘n’ roll of all the composers to emerge from New York’s downtown scene in the 1970s.” Dreyblatt founded The Orchestra Of Excited Strings in 1979, harnessing unusual tuning intervals to an exuberant performance style. 

Star Trap is selection of hitherto unreleased 1990s recordings from Arnold Dreyblatt and his Orchestra of Excited Strings mining Dreyblatt’s extensive archive of unheard recordings from the 1990s. 

Rather than the relentless thudding rhythms of 1980s works like Nodal Excitations, the ensemble pieces here are closer to the propulsive, at times even funky rhythmic foundation of Dreyblatt’s classic Animal Magnetism (Tzadik, 1995).

Far from austere exercises, these pieces are perhaps the most immediate of Dreyblatt’s oeuvre, with the Orchestra exuberantly tearing through a sequence of repeating rhythmic and melodic cells, dazzling the ear with the overtones generated by Dreyblatt’s twenty-note microtonal scale.

At times recalling aspects of the work of Peter Zummo or Arthur Russell’s Instrumentals, but with a massive dose of sonic heft, this is music for both the mind and the body.