(Regarding Fifty Five) "What he brings is an abundance of space, a sense that each tune could last a whole night long. From the sprightly ‘Upham Down’ to the reflective ‘Sills Gully’ this is a moving, personal journey."
—Songlines Magazine (full review)
"Songs That Are Hard to Sing straddles early and contemporary traditions to arresting effect... The forty-two-minute piece inhabits a fascinating space given that it could pass equally convincingly as rustic material created by self-trained musicians at some remote cabin as a work produced by music academics conducting microtuning experiments at a university."
—Textura (full review)
"Perhaps the steadiest through-line of the record is its inspiration from the Hardanger fiddle, whose folkish whimsy appears in each piece. “And so we must sing the best we can” is the final call-to-action of the collection. We’re reminded of the ways in which trudging through difficulty often begs forward motion. On Songs That Are Hard To Sing, the idiosyncratic mashup of disparate musical traditions eventually gives way to clarity."
—The Road To Sound (full review)
"the music (Songs That Are Hard To Sing) made something out of time and was intelligent and beautiful."
—New York Classical Review (full review)
"I am taken by this music. There is ever a place for me for beauty and poetic, winsome suchness. Olagon gives you more of it than you might have a right to expect nowadays. And we are all the better for it. Hear this one of you look for endless song."
—Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review (full review)
Olagon: A Cantata in Doublespeak named Best Classical Album of the Year by the Boston Globe
LPR Live podcast of Nostalgic Synchronic record launch, hosted by John Schaefer, on WQXR:
On New Sounds/WNYC with John Schaefer and Rebecca Lazier:
Conversation with choreographer Rebecca Lazier about There Might Be Others, on The Operating System.
Preview of There Might Be Others in The New York Times.
"The études, some fast and virtuosic, others spare and introspective, unfolded to beautiful and haunting effect in a haze of pitch-bending, echoes, distorted rhythms and eerie timbres."
—Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times (full review)
Systerslått film featured at I Care If You Listen.
"who says piano keys have to be just black and white?"
—Maggie Malloy, Second Inversion (in depth review)
"On hearing that “Nostalgic Synchronic” is composer Dan Trueman’s beautiful, surprising and innovative set of eight etudes for “prepared digital piano,” you may wonder what such an instrument could be. But you only need to listen to a few moments of the music — superbly performed by pianist Adam Sliwinski — to think, “Oh, of course.” "
—Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle (full review)
Marbles film premiered at Classicalite.
"enjoyable and stimulating new release, Nostalgic Synchronic, which you should listen to but also experience in person."
—Brooklyn Rail (full review)
"Dan Trueman’s Crazy, Versatile New Keyboard Software Gets a Workout at le Poisson Rouge"
—Lucid Culture (full review)
Nostalgic Synchronic featured in the Utne Reader Monthly Sampler
Nostalgic Synchronic featured on Radio Times in Review:
podcast with Darwin Grosse on Art+Music+Technology.
"The result harkened to Steve Reich's pioneering "phase" works while spinning off into its own exhilarating, outer-spacey directions."
—The Chicago Tribune (full review, Chicago Symphony MusicNOW concert)
articles in TimeOff New Jersey about collaborations with Iarla Ó Lionaird and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh
Preview of concert with Iarla Ó Lionáird, US1
Profile in Physics World.
Profile on NewMusicBox, by Molly Sheridan, and a video excerpt of the profile:
Sideband and PLOrk featured on this Relevant Tones show, WFMT Chicago
"5 Minutes with Dan Trueman" in Strings Magazine
"It was Dan Trueman’s music that really showed how much potential the songs have for elaboration, fodder for the imagination." Iomas Project with Iarla O'Lionaird and the RTE Concert Orchestra.
—
Trad Review (full review)
"...symphonic sweet, but sonic-boom heavy.... Trueman is a man out of time, one foot in tomorrow’s software, the other in yesterday’s folk music."
—Ken Micaleff, Electronic Musician (full article)
Irish Times piece about the Iomas Project with Iarla O'Lionaird
Feature interview with Marty Moss-Coane on RadioTimes, WHYY
QQQ live interview on NPR's Weekend Edition with Liane Hansen.
and some behind the scenes, as well a beautiful video NPR made of Dan playing Orton's Ode
"The piece (neither Anvil nor Pulley)– with its collisions and conjunctions of electronic and live music – was a true joy to lose oneself in... The five musicians had kept up the intensity and imagination of the work from beginning to end, and Mr Trueman's incredible and almost incomprehensible opus certainly merits a second (and third, and fourth) listen."
—Rebecca Lentjes, Bachtrak (full review)
"paradoxically visceral, endlessly engaging..." Review of Sideband performance.
—Steve Smith, The New York Times (full review)
"This is a beautifully shaded piece strewn with ear-cocking surprises whose overall effect is a kind of richly satisfying engagement, on the one hand, and beyond all that just a great opportunity for getting one’s ears and brain to enjoy the practice of deeply listening."
—John Payne, Bluefat (full review)
"neither Anvil nor Pulley conjures a pinging, rattling, booming, but ultimately very gentle and spacious sound-world, closer to the quieter moments of Aphex Twin, Autechre or Photek than anything “classical” (though parts of it also remind me of Steve Reich and of Chinese ritual music). It’s really a remarkable piece, one of the most unique and fascinating works I’ve heard so far this year."
—Burning Ambulance (full review)
a lengthy interview with Marc Weidenbaum of disquiet.com
"With nAnP, Trueman presents a potential musical future – full of color, whimsy, and emotion – where technology serves as the gateway to unlocking an entire universe of novel sounds."
—Dana Wen, I Care If You Listen (full review)
also, an interview with Dana Wen from I Care If You Listen
"Trueman honors familiar sounds with new twists in a dialogue of sounds and ideas that is fun to listen in on."
—Sydney Beveridge, Linked Music (full review)
interview with Gregory Taylor of Cycling '74, makers of Max/MSP.
"Dan Trueman’s composition is rich in meanings, full of surprises, and ripe with references (to Bach, rock music, pioneers of noise, etc.). It’s a wonderful listen and it showcases the So Percussion quartet’s incredible versatility."
—Monsieur Délire (full review)
" The quartet members gamely do battle with drum machines; attach speaker drivers to bass drums and play with the resulting feedback; and manipulate synthetic string timbres with golf video-game controllers, complete with tethers. And on top of all that, they play more conventionally written sections for percussion with aplomb. It’s this shared commitment to bringing seemingly disparate elements together that makes Trueman and So a winning association."
—Christian Carey, Time Out New York (full review)
an interview with Ronni Reich (Newark Star Ledger)
"Stunts? Gimmicks? Not at all. This is music doing — as has been happening for quite a while in the new classical music community — what visual art has been doing for quite a while. If you go to see contemporary art, you’re going to see a lot of pieces that aren’t paintings, drawings, sculpture, photography, or any of the older genres. Instead you see installations, performance pieces, wildly imaginative things for which no genre exists."
—Greg Sandow, Arts Journal (full review)
"The integration of the laptops within the percussion quartet is extremely well balanced. Just listening, one is never sure if it is “live or Memorex.” "
—Jay Batzner, Sequenza21 (full review)
interview with So Percussion on Texas Public Radio
"As cold and calculated as that may be in concept, in execution it's an intriguing juxtaposiiton of the organic and synthetic that stands among So Percussion's most accessible and powerful efforts to date... The record never lacks the intimacy and emotive charge of human touch, while exploring electronically-generated colors and textures."
—Hannis Brown, WQXR, Q2 Album of the Week review (full review)
“The dazzling results mixed George Crumb’s knack for unearthly timbres, Alvin Lucier’s infinitesimally fine gradations of tone and the fierce creative audacity of Jimi Hendrix.”
—Steve Smith, The New York Times(full review)
“It sounded like ... what Star Trek's Borg might play after assimilating a garage full of punk-rock heroes paying homage to Erik Satie? … rocked the fuckin’ house.”
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Wayne Brenner, The Austin Chronicle (full review)
“remarkable… transportive…”
—Jeffrey Edelstein, MusicWeb International (full review)
“inventive and heartfelt… a bold statement of purpose disguised as an unpretentious lark.”
—Hank Shteamer, Time Out New York (full review)
"The results sounded something like a shimmering moment from a John Adams orchestral score stretched out indefinitely."
—Steve Smith, The New York Times (full review)
“obscenely mature and innovative… The entire enterprise is complexly instrumental, progressive like nobody's business, and hardly needs song titles, as everything flows into everything else as one huge spacious concept.”
—Mark Tucker, FAME Review, Acousticmusic.com (full review)
“deeply wonderful… The CD (QQQ) is a testament to the metaphysics of Sonata form. It’s a gem.”
—The Big City (full review)
“Sophisticated and accessible”
—Textura.org
“the most fascinating musician on the face of the Earth.”
—Andy McGowan, PopMatters (full review)
“The music on Gardens, composed by Trueman, includes rustic folk melodies, gangly dances and pulse-oriented workouts on woodblocks and marimbas—as well as flowerpots, rocks and a wheelbarrow—interspersed with quirky narratives written by Jennifer Trueman (the composer’s sister), and read by her and Rinde Eckert. A DVD matches the music to images by painter Judy Trueman (the composer’s mother), computer-animated like a gallery full of Kandinsky canvases dancing to their own gaudy rhythms.”
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Steve Smith, Time Out New York (full review, 5 star)
“hypnotic, fresh, bracing music.”
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Bob Norman, Sing Out!
"[Trollstilt] made an impression.... It was a superb concert of high quality."
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Vidar Lande, SoundPost of the Hardanger Fiddle Association of American