Like Octavia Butler’s Afro-futurist science fiction, which inspired the piece, this experimental septet performance can seduce, challenge, and unnerve in the span of a few measures.
Afro-futurist author Octavia Butler served as a touchstone for flautist and composer Nicole Mitchell well before she considered herself an artist. Found on her mother’s bookshelf when Mitchell was a teenager, Butler’s work “[was] equally fascinating and disturbing to me,” the composer told one interviewer. An African American woman who was the first science-fiction writer to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, Butler tackled ecology, theology, racism, corporate greed, violence, empathy, and more in her novels and short stories. Works such as The EarthSeed Series could be apocalyptic and optimistic at once. The same dichotomy figures into Mitchell’s own compositions, which can seduce, challenge, and unnerve in the span of a few measures. Butler’s example has stayed with Mitchell, a former chair of Chicago’s vaunted jazz collective the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, in her own large-scale works. Soon after Butler’s death in 2006, Mitchell premiered her ambitious Xenogenesis Suite, scored for nonet and based on Butler’s trilogy of the same name, and she drew on the author’s writing again for 2014’s Intergalactic Beings.
Mitchell returns to Butler’s work once more—specifically, the 1993 novel Parable of the Sower and its sequel, 1998’s Parable of the Talents—with EarthSeed, a collaborative performance with the singer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Lisa E. Harris. The two women bonded over Butler at the New Quorum Composers’ Residency in New Orleans, and the Art Institute of Chicago commissioned the work for performance on June 22, 2017, Butler’s birthday. Mitchell and Harris collaborated on new lyrics based on concepts in the Parables, in which climate change has ravaged the planet. Arranged for a septet featuring Chicago luminaries like cellist Tomeka Reid and trumpeter Ben LaMar Gay, in conjunction with Harris’ theremin and Mitchell’s flute, EarthSeed tends towards that “disturbing” nature of Butler’s work, blurring the line between the present moment and an imaginary dystopian future. At times visceral and discordant, even agitating, the piece favors turbulence and accentuates the queasy timbres of its instruments.
Drawing on the fusion of improvisation and composition that marks the works of the AACM and Art Ensemble of Chicago (a long-lived collective that counts Reid and Mitchell as current participants), EarthSeed’s music is challenging and bracing, often deploying an array of small sounds that confront and befuddle. Opener “Evernascence / Evanescence” features Mitchell’s spare flute and Harris’ wordless exhales and whistles—a rare instance of the main participants in duet, and a brief oasis before the others enter. When the full ensembles emerge on “Whispering Flame,” Reid’s bowed cello and Gay’s queasy tones act as destabilizing forces. As Harris harmonizes with another vocalist, Julian Otis, her operatic training comes to the fore. But before you can be seduced by their interplay, it sours. Otis and Harris wring out guttural gasps and wretching noises, Gay’s muted trumpet screeches, and Reid’s cello strings squeak like sawed wood.
In “Moving Mirror,” which highlights Reid’s quicksilver work, her cello serves as bass, melodic lead, and frightening noise generator, veering between bow and pizzicato. She can be nuanced and hushed one moment, skin-prickling the next, accompanied by a battery of electronics from Mitchell, Harris, and Gay. “Whole Black Collision” juxtaposes white-noise rumbles with Harris’ sustained notes. She scales higher and higher until she’s at a piercing register where Gay’s shrill horn joins in. And the heights she hits on the climactic “Purify Me With the Power to Self Transform” are dizzying and awe-inspiring.
EarthSeed’s sometimes bewildering array of disassociated texts, ululations, and rhetorical questions (“If you become ‘other’ then who becomes the mirror?”) all play into notions of disturbance and disruption from Butler’s writing, but on record, it discomfits. The babbling and vocal noises that introduce “Phallus and Chalice” turn enervating after four very long minutes, wince-inducing rather than whimsical. In “Biotic Seeds,” which draws inspiration from Parable of the Sower’s theory of life force, their voices veer from exaggerated dramatic enunciation to matter-of-fact recitation, the accompaniment reduced to mere punctuation: “Crisis is our teacher. What is its message? Embrace crisis. Lean into chaos!” The same philosophy could be said to guide EarthSeed: The album itself often feels as uncomfortable as the chaotic world depicted in Butler’s books.
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