Other Minds is pleased to present Ratchet Attach It by the Bay Area composer, impresario, and Chief-Other-Mind Charles Amirkhanian. The work includes a rollicking miasma of drum cadences, fractured player piano rolls of manipulated Rachmaninoff, Harold Arlen's "Stormy Weather," and Armenian folk music, along with interludes for multiple ratchets and cowbells, tastefully crafted into an 11-movement suite sure to delight the most jaded new music ears.

Commissioned by Errollyn Wallen, the UK’s Royal Composer, for the 2021 Spitalfields Festival in London, Ratchet Attach It continues—and crowns—Amirkhanian's career-long fascination with the noisiest of percussion instruments: the ratchet. "The sound up close of a concert orchestral ratchet can be hair-raising," Amirkhanian writes in his composer's notes. "Also, full of bird-chirping-like overtones. I learned this early on by accident while sitting in the enclosed cab of my Volkswagen Bug and turning the handle of this ear-splitting instrument."  

Over the course of its 27-minute duration, Amirkhanian dresses up—and dresses down—the ratchet to explore how percussive noise acts in support of, and in opposition to, the keyboard music. "The act of playing this mechanical instrument somehow relates," says Amirkhanian, "to the mechanism of the player piano, with its constant rotating of the paper roll on which music has been encoded." Besides percussive support from Dominic Murcott and the Trinity Laban Percussion Ensemble of London, the work also features pianolist Rex Lawson subverting piano rolls from his vast collection by performing them in unconventional ways, which then are further manipulated by Amirkhanian in the recording studio.