Christian Gentry is a composer and professor in the Boston area. He grew up in Arizona and ended up in Massachusetts via Utah and Kentucky–bicoastal if you count the Great Salt Lake. Christian explores sound in its various guises: as art, as music, as noise, as memory, as symbol, as commercial product, as pollution, as whatever. His work resides easily inside the art gallery, the concert hall, or headphones. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Music at Framingham State University where he teaches a variety of music theory, history, and electronic music courses. He resides in Framingham, Massachusetts with his wife, two kids, and two terriers. Delayed Transmissions is a collection of five electronic pieces that each, in their own ways, burst from their frames. Orderly arpeggiated patterns (some downright danceable!) sputter and crackle into clouds of synthesis. Private moments, iPhone voice memos, late-night hummed melodies, and a family album of field recordings, present themselves in a flurry of skewed images. One is left with the feeling that this music is filled with the joy and anxiety of life moving quickly by. The album marks a committed embrace of pop music in Gentry’s work. The musical palette is often surprisingly pop: whining synths, deep subkicks, and shimmering reverb. At its heights, the music unabashedly grooves. Slices from these pieces could easily drop in the middle of a DJ set without the losing momentum of the room. At the same time, the composerly touches of the pieces reveal themselves in the music’s development. Neoclassical progressions and clever metric displacements are found throughout, driving these pieces in a similar way to the frenzied devolution that a ragtime might undergo on one of Conlon Nancarrow’s piano rolls. The third piece, “basement_improv_deluxe_2” presents itself as a subwoofer-heavy drum-and-bass groove, but that opening pop facade gives way, over the rest of the ten-minute frame, to an especially obsessive ear for melodic invention and a myriad of rhythmic contortions. The standout moment, in my listening, is the final track, “if my memory...” Somewhere between Ives’s “Unanswered Question” and the final minutes of Radiohead’s “Videotape,” a slow, heavenly pad of voices drift in the background, while a granulated blur of household noises (children, kitchen sounds, toy pianos, squeaks, squeals, laughing) are presented as an accelerating flipbook of images all over the stereo field. The very first voice in this fray is the composer’s, uttering what sounds like “wait!” Later, we hear the chopped phrase, “if / my memory / serves me.” The music here, the unmoving backdrop and the family history in the foreground, is personal and transcendent. One feels the time pass in the music, as it does in life: extremely slow, extremely fast, all at once. - Matt Sargent