performed by Daniel Lippel on his album Mirrored Spaces
Available from bandcamp, Naxos Direct, Amazon, and Apple Music
performed by Marianne Gythfeldt on her album Only Human
Available from bandcamp, Naxos Direct, Amazon, and Apple Music
"Gythfeldt is setting a new standard for her instrument here."
—Jeremy Shatan, Anearful, Best of 2018
"The technology never overshadows the essentially human rhythms underlying the music and the equally human urge to convey, though sound, an expressive message from one person to another."
—Daniel Barbiero, Avant Music News
performed by Flexible Music on their album Flexible Music
Available from bandcamp, Amazon, and Apple Music
"In Link's Around the Bend, something surprising is always lurking, from exotic tambourine sighs to quickly shared fragments, dreamy piano lines and sudden outbursts."
—Donald Rosenberg, Gramophone
"Around the Bend by John Link combines 'grooving' rhythms with a quotation from Verdi's Falstaff."
—Daniel Ender, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik
"In the present new music milieu of countless oddly staffed ensembles, Flexible Music has one of the more exciting combinations of instruments and probably one of the most, um, flexible out there in terms of their ability to capture such a broad range of sounds and styles."
—Brian Sacawa, NewMusicBox
"Around the Bend has a cheerful mania."
—Josh Langhoff, Pop Matters
on the album Crosstalk
presented by Mendi + Keith Obadike
Available from Bridge Records and Amazon
"John Link's Life Studies, Movement 1 features digital synthesis, employing Shakespearean scholar Helen Vendler reading Sonnet #65. The result is an engaging combination of regular pulsations, percussive attacks, layered washes of speech snippets, and fragmentary pitch gestures."
—Christian Carey (File Under?/Signal to Noise)
"Mendi and Keith Obadike have compiled a stunning recording containing pieces
that have, at one time or another, been referred to as "spoken word," "text-sound,"
"sound poetry," or simply rap.... Although it is never presented in a straightforward fashion, a reading of Shakespeare's sonnet number 65 serves as the raw material for John Link's Life Studies, Movement #1, yielding a complex rhythmic surface constructed of dislocated aspirates, sibilants, and gutturals."
—John Brackett (Journal of the Society for American Music)
This diverse, oddish, and comely music goes far beyond what one might expect, and should prompt you to explore the works of each and every one of these artists' work...."
—Michael G. Nastos (allmusic.com)
performed by Jeffrey Irving and Daniel Lippel on the album Sustenance
Available from bandcamp, Amazon, and Apple Music
"John Link's duo For Irving Lippel has some captivating, restrained moments where the resonances of guitar and vibraphone are allowed to shimmer and blur in an exquisite way. The whole forms a pleasing arc of textural and timbral density." —American Record Guide