Dominic Frasca: 'Deviations'
Dominic Frasca, guitarist. Cantaloupe CA21032; CD.

DOMINIC FRASCA provides virtually no information about the music on this disc, which includes his own works, pieces by or collaborations with Marc Mellits, and an extraordinary arrangement of Philip Glass's early "Two Pages." But at the end of the track listing, Mr. Frasca offers a note: "All music is performed on solo guitar in real time with no loops, overdubs or other instruments."
That's hard to believe, given Mr. Frasca's penchant for perpetual-motion rhythms and dense counterpoint. And in truth, there should have been an asterisk. For some pieces, Mr. Frasca uses a 10-string guitar, with an extended bass range and greater flexibility of voicing. And perhaps more crucial, he is committed to using amplification, often sending the relatively light sound of his nylon-string guitars through a computer, which lets him manipulate timbres, reverberation and stereo placement.
Still, anyone who has seen Mr. Frasca in concert knows that he has the technique to produce the energetic, richly textured music here, and that the extra strings and computer circuitry mainly add color. He and Mr. Mellits write enveloping works that draw heavily on pop and Minimalist sensibilities and use the extended resources of the guitar and the computer imaginatively.
The highlight is Mr. Frasca's 23-minute "Deviations," an elaborate set of rhythmic and harmonic variations with pizzicato figures and percussive tapping on the guitar's body woven through the increasingly dense texture. Other works, like Mr. Mellits's "Lefty's Elegy" and "Metaclopramide," are lighter in texture and use the instrument's sound more conservatively. Even so, in "Metaclopramide" a harpsichordlike timbre on the top line of the counterpoint gives away Mr. Frasca's use of electronics, as does a brief flirtation with phase-shifting in "Lefty's Elegy." And in Mr. Frasca's rendering of the Glass work, the sound of the fingers plucking the strings creates a layer of rhythmic counterpoint not heard in more conventional ensemble readings. ALLAN KOZINN