Michael F. Hunt is something of a hidden figure. Decorated within American music academia, the New Castle, Indiana-born composer (b. 1945) has had his works performed across Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, China, Ireland, Serbia and the USA over a career that began in his preteens. Yet remarkably, none of those compositions has ever been issued commercially — a state of affairs Brighton’s Phantom Limb are about to correct.
Passage of Time: The Music of Michael F. Hunt, out June 19th, gathers three longform works written and recorded between 1980 and 1985. The label’s founder, James Vella, pitches the album as a missing link between New Age, mid-century American minimalism and large-scale ensemble composition — territory Hunt occupies with what he describes as a yin-yang of quietude and potency, drawn in part from his lifelong study of Daoist philosophy (and his belts in aikido).
The lead single, available to stream today, is an edited version of the album’s epic opener, Music for Multiple Keyboards. Originally running to thirty-five minutes, its many-layered ensemble of synthesisers unfolds through cellular repetition and a Rileyian shimmer — fittingly, given Hunt and Terry Riley have been peers and contemporaries throughout much of their careers. Two further pieces complete the set, including the gliding viola of 1985’s Butterfly Dreams, written for an outré oversized graphic score.
Hunt’s path here has been characteristically idiosyncratic. Drafted into the US infantry after graduating from the St. Louis Institute of Music in 1968, he eventually transferred to the Army Band as a trombonist. Earning his PhD from Washington University in St. Louis in 1974, he experimented with algae-prompted tone generation and programmed Paul Hindemith’s rules of composition into a 3,000-card IBM 360 deck — work that fed directly into Music for Multiple Keyboards. Reviewing a 1972 Hunt premiere at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the LA Times described the performance as “Sounds and structures emerging from single lines… colours drifting in and out… clear, sparse, disarming.”
Pre-Order via Bandcamp: https://phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/album/passage-of-time-the-music-of-michael-f-hunt