Aheym

Bryce Dessner's day job as a guitarist in the National requires him to work in big, sweeping rock-song arcs, but his solo work displays a furiously complicated musical mind chattering to itself. On his new collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, Aheym, Dessner produces vivid, fierce chamber pieces.

Bryce Dessner has always been one of the more gifted artists in contemporary music.

Bryce Dessner is a guitarist with the alternative-rock and Americana band the National, and this album with the Kronos Quartet appears not on its longtime label home of Nonesuch but on the rock-oriented Anti imprint.

AHEYM is the fruit of yet another close working relationship between the Kronos Quartet and a composer of new music.

Perhaps you know Bryce Dessner as one fifth of indie rock laureates The National. But don't assume the Ohio-born guitarist cut his teeth plucking out grunge tunes in his parents' garage-Yale doesn't hand out master's degrees in music for nothing, after al

A gripe aimed at pop musicians who take a stab at composing classical music is that they approach it from a pop-minded point of view, i. , simplistic