Other Minds is pleased to present Ratchet Attach It by the Bay Area composer and impresario Charles Amirkhanian. Commissioned by Errollyn Wallen, the UK’s Royal Composer, for the 2021 Spitalfields Festival in London, Ratchet Attach It continues—and crowns—Amirkhanian's career-long fascination with the noisiest of percussion instruments: the ratchet. "The sound up close of a concert orchestral ratchet can be hair-raising," Amirkhanian writes in his composer's notes. "Also, full of bird-chirping-like overtones. I learned this early on by accident while sitting in the enclosed cab of my Volkswagen Bug and turning the handle of this ear-splitting instrument."  

Through eleven movements, Amirkhanian dresses up—and dresses down—the ratchet to explore how percussive noise acts in support of, and in opposition to, melodic accoutrement. "The act of playing this mechanical instrument somehow relates," says Amirkhanian, "to the mechanism of the player piano, with its constant rotating of the paper roll on which music has been encoded." Besides percussive support from Dominic Murcott and the Trinity Laban Percussion Ensemble, the work also features prepared piano rolls from Rex Lawson. If you only hear one ratchet-focused composition this year, make it this one!