Christopher Hoffman: REX

Musicians have been inspired by the visual arts for centuries, from Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition in 1874, depicting the works of the artist Viktor Hartmann, to Myra Melford's 2025 release Splash (Intakt Records, 2025), a homage to the visual artist Cy Twombly. The question always arises: Does the listener have to know the artwork and artist being referenced to engage with or understand the music? Not really. The magic of Mussorgsky's music survives and thrives even as Hartmann's work has faded from memory, and Melford's exquisite take on the energy of Twombly's work engages on a level all its own. One never has to have seen the original artwork or know the artist to enjoy the music.

Cellist Christopher Hoffman takes a slightly different approach on his 2026 release REX. In 2023, he and his family moved from Brooklyn to the rural home of the watercolor painter and ornithologist Rex Brasher in Connecticut. Brasher is known best for Birds and Trees of North America, containing 874 watercolors of about 1,200 American bird species, said to cover every bird species in North America (you can find his bio and artwork at rexbrasher.org). Inspired not only by the artwork of Brasher but by the environs in which he worked, Hoffman began work on what would become his first solo cello recording.

Unlike other albums that are tributes to artists' works, these tunes are more about being in the moment and creating art from the energy of the place and the energy of the artist himself. As Hoffman noted in an essay he wrote for Which Sinfonia, "These recordings are snapshots- -honest ones. Some performances feel like I'm discovering the piece in real time; others feel like I'm chasing something just out of reach."

Hoffman, who has played with Henry Threadgill, Anat Cohen, and James Brandon Lewis among others, created a singular work using both electric and acoustic cello, looping and overdubbing instruments. The result is an album that depicts the pastoral world that Brasher so treasured but offers vivid musical images that are not always idyllic.

Some of the songs are about Brasher's paintings, such as the opener "Snow Owls," which starts with a bouncy rhythm that conjures memories of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra of the 1980s (yet another bird), Hoffman taking a soulful bowing solo over the rhythm. On "Swallowtail Kite," another song based on a painting, the plucking of the cello over a staggered acoustic beat suggests the motion of a bird in flight, which would please Brasher, who preferred to paint his birds in their environment, rather than, as John James Audobon did, from dead preserved birds.

Some of the songs depict the rural countryside around Brasher's home, but Hoffman does not seek to mimic the natural environment so much as evoke the sensation of being in it. The plodding, distorted rhythm of "Buffalo Mountain" carry you along up the trail to the mountain while the melancholy riff that opens "The Babbling," written about a babbling brook that one has to cross to enter the property, soon gives way to a building electric rhythm that creates tension and excitement over which Hoffman takes a solo, all ending abruptly, as if one has come to the end a road.

And there are songs about Brasher himself, such as the title track and "Spindrift," the name of Brasher's unpublished book of writing and watercolors and the highlight of the album. Plucking an evocative rhythm and adding an additional bowed rhythm, Hoffman then solos a stunningly beautiful melody over it, creating a transcendent middle to the album.

The cello is an instrument that can display often contradictory extremes: ominousness and exuberance, sadness and joy. Hoffman compounds that by manipulating the sounds through electronic effects, and looping several different cello sounds over one another. The heavily distorted cello that begins "Sabateur," for example, is then overlapped by a metallic-sounding bowing playing off the distortion to create an uneasy yet pleasant sensation.

One of the exciting aspects of the record is the way Hoffman combines these electric and acoustic sounds and looping and electronic effects to create a mood that permeates the entire album, one that is simultaneously wistful, meditative, and elated. Many of the songs come to an abrupt or noisy end that is then contrasted or complemented by the next song. The sounds and songs play off each other, but ultimately all tie together to create a unified piece that, as Hoffman noted, "reflects the solitude and intensity that shaped both Brasher's vision and my own process." Does one need to know Brasher's work to engage wtih this music? Hoffman creates a musical world that while inspired by Brasher lives all on its own successfully. We can hope that there will be more solo works as strong as this one from Hoffman in the future.

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