Brightwork newmusic opened its season Sept. 30 at Monk Space, a modest Koreatown venue that has become a laboratory for new music in Los Angeles. At the concert, composers and electronic multi-genre artists Nick Norton and Cristina Lord offered music that was intimate, vulnerable, carefully shaped, and unguarded for their program “FRIENDS.”
Brightwork has long been a haven for adventurous listening, where artistry meets informality in a welcoming DIY space. Norton and Lord, both steeped in cross-genre practice, are carrying this ethos forward. Norton’s pieces drew on elemental imagery and gradual accumulations of texture; Lord’s on voice, electronic processing, and finding expression in the space between genres. What bound them together was not style but an ethic of openness — music that asked to be received rather than dissected. The audience leaned in, eyes closed, letting the music carry them into quiet reflection.
That atmosphere of peace and openness defined the concert’s sound world. The evening’s music emerged more as layered musical shapes than as traditional melodies. Single gestures stretched into textures; points thickened into clouds. Songs were often built up by accretion, one layer at a time, with uncomplicated harmonies acting as the glue that held these textures in place.
The resulting effect was less about forward drive than about settling into resonance. The space in the music allowed listeners to notice how sound decays, how silence frames the next gesture. Lord’s work centered on voice and electronics as she moved easily between human warmth and a more ethereal electronic haze. She spoke of a longing for stillness, and the night’s music brought that vision to life with short vignettes, often static on the surface, that invited attention to the smallest detail. Norton’s pieces leaned on elemental images — waves, snow, and wind — that translated into sonic buildups. The cumulative impression was of music that did just one thing at a time, with care.
The night felt a little thrown together at times, yet that was its strength. Norton and Lord offered no spectacle, only an invitation to listen closely, to let sound wash over you, and to meditate on simplicity. There was something healing in the evening’s candor: Norton’s willingness to speak about mental health and Lord’s remark about longing for stillness were part of the musical experience itself, something simple and direct.
The audience received it in kind, quietly, as though listening could itself be a form of care. At a time when politics and media conspire to keep us anxious and distracted, the Brightwork concert suggested another model: one built on trust and tranquility, with music as a form of refuge for the quiet power of shared listening. The evening ended not with a flourish but with a communal kind of exhalation. Applause filled the room, yet the prevailing mood was meditative, a reminder that compelling season openers need not be loud, and that such quiet honesty can feel radical.
