Martin Arnold
Stain Ballads
There is something disarming about the world conjured in Stain Ballads. Martin Arnold creates music for Apartment House that settles into the ear with an air of deceptive simplicity: four extended works - “Lutra,” “Stain Ballad,” “Trousers,” and “Slip” - move in slow, off-center arcs, each clothed in a soft-edged lyricism that never quite settles into resolution. Arnold’s notion of a “stain” isn’t merely suggestive of the accidental, but proposes a form where contour and color are indivisible. H…