On Richard’s Music

“On Saturday at the Library of Congress, the New York-based group offered a cross section of its repertoire in a performance that was spot-on focused, unfaltering, and at times, unforgiving. 

Ensemble Director Carrick’s La Scène Miniature, a work depicting the murder scene from Albert Camus’s “The Stranger”..re-recreated the narrative in a visceral way, generating sounds ranging from groans and sighs to insects buzzing and aircraft diving.”

-Washington Post

“The charm of Mr. Carrick’s “Scène Miniature” was in the way the instruments — piano, violin, saxophone and musical saw — paired off in various combinations. The paired instruments began by playing abstract themes, but in the final section, based on a sharply rhythmic Algerian dance melody, abstraction was overtaken by exoticism and sheer infectiousness.”

-Allan Kozinn, The New York Times

“Richard Carrick's Cosmicomics was an almost operatically ambitious multimedia piece with video, narration, and a scintillating score ... The concept was clever….each element had its own engaging narrative.”

-Kyle Gann, The Village Voice

"whole stretches of this organic, restless and unruly score conveyed the sense of creation as a tumultuous process. "

-Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times

Cycles of Evolution CD review

“His music is very much of a Modernist bent, but also very much up-to-date, i.e. not in the serialist vein that has created so much animosity over decades, but one that privileges all sorts of current intellectual endeavor as a stimulus for musical reflection....The resultant sound is highly plastic—sounds are bent and smeared, ideas emerge and evaporate like weather systems.....One feels ideas constantly receding and then returning into view, each time slightly modified, in turn generating new forces that will further shape this mutation.”

-Fanfare Magazine

Stone Guitars CD review

"Carrick is certainly inventive in his use of electric guitars. I’ve always though the possibilities of expression were vastly underused by most electric players. You have to conceive of it as a totally different instrument from the classical guitar, capable of things impossible on the classical instrument—sustained sounds, even a single note crescendo by the use of amplification. Carrick creates a sound world in these mostly brief pieces. He performs in a mixture of composition and improvisation—I’d be interested to see the scores, if there are scores. There are 11 pieces, with titles like ‘Intimate Spaces’, ‘Molten’, and ‘Undersea’.

There is a minimalist influence, certainly, and a resemblance to ambient music—but it’s more interesting than ambient sounds, stuff I’ve always dismissed as music not to be listened to. This rises above that, though each piece is in stasis, each with a different set of sounds, gradually shifting almost imperceptibly. There is no rock or pop influence here, and it may change your perception of electric guitar.”

- The American Record Guide

Flow Cycle for Strings CD reviews

“quietly virtuosic and addictive”

-The Wire UK

“The Flow Cycle, a rich, beguiling composition”

-Steve Smith, The New York Times

“Constructed as free fantasies, where moment-to-moment activity takes precedence over organizational unity, they articulate small details with energetic gestures - jolting, swooping, lilting rhythms; irregular phrase lengths and unexpected accents; string harmonics, bristling pizzicati, exaggerated bowing, and other tonal/textural effects.

But there is also an ever-present clarity of line and dramatic continuity that help the music sound subtly familiar and vigorously new at the same time." 

-Fanfare Magazine

“I am not an expert on contemporary music, but listening to the Flow Cycle has been unadulterated pleasure — and yes, a real flow experience. Rarely have I heard ease of invention been so well matched by technical virtuosity.” 

-Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Management

 “Carrick's music is unapologetically raw, and reveals a transcendent beauty through its grit and earthiness. He marries a European aesthetic with a West Coast sensibility to create a truly compelling and original compositional style.”

-Amelia Lukas, Ear Heart Music Series Curator

link to Adagios for String Orchestra review

-Feast of Music

“intriguing, enigmatic and eloquent…. His work is heavily influenced by the physical properties of sound, and the boundaries between pure texture and traditional pitched music, with North African melodic influences floating through.....à cause du soleil – Flow Trio ... represented a new level of maturity in his already impressive compositional development.”

-Bruce Hodges, Music Web UK

AS PERFORMER

“Carrick conducted Dumitrescu’s works as though the entire ensemble were a single huge theremin extended over the whole stage: he moved his arms and body with dancerly invocation and sacerdotal command.”

-Jean Ballard Terepka, Theatre Scene, 2016

“a demon at the piano”

-Bruce Hodges, Music Web UK, 2011

“hallucinatory”

-Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 2013

"Either/Or, [one of the] most prominent new-music ensembles in NewYork, opened with a hallucinatory account of Giacinto Scelsi’s ‘Pranam II,’ a work of haunting intensity and breathy flow."

-Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 2013

“A new and first-rate new-music ensemble”
-Bernard Holland, The New York Times

The New York Times - 2013 concert review by Steve Smith, click here

The New Yorker - 2013 concert review by Alex Ross, click here