Sometimes a simple cocktail offers a breather on a list crowded with ambitious concoctions, its modesty acting as a merciful comma in a monologue brimming with ten-dollar words and knotty phrases.
This view is shared by Roque Strew, who argues that "equally vital to the record's dense, hypnotic shape is Clifford Meyer's command of the keyboard His blissful, knotty phrases, played on a dusty Hammond B3 or Rhodes, often recreate moments from the psychedelic and prog-rock past".
Not so a duet like Cayetano Soto's "Zero In On" (2010), whose striking design elements and arduously knotty, balletic phrases are all too familiar these days.
It's not the dancers, he said pointedly, who hold onto the past, as proven by the gusto with which City Ballet performers attacked his knotty, aggressively physical phrases.
But if you're a complete novice, you may get a bit lost among all the options and knotty jargon, with phrases like "a loop on the bight" and "fair the knot".
With his oblique and inimitable turn of phrase and knotty, trenchant piano style, this is vintage Tracey.
Mr. Frishberg's pianism, with its knotty chords and staccato phrases, was as spiky and emphatic as his personality.
Tight but fluid phrases, and deft, sometimes knotty shifts characterized several of the works on the bill.
In "Calculus and Politics," a trio and a quartet negotiate a knotty Harry Partch score; in "Dreaming Awake," a soloist and a duo independently scroll through three phrase variations.
