Boring Like A Drill.

This ain’t drone. It’s slow and monophonic, with no obvious change in pitch over the time it takes you to normally breathe in and out, but it plays out like an orchestrated melody. It’s claimed that the three pieces on Scott McLaughlin’s we are environments for each other (Huddersfield Contemporary Records) came about over the course of ten years’ worth of collaboration with violinist Mira Benjamin and pianist Zubin Kanga, and listening to it again I can believe this. Each piece required meticulous attention to detail to present it without noticeable blemish; here, the content is all contained within the music’s surface, with precision-engineered technique to make the finest distinctions between texture and colour. The album opens with the most recent and fully-developed piece, a sublime thirty-five minute stretch of music titled we are environments for each other [trio]. The trio in question here is Benjamin on electric violin, Kanga on piano with electromagnetic resonators; the resonators acting as an emergent third force. Without ever becoming dense, the musicians follow a thin line that keeps changing its substance, e-bowed piano strings and amplified violin strings each giving a tone that is slightly diffuse about the edges. The resonances of the strings set off a surrounding radiation of additional tones that don’t sound like the usual harmonic overtones, but instead create new types of sound that resemble electronically synthesised waveforms. Paradoxically, the musical shaping of each event stills sounds very natural, making something that should be familiar enough feel fresh and new without making the technology conspicuous. The two earlier pieces, each sub-twenty minutes, are relatively less refined but almost as striking. Benjamin’s acoustic violin playing on the endless mobility of listening is augmented by McLaughlin’s live electronic processing to elongate the effects of her bowing as much as add harmonic resonance. The aim of transforming timbre by exploiting the instrument’s acoustic properties is present in a less developed form, latching onto sine-tone upper harmonics or letting the grind of strings turn beating frequencies into a pulse. The fact that drones are not part of the equation becomes clearer here, where the performer’s gestures are more overt. At the start of in the unknown there is already a script for transcendence, Kanga plays haunting phrases on a prepared piano swimming in reverb, but the struck notes soon peter out into sourceless tones from the magnetic resonators, lapsing into long passages of sounds sublimated into almost pure electronics, only occasionally propelled by piano keys.

The Greyfade label is starting up a Folio edition: hardcover books with an accompanying music download (music also available separately). The first release is Three Cellos, an acoustic realisation of Kenneth Kirschner’s electronic composition July 8, 2017 for the aforesaid instruments. Joseph Branciforte arranged the piece for live cellos, multitracked by Christopher Gross. The book is a seemingly exhaustive account by Kirschner about the compositional process behind the original work, from its conceptual origins, tracing through the emerging implications and complications in producing a finalised work, followed by an equally thorough discussion by Branciforte of Kirschner’s work and how to render it as an acoustic performance. Gross also gets in a couple of pages about playing the thing. Kirschner is a prolific composer of electronic music, producing large and boldly conceived works that refuse to be complacent about their foundational premises. July 8, 2017 was made with the use of algorithmic processes; it’s a pitch-based work made out of transformations of a reduced set of six pitch-classes from the usual twelve-tone scale. The predominant theme is one of tension and release, opening with a minor ninth that resolves to the octave which becomes the recurring theme throughout the work, transposed to other near-octaves on various pitches, all played in counterpoint like an illusory canon between two or three cellos at a time. The forty-minute work is divided into multiple cells in a seemingly modular form: Gross accurately likens the work immediately to a kaleidoscope. Each section feels like passing through a room full of mirrors, only to find that each successive room is also equally mirrored. For this acoustic version, with the reliance on the most angsty of dissonances as the basis of the work, your own headspace at the time of listening will play a part in whether you find its prolonged, reiterative excesses exhilarating, wearying or ludicrous. Kirschner’s essay maintains some consciousness of these aspects of composition and how much of the substantive features of the work can be out of your hands even as you create it; regarding this arrangement, he subtitles his chapter “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Vibrato”. The use of cellos rebounding off each other adds to the overall sturm und drang impression, but then Gross’s demonstrative use of vibrato throughout makes another comment on the electronic original: Kirschner was using sampled cello and wondering about the tensions and limitations of working with sampled instruments versus the real. Gross’s vibrato is prominent but alive and variable, responsive to the moment, while sample patches of acoustic instruments are naggingly uniform, pushing timbre to become a mere vehicle for pitch. Branciforte’s arrangement, with its emphasis on elastic phrasing, and Gross’s generous interpretation interrogate Kirschner’s composition even as they may appear to elevate it.

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Tags: Joseph Branciforte, Kenneth Kirschner, Scott McLaughlin
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Last Sunday an afternoon of concerts was held at the Round Chapel in Clapton to commemorate what would have been the 88th birthday of composer John White. White, who died in January, is one of those figures of the British avant-garde whose work was, for certain generations, often more inferred from others than heard directly. That was certainly my experience when growing up in Australia and I suspect it wasn’t too different elsewhere in the Anglosphere, where a few glimpses could be deduced from reading about some tracks on out-of-print LPs issued on the Obscure label, or possibly even hearing them. Living in the UK helped to expand on this narrow view from half a century ago but even so, when hearing a selection of his music at Music We’d Like To Hear in 2022 I noted that his short, often oblique compositions condemned him to “being regarded in much the same way as an outsider artist”. The Round Chapel audience skewed old, peppered with original longhairs and a handful of soft-spoken Maoists up from Surrey for the day.

Hearing this much of White’s music in a day helped to understand how weak my understanding is of his art. Selections from his hundred-odd Piano Sonatas appeared throughout the day, mostly played by Dave Smith. These ranged from the benignly self-undermining miniatures I’d associated with his overall style, to some more generous take-offs on various genres (these were played by Mary Dullea) and one stark, early Sonata of brusquely contrasting intervals played by Tim Parkinson. The creative impulse was pulled one way then another throughout the day, alternating between more conventionally emotive music for plays or cosier chamber works, and more abstract works like the Concert Duos from the early 1970s, originally written for the John White / Christopher Hobbs tuba and piano duo. Then again, even those supposedly colder pieces were built upon dance steps or concert-hall favourites, so that White was always tweaking his sentimental influences in some idiosyncratic way, with the distinguishing factor being the degree to which the work’s origins could be detected on the surface.

Then there’s the comedy. Parkinson and Catherine Kontz performed White’s 2014 piece Wine Connoisseur’s Shoot Out, a cheerfully inconsequential piece for percussive objects (including wine bottle), ditzy stylophone breaks and readings of descriptions from a wine catalogue. It was very British in the way its harmless eccentricity raised questions about satire, arte povera and Dada without the slightest interest in spelling anything out beyond the audience’s immediate enjoyment. It makes Satie – one of White’s chief influences – seem pointed. It also shows why White remained a marginal figure, as he never really mellowed into a sufficiently safe figure with an institutionally acceptable idea of fun (as the Poor Fart Harmony tape from 1988 demonstrated when played later in the day). Instead of composing soundtracks for lottery-funded movies, he was performing live sets with homebrew electronics in the backrooms of pubs. John Lely, frequent collaborator with White in electronic gigs, played a concentrated work with an off-kilter array of lo-fi objects as a tribute, as did Greta Kalteisen, Andrea Rocca and Richard Sanderson with a revival of White and Hobbs’ battery-operated electronic ensemble Live Batts!! Of course, there were also the Machines – Newspaper Reading Machine, Drinking and Hooting Machine, with Autumn Countdown Machine to end the event – which were highlights as usual, perhaps through their simple ingenuity, or perhaps because everyone’s appreciation of White is oriented upon those old LPs after all.

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Tags: John White
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[Part 1: daytime concerts]

In the evening at Wigmore Hall, Apartment House presented two more premières but opened the concert with a late work by Elisabeth Lutyens, Go, Said the Bird, scored for string quartet and electric guitar. It’s a haunting piece, with the guitar (played by Sam Cave) contributing a unique sound, owing nothing to the usual popular styles associated with the instrument. Despite this, Lutyens shows a deep appreciation for the guitar’s capacity for timbral variation, with Cave first playing mysterious ascending glissandi in the bass range as coloration beneath the acoustic strings, using the clear and natural tones as both lead and background while occasionally throwing in moments of nasal treble or passages using a strange, watery modulation effect.

Elaine Mitchener was the soloist for the first premiere, as the vocal lead for an ensemble of seven musicians in Rolf Hind’s Blue to the Throat. The eight movements play through without a break and Hind makes innovative use of the voice, first more as instrument before emerging into song. The piece makes great use of Mitchener’s talents as a singer and for holistic interpretations of the music presented to her, with extremes of register expertly handled, quick-changes in attitude and extraneous techniques extending to percussive effects (torn paper, whipped violin bow) and Mark E. Smith loudhailer employment. Despite this, I still have trouble getting my head around Hind’s compositions; the combination of expressionism with ayurvedic equanimity doesn’t sit well with me and never seems to settle into a style that’s comfortable with itself. It made me notice that the details get a bit messy and many of the effects, such as those mentioned above, get lost in the aural clutter.

Blue to the Throat was conducted by Jack Sheen, who returned as composer in the second half for the première of his piano quintet Press. It carries on from where his Solo for Cello from last year left off, with strings again suppressed by heavy, metallic mutes to produce sibilant, desiccated whispering. Even longer than the Solo, Press plays for about fifty minutes and is broken into three movements. The remoteness implied in last year’s recording was strongly felt here, as Apartment House played constant, scurrying passages that twined around each other, but so faintly that at times you had to strain to listen. The hall was simultaneously filled with sound, but empty; a self-contained microclimate where forces swelled and ebbed but never broke into full voice. As for the piano, it was largely absent, adding an occasional low tone. The second movement continued much the same as the first and for a while it seemed to have turned into an exercise in duration, before small but deliberate changes made you suddenly notice that something was up. The third movement brought more changes but never relieved the tension, serving only to create further apprehension until the piano burst forth into a stupendous, disturbing cadenza that resolved nothing. Press is the eerie, negative image of an epic.

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Tags: Elisabeth Lutyens, Jack Sheen, Rolf Hind
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Only Music Can Save Us Now was the title for the three concerts presented by Apartment House at Wigmore Hall last Saturday, led as ever by Anton Lukoszevieze, where morning afternoon and evening they love-bombed us with new and unfamiliar compositions. As usual, there was no evident compulsion to justify the audience’s attention by way of a curatorial (read moral) theme, only music that it was believed would reward our fresh attention. The morning concert began with Kerry Yong giving the UK premiere of Marek Piaček’s Canzonetta, a piano piece written some thirty years ago. It’s almost as light and lively as the title implies, but offset by a contemporary interest in aggressively repeated patterns and worked with snippets of movie themes and ad jingles (“sound smog” as Piaček calls it) which might be considered po-mo except for the typically East European quizzical attitude to pop culture that realises parody is a two-edged sword. A second work by Piaček was played later in the day, his 5 Studies for piano quintet completed in 2022, where a similarly breezy approach added glossy varnish over sour humour. Šarūnas Nakas’s Cenotaph for piano trio, from 1995, may have been the most conventional work heard on the day. Composed in memory of anti-Soviet resistance fighters in Lithuania, it managed to alternate between dark and light, the tender and the brutal, with each seemingly contradictory impulse contributing to a single statement of emotional complexity. The two world premières of the morning were Christopher Fox’s Heaven as a scroll and Adrián Demoč’s Zamat (Velvet). The Fox piece is a characteristically strange piece; his music floats in the grey zone between the conventional and the experimental, so that hearing his stuff can be an elusive experience. A string quartet is accompanied by a set of bells, which had been hanging at one end of the stage all shiny and alluring all morning. The strings play with tunings to match those of the bells, with the natural harmonics and resonances guiding the musical substance beyond its usual intonation. Zamat is a spare and elegant piece, with clarinet and bass clarinet, viola and cello playing short melodic cells in unison. The strings are pizzicato throughout, slightly out of step and adding percussive colour to the two clarinets, whose timbres combine to add subtle disturbances to the pitch.

I have now also heard a slightly less weird and more approachable piece by Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson. His Sitt hvoru megin við þilið uses his computer animated scores and friable material, but in this case the instrumentation is for string quartet instead of homemade instruments and the piece is contained within a single movement. The frayed scraps of sound fall into fleeting patterns that never sit still. It’s an intriguing experience as the ear can never settle on any moment; my failure to hear what’s in front of me becomes a problem when confronted by my expectation that I should tell each movement apart. The first concert ended as it began with Yong solo giving the first British performance of David Mahler’s Only Music Can Save Me Now from the late 1970s, a piece firmly located in the minimalist ethos of the time: an ostinato cycles throughout, forming the basis for a type of open-form chaconne as right hand harmonises upon the left, playing tropes that make small but significant changes to the rhythm and phrasing. It’s a reminder of the fecundity of minimalism in its later blossoming, before the style was subsumed into its present monoculture of soundtracking pageantry.

Besides the additional Piaček, the afternoon concert included a string quartet by Dubravko Detoni, a composer who presence amongst Western music geeks seemed to fade away with the dawn of the CD era. Forgotten Music presents 27 slips of music, each relating to a different style or genre but distorted almost beyond recognition by subjecting each to intense but brief scrutiny. Multiple contradictory meanings proliferate as each moment passes, both overzealous and dismissive in interrogating the music’s contents, with possibilities for misinterpretation rife. It takes on extra significance when you remember Detoni was a Yugoslavian writing the piece in 1981. In some ways, a more acute statement of the predicament described in the two Piaček works. My personal highlight was Michaël Lévinas’s string quintet (extra viola) Les lettres enlacées IV, an enthralling work of grainy micropolyphony and spiraling scales, made out of modal figures transposed upon each other and transformed by a method derived from computer modelling of Doppler shifts in spatialised sound. A sterling example of how access to all the toys at IRCAM can pay off handsomely when used with probing, analytical thought. The afternoon’s premiere was Kerry Yong’s arrangement of Jem Finer’s album Hrdy-Grdy for reed organ and string quartet. The art of transcription here is complicated by Finer’s original being made on hurdy-gurdy with electronic processing, layering the curious instrument with delay loops and other forms of self-accompaniment. Yong and Apartment House handled these masterfully, with sampled organ blended into a multicoloured acoustic chorale with the strings. This was a different musical language to that heard the rest of the day, with direct melodic playing as the base, even as it was compounded by technical elaboration. In a curious way, the method used in presenting Finer’s collection of pieces as a live ensemble work was analogous to that of Lévinas composing his quintet.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Adrián Demoč, Christopher Fox, Dubravko Detoni, Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson, Jem Finer, Marek Piaček, Michaël Lévinas, Šarūnas Nakas
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Gabriel Vicéns is a new name to me, despite not being the first record he has out. A quick look through his back catalogue explains why: originating from Puerto Rico, now based in New York, his reputation is that of guitarist and composer of Latin-influenced jazz. I may as well be deaf when it comes to jazz, but I didn’t detect any disturbing traces of it when listening to Mural, his new release of chamber compositions on the Italian Stradivarius label. I only made the discovery after playing Mural several times over, blissfully unaware of his dark secret. Even now, the idea of it is like being told that Jo Kondo used to play prog.

In the seven pieces heard here Vicéns takes an abstract approach, laying his materials out according to some superimposed logic whose effects can be heard while the motivation remains obscure. Those materials are rarefied but playful, falling into grids of loping, off-beat rhythms or suddenly breaking away to chase their own tails. (The Kondo analogy was not arbitrary.) Trad genres like piano trio, wind quintet and Pierrot ensemble get pressed into service of counterintuitive structures. The trio Sueños Ligados is all staccato phrasing, each instrument rudely cut off no sooner than they have begun, before shifting scene to a cycling chorale of undulating chords disturbed by dissonant interjections. Vicéns often holds off his instruments for as long as possible, as on the opening title work, where piano spends several minutes toying with a reiterated pedal tone before clarinet and violin add commentary and timbral colour to the slightly prickly harmonization. The sleeve notes mention 12-tone composition at work here, but Vicéns takes chromatic dissonances and will repeat them rather than resolve them, implying the stability of repetitive music without any of the comfort that it typically affords, while cloaking less palatable melodies with the sly insinuation of a deferred payoff. It’s a mischievous pleasure.

The crack team of NYC players assembled here give studious attention to the comedic implications of the pedantic tread underpinning many of the works, while never making heavy weather of it or smoothing off the sharp edges to make something quirky. They present Vicéns with a cool facade as he alternately charms or worries the listener. The Pierrot work El Matorral begins with an ominous piano ostinato that soon falters and then loses momentum entirely, leaving the ensemble to make awkward attempts at initiating dialogue to fill up the void. Silence plays a part in all the pieces here, most notably the violin/piano duet Carnal, where small snatches of sonata-like playing escape in fleeting bursts. Everything here is clearly the work of the same composer, though that distinctive quality is hard to succinctly define. The discontinuities hint at a highly refined cartoon-music technique at work, which may be where the jazz seeps in, but the most rewarding thing about this collection is the way Vicéns never stoops to trying something popular, even as he surrounds himself with tempting opportunities.

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Tags: Gabriel Vicéns
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I’ve occasionally mentioned the Octandre Ensemble – particularly their advocacy of Frank Denyer, like last month – but not the music composed by their co-director, Christian Mason. Time – Space – Sound – Light is a new disc/download from Winter & Winter dedicated to Mason’s works for chamber groups with members of Octandre. Recorded in a Bavarian villa last summer, the set of works presented here recreates a potted version of a concert given in the same venue several years earlier. The sequencing of works is ideal, unfolding and then contracting as an extended suite. The attributes listed in the album title informs the understanding of Mason’s music, with its clean presentation of direct and associative qualities working in a close relationship. The set begins curiously but vividly with A kingfisher dives into the sun…, a strongly evocative pastoral recording of birds and insects on a summer’s day without any perceptible artifice. The following piano piece … just as the sun is always… sustains the feeling of open space with long, resonant pauses between its chiming chords. You can pick out resemblances and possible influences, particularly of European composers with interests in Asian music and thought – Messiaen’s bell-like harmonies, Scelsi’s unhurried pacing, Vivier’s sense for ritual – while still finding Mason has his own perspective on these traits which makes his voice identifiably unique. The use of piccolo and percussion in the ensemble work I wandered for a while… is the closest he gets here to anything resembling high-brow exotica, offset by the return of the bird sounds and electronic processing to extend the acoustic space. Cello, flute, piano and bells are the predominant instruments throughout the album. Mason’s talent for making sparing use of sound to maximum effect is heard in wandered and the succeeding Remembered Radiance, where cello, bells, piano and harmonica (without electronics) slowly build intense heat with increasingly stark timbres. Cellist Corentin Chassard gives a forceful soliloquy in the solo work Incandescence, emerging from silence with increasingly esoteric harmonics enriching the tonality and coloration as he drives towards the conclusion. Two shorter works conclude the set: Heaven’s Chimes are Slow is a relatively compressed and agitated duet for flute and piano (on all works the flautist is Audrey Milhères, with Joseph Houston on piano), before Chassard returns with a retuned cello for Bird learning to fly, transforming the instrument with a ghostly accompaniment of buzzing and distempered multiphonics before coming to a sudden stop.

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The Ostrava Days Festival began the new year with a compilation of highlights from their 2023 season, available in a few permutations (the CD version captures only a quarter of the downloadable material and you miss a lot of the best stuff). The download collection focuses on orchestral and larger ensemble works, most of them premieres. It’s tragic but appropriate that the first album begins with the first performance of the late Phill Niblock’s High Noon, given last September by ONO – Ostrava New Orchestra under Petr Kotík’s direction. Hearing one of Niblock’s dense sonic monads executed by a mass of acoustic instruments instead of his usual electronic drones is a powerful experience, with ONO retaining the expected level of intensity to achieve the complex but single-minded nature of Niblock’s music. I hope to hear this live one day. Also present is Christian Wolff, with the premiere of his For 38 Players by Kotík leading Ostravská banda this time. Wolff exploits the instrumentation to produce a particularly lively and colourful work, with the playful inquisitiveness of his discontinuous aesthetic at the forefront. Kotík’s own Outline / Fragment II retains a discernible foundation of his radical steady-state compositions from the Seventies beneath a more elaborate, if not exactly ornate, surface which raises the question of whether he has matured into a more eloquent mode of expression or just mellowed out and regressed towards conventional concert-hall gestures. We’re closer to a Boulez situation here than Glass or Reich so it’s fair to say the former.

Besides Kotík and Wolff, a couple of other names from recent festivals. Bruno Ferrandis conducts Ostravská banda’s premiere of Petr Bakla’s Diptych, an austere work for twelve string players. Bakla reduces everything here as much as he can, sustaining a monotonal line with a slow pulse, the faintest harmonization and gradations in colouring and dynamics to produce the illusion of motion. There is again a Xenakis piece, which seem to take on the role of a yardstick here amongst all the premieres. This time it’s the tour de force for string orchestra Shaar from 1983, which is always welcome, especially as ONO (conducted by Pavel Šnajdr this time) maintains momentum through the steady rhythm passages without trundling. Amongst the newer voices found here, several others lean into the same “less is more” approach heard in the Bakla piece. Michal Wróblewski’s Rhythms no. 3, Glissando appears to feature neither, except in a very subtle way to produce a precarious weave of light, thin material as played by Ostravská banda. James Falzone’s Neither/Nor II inhabits similar territory, even as Ostravská banda require a conductor (Ferrandis) for this piece, with studious attention to each pitch while sounding scarcely any thicker in texture than the original version scored for a trio of violin, piano and vibes.

There’s not enough of Zygmunt Krauze’s music readily available, so fortunately both download and CD include the premiere of his Rivière souterraine 3, with the composer as soloist on piano and Ostravská banda augmented by electronic sounds. It’s a craftily constructed montage of tableaux in which texture and colour take precedence over small-scale shape, where the details are articulated by what I suspect are sublimated examples of Krauze’s predilection for quotation, or ersatz quotation. In my ignorance I’m imagining that the title is a reference to the scherzo from Berio’s Sinfonia, but I’m not looking it up and the album booklet doesn’t say. The provided booklet doesn’t tell us anything about the music really, except that we dodged a bullet when the theatre piece about American politics documented in several photos was omitted from the album. There’s enough theatrics in František Chaloupka’s Allegory of the Cave II., which sounds like it should also be a piano concerto and almost is, making grotesques out of movie soundtrack tropes while occasionally channeling the earlier works of John Adams; it’s a natural fit but as with all grotesques the proportions of wonderment and disgust in your reaction will be a personal matter. Less forgivable is Ian Davis’s Pale Blue World which has a wan presence in this company, with that apologetic air that wafts through too much modern composition these days. As a disclaimer, I’m not an expert on this subject: for example, I keep mixing up Anne Cleare with Anna Clyne. This conundrum has hopefully been resolved once and for all by Canticum Ostrava’s performance of Cleare’s Earth Waves, a nakedly and defiantly weird piece from 2018 that combines the vocal ensemble with trombone (played here by William Lang) and electronic processing. Cleare relocates the contemplation of natural phenomena away from the limited realm of human experience, where the vast majority of it takes place, affirming its strangeness in relation to us while using the human voice as a means for doing so. The trombone and electronics act as transformative elements, both in altering the voices and in guiding them into extended means of expression. That exploratory, expressionist bent recalls the avant-garde of fifty years ago but tackles the medium with more assurance, aware that the technical and technological crudeness of the time is no longer necessary.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Ann Cleare, Christian Wolff, František Chaloupka, Iannis Xenakis, James Falzone, Michal Wróblewski, Petr Bakla, Petr Kotík, Phill Niblock, Zygmunt Krauze
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At Christ Church Spitalfields in 2011 I witnessed one of the most astounding performances in my life when Charles Curtis played Eliane Radigue’s Naldjorlak with uncanny flawlessness. So glad I got to hear his cello playing again at Cafe Oto last week, as part of his residency for four nights. There wasn’t the shock of that first time for me, but the marvel of the rarefied music he brings to us remains. For the first gig he played two pieces, Alvin Lucier’s Slices and Tashi Wada’s Landslide – all the pieces I heard were for solo cello with fixed media playback. (Sadly I missed the two middle concerts due to stupid shit). In Slices, the backing is a recording of what sounded like a mix of sampled and synthesised orchestra. It’s a relatively dense and elaborate piece by Lucier’s standards, with cello playing against or responded to by single instruments on the same pitch, accumulating into chords for which the cello then acts like a filter or interference pattern, in the manner which sine tones are used in many of his other pieces. Overtones and ephemeral complex phenomena come and go, but I’ve always liked this piece a little less for its lack of clarity even as it seems to imply a more perceptible premise. There was a shorter version for cello with live orchestra at Tectonics in Glasgow about ten years back where the acoustic intricacies worked more effectively. Landslide uses field recording in duet with cello, sounding like parkland with distant city, a kind of urban bucolic. It seemed familiar because there is, through demographic necessity, a small musical sub-genre of pieces which make use of this soundscape, exploring the idea of public solitude in a populated place. Wada’s depiction of space is blurred and streaked by overtones instigated by Curtis’ light cello drones on a single pitch that steadily rises, creating reverberations as it crosses particular frequencies in the grey noise background. Why does the pitch rise? Because it needs to cover the full range between high and low but doesn’t need to go anywhere in particular.

The final night was taken up by one long work, Terry Jennings’ 1960 composition Piece for Cello and Saxophone. Composed for Jennings to perform with drones played by a cellist (or bassist) for a concert in Yoko Ono’s loft that didn’t eventuate, the piece persisted as a faint, shadowy presence, one of many works that haunted the turning-points of the American avant-garde, lost along with the short, tumultuous lives of their creators. It has since manifested itself as a version for cello with pre-recorded cellos, arranged by La Monte Young and superbly realised by Curtis. As Young was involved, there was a handout for us to read at the gig which shed additional light on the piece’s conception, context and history. Stretching out for nearly ninety minutes, the piece is built out of improvised solos over chord changes, using “raga-like” modes to move from one harmonic region to another. Sustained tones dominate, and Young has rewritten the piece to specify just intonation for all pitches. The work’s origins can be traced to a shared interest in blues and Indian music, although any imitative resemblance is limited to the use of pitch bends reminiscent of sarangi playing. As the live presence, Curtis alternates between melody and drone in a series of exchanges from him to the tape and back again, causing an elaborate interplay between figure and ground, both endless melody and endless chorale. The music was alive throughout, at once in motion and at rest, moving sublimely from one mood to another with calm, self-contained power. A promotional blurb for the gig described the piece as “visionary”, which seems extravagant but also fair: even as almost every aspect of the piece had been transformed between its composition and its performance, the integrity of Jennings’ singular musical thinking still speaks to us today.

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Tags: Alvin Lucier, Tashi Wada, Terry Jennings
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I got sent a digital download of a limited-release cassette of not-bad bedroom collages turning 20th Century composers into Yuppie-friendly repetitive loops that would have knocked my socks off in the mid-80s and still today is, as I said, not-bad despite or perhaps even because it takes a lot less craft to make such a thing these days. Then I lost interest in writing more about it because the artist was a self-described cyber-shaman named Vadge Wanko who said his tape was striking a blow against Thatcher – something like that, anyway; my eyes kept glazing over. The awkward thing is now I’ve got Mattin’s Seize The Means Of Complexity [Xing] on the stereo and I get it, but maybe not in the way he’d like. Just so you know up front, this is a Mattin record you can listen to rather than just think about. It is, of course, still a provocation: side A opens with bursts of appropriated music before quickly lapsing into near-nothingness, much later resuming with a trashpile of pirated pop clips haphazardly stacked up against each other. The flip side starts out as before but is soon infiltrated with flickering, burning noise that steadily consumes everything in its path. The tropes and attitude of pop art at its most scabrous are present and correct, but Mattin’s handling of the material and control of the form keeps its critiques fresh by reifying the old, oft-repeated premise and treating the present-day details with indifference. The paradox at the heart of Seize The Means Of Complexity is that it achieves its power through a philosophical construct that has endured since the dawn of the industrial age, that of the present being a unique moment of existential crisis. His sleeve notes dream of “forging a new form of catholicism fit for the 21st century” allude to the reliance on tradition in this work. Actually, I meant to type “communism” in that quote but I’m not going back to change it because whatever ideology you slot in there reveals the incipient nostalgia at work here.

Dunno why I haven’t written about Valerio Tricoli before so I better start now. His virtuosic handling of open-reel tape recorders as instruments is compelling in a live setting and scarcely less so on record. The nature of the beast insists on repetition within linear time structures, but Tricoli’s mastery overcomes the obvious limitations of the device while harnessing its inherent capacity to imbue even the most discursive gestures with a steady momentum. A Circle of Grey [Xing again] demonstrates this potency through being so undemonstrative, making an extended pieces that simmers with energy even while, sonically, scarcely breaking the surface. Content is sublimated into the medium, keeping each slip, echo and crackle to a strategic minimum, transforming technique into material. He’s going over the same ground as before, but each new expedition reveals a deeper understanding and greater appreciation for the underlying fundamental nature of the exercise. By now, it’s a slow journey with time to discover and admire the smallest details, transcending the origins of the found sounds to produce an analogue electronic landscape, at once lush and austere.

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Tags: Mattin, Valerio Tricoli
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It’s composition, but who composed it? William Walker’s The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion is an anthology of American shape note hymns, published in 1835. In 2022, Cleek Schrey and Weston Olencki performed “readings” of selections from this volume on a pair of old wooden pump organs. At first, their interpretation of The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion [Pagans] seems straightforward enough. The variegated tones of the organs and extraneous mechanical sounds serve to illuminate the austere exoticism to be found in a colonial vernacular form of serious expression. John Cage became fascinated by the subtleties of this simple, supposedly crude formalism in his study of late 18th Century American music and composed a series of works based on similar hymns. It’s impossible to hear Schrey and Olencki here without recalling Cage’s own organ suite Some of “The Harmony of Maine” (Supply Belcher); but while Cage creates something new through erasure and extension, Schrey and Olencki are apparently retaining all the right notes in the right order. The natural variation in the organs’ sounds are exploited to highlight the overtones produced by the material, as first in inconspicuous ways, before taking a sudden turn in the two renditions at the heart of this collection. Each of these much longer pieces is a lingering meditation on the hymn’s substance, elongating each tone to provoke beating frequencies and ghostly timbres. Schrey and Olencki augment these two versions with sine tones, reed organ and bowed and scraped banjo strings, using the additional sounds as reference points for how much the organ sound has transformed into something strange and uncanny.

A new recording of Martin Arnold’s music is always welcome, even when given in somewhat bittersweet circumstances. Flax [Another Timbre] is a solo piano work for Philip Thomas, drawing inspiration from Thomas’ superb interpretations of Arnold’s music and from his insightful survey of Morton Feldman’s complete works for solo piano. Sadly, ill health has prevented Thomas from performing the piece. The task has since fallen to Kerry Yong, a pianist with an overlapping repertoire and a shared inquisitive approach to new music. Yong’s approach finds the double image that often hovers in the background of Arnold’s music: his compositions are made of the slenderest elements, arranged into a light but self-supporting structure which suggests a more fully-fleshed work that will remain a spectral presence in the listener’s imagination. The music is persistently calm and alert – a connection to the jazz pianists Arnold name-checks when discussing his piece. Yong captures this mood by maintaining a relaxed almost-a-groove, taking his time without losing the pulse, yet always gently interrogating whether this attitude is justified by or at odds with the material. As for the material, Arnold has described Flax as an exploration of the higher registers of the piano, and the piece does pursue the fine line between the delicate and the brittle. When the high notes are absent, the work takes a new turn in demeanour and form. Melodies play out in small fragments like slow riffs, with almost accidental chords and occasional brief chromatic runs, the overall shape remaining unclear yet becoming more distinct as the piece progresses. In this recording, Flax clocks in at seventy-nine minutes, so Yong’s pacing becomes critical. As always, Arnold avoids stasis, preciousness, doesn’t ramble; each small part is essential. Like an experienced story-teller, Yong lets each detail fall into place with confidence that you can piece it together.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Cleek Schrey, Martin Arnold, Weston Olencki
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I swear I’m not warming to Matthew Shlomowitz’s music; it’s just that he jerks me around, which is doubtless part of his intention, and that I’ve been fortunate enough to swing in the right direction more often than not. Having been wowed after a few bad trips by his Explorations in Polytonality and Other Musical Wonders, Volume 1, he’s back with some of the threatened sequels to mess with my expectations again. Pleasingly, it both is and is not more of the same. Explorations in Polytonality and Other Musical Wonders, Volumes 2 and 4 presents two suites for small ensembles which extend the hyperkinetic chromaticism-by-association of the original piano set while adding cultural complications that make listening more precarious. These have been a feature in much of Shlomowitz’s music before now, and haven’t always sat well with the material. In these examples, everything is much better integrated. Volume 2 is scored for the forbidding combination of three recorders, ably played here by the Apsara trio who bolt out of the gate like an overclocked calliope in a dazzling contrapunctal frenzy. The dexterity of Shlomowitz’s writing, matched by Apsara’s precision, is placed at odds with the thickened timbre and rough attack of the instruments. The intonation is thus smudged throughout, calling into question the wisdom in attempting this polytonal exercise in the first place. Six formal studies are tooted at you, topped off by a coda labelled “Afternoon Jazz” that is more po-faced than the preceding movements – one of a number of little jokes that all land successfully this time around, highlighting the wit overall. You’re left in a conflicted position akin to viewing a finely detailed finger-painting, admiring the skill while agonising over the validity of the chosen medium.

Volume 4 features Quartet Laboratoire on a combo of synthesisers and percussion. An exacting but erratic drumkit backs xylophone and vibes with keyboards loaded with the daggiest General MIDI patches – more familiar territory for Shlomowitz but put to better use here, mixing funny and grating in its material and its means. The writing is less stiff than I remember from his earlier electroacoustic works, and the incongruities emerge through more subtle means than simple juxtaposition. The Laboratoire musicians nail down the rapid interplay of tuned percussion with the alacrity of Serious Europeans playing Zappa in a concert-hall, undermined by the electronic squeezebox synth parts that evoke, not so much retro computer gaming, as the received idea that old timey video-game music is crude and thin. While some music builds on the tension between low culture and high, Shlomowitz tweaks his sophisticated musical language by playing off the low against the low that aspires to be high. When you work through all the confusion you finally end up with a bundle of fresh, new confusion. Like I said, he jerks you around, but in a good way. The final movement’s title, “LoFi not to study to”, means what it says.

The title of this album is disingenuous. I mean, yes it’s true that Music for Two Flutes by Weston Olencki and Laura Cocks does indeed contain two flutes and nothing but, played by Olencki and Cocks themselves, but it does not prepare you for what is to come. Remember vuvuzelas? Now that you’ve recovered, I’ll clarify that the buzzing drones of Olencki’s ceòl meadhonach in fact draw on Highland bagpipe music for inspiration. The title is accurately but unhelpfully explained as being a type of music that’s neither classical nor popular – not quite an accurate summary but enough to give you the idea. Using what sounds like a trumpet embouchure for the flute is here employed to produce harmonies in a Gaelic mode, slowed to glacial pace. Halfway through the tone suddenly changes to a muted burble before recapitulating. This radical approach to traditional idioms is carried over in another set of pieces Olencki has made with Cleek Schrey, titled The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion, which intend to discuss later this week. Laura Cocks presented the fearless and fearsome recital disc field anatomies a couple of years back, offering some of the most brutal flute music on record. Her composition SLUB pushes her interest in physical limits and the pursuit of extreme and even ugly sounds with elemental directness. The two use their instruments as resonators and filters for an array of partially-voiced mouth noises, alternately squealing, honking, braying, rasping and squelching in a bravura effort to redefine the instrument. Cocks warns that this “reconfiguration” comes with “instabilities”, which is emphatically true. It harks back to a bolder age of experimentation, recalling Kagel’s determination to find a music deprived of cultural and institutional support. Both pieces are monumental slabs of sound and it can all get a bit frightening.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Laura Cocks, Matthew Shlomowitz, Weston Olencki
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Christian Wolff has now entered his tenth decade, and I Dischi di Angelica have celebrated by releaseing a concert of premieres and some of his older pieces, presented in Bologna in 2022. Wolff himself plays piano, with the addition of voice, whistle and “objects” on some pieces. He is joined by the expert Wolff interpreter, percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky, with additional percussion from Joey Baron and a local orchestra of seven electric guitars. The title work Sveglia is one of the premieres, using just the guitars. Wolff’s writing for the instrument consistently focuses on its ability to produce chiming notes with enhanced reverb and decay, retaining the delicacy of the plucked strings as much as possible. (Just a warning in case you’re jonesing for more Glenn Branca.) Sveglia does in fact have some abrupt unison moments, which serve as one of several means Wolff employs to break the continuity in what might otherwise become endless melody. Wolff’s feeling for continuity in music has always been expressed through the attitude of the performers towards the material and each other, requiring the musician to be consistently alert and receptive, alive to the changing nature of circumstances in performance. None of the ensemble pieces here use a conductor. The music, meanwhile, is in a constant state of starting over from zero, each sound new and independent. In Wolff’s mature music, this manifests itself in short, discrete melodic fragments that carry no particular momentum or direction, even before they are quickly re-set and start again from scratch. Paradoxically, it strikes the unprepared listener as suffering from an attention deficit, but the unhurried equilibrium that each piece desires is at odds with any tendency to hyperactivity. One learns to listen in the present, ready to be gratified at each moment without expecting a greater deferred payoff.

The other premiere, Roulette, brings all the musicians together, with Wolff and Schulkowsky sometimes playing amongst the guitars, while at others appearing solo or in smaller groups. This distinguishes the piece with a type of concertante form, creating a structure for itself as it progresses. The album begins with Exercise 10 from the early 1970s, arranged for piano and electric gutars. A quintessential Wolff composition, the ensemble strives to play a melodic line in unison, without overt directions on tempo or rhythm. The compositional ramifications are achieved through a process at once complex yet intuitive, attempting to find consensus on the fly. The album also ends with this piece, played in rehearsal with differences in approach and Wolff’s commentary to the musicians. The rather gentle sounds in these works are contrasted by Wolff, Schulkowsky and Baron taking a harsher approach to his classic open score from 1964, For 1, 2 or 3 People. Schulkowsky and Baron present a duo version of 2002’s Percussionist 5, which I found less compelling owing to its rapid succession of assorted timbres, making it sound much like much other concert percussion works. Schulkowsky’s performance of the solo Exercise 32 from 2011, on the other hand, is exemplary in the way it demonstrates Wolff’s musical thinking without the group activity, finding balance between the arbitrary and the intuitive, making sense of the intangibles to be found within the indifferent. Wolff also plays a few of his piano miniatures, including a valentine that could almost be a waltz.

As previously observed, Philip Corner is also ninety, so it couldn’t hurt to listen to a little more. Angelica has trotted out a selection from concerts of his choral music given in 2018. Chorus at The Corner: A Joyfull Noise features the combined forces of Coro Arcanto, Coro Per Futili Motivi, San Giorgio In Coro and Piccolo Coro Angelico conducted by Giovanna Giovannini with assistance from Silvia Tarozzi. Corner is also present. It is indeed a joyous occasion, with everything short and simple and a lot of the pieces running into each other. The singers hoe into these pieces with gusto, embracing the directness of it all. Corner’s compositions are interleaved with some takes on Italian folk songs “In Old American Style” and contrasted with 18th Century American Barnabas McKyes’ hymn Crucifixion. Giovannini’s own composition Scultura sonora is premeried here, along with several pieces written by Corner for the occasion. In fact, a lot of the tracks are tagged “world premiere”, including some pieces by Corner written as far back as 1970. I’ve still got my old qualms about the pedagogical aspect to Corner’s writing, and some of the singalongs here are a bit happy-clappy for my taste, but the significant thing about this album is the event it documents, showing a less-known facet of Corner’s music and, more importantly, singers and audience having an absolute whale of a time with Philip Corner. That Piccolo Coro Angelico is a children’s choir who sing in several pieces, including new stuff Corner wrote for them, and of course the kids are awesome. It’s telling that the longest track here is with the audience at the end, repeatedly applauding and cheering as the singers reprise pieces from the concert, under the title “An infinite encore”.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Christian Wolff, Philip Corner
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Maya Verlaak’s metamorphosis into an English eccentric continues apace. Her new album Trace from Birmingham Record Company comes without text on the cover and without explanations for any of the pieces it contains, save that they’re to do with “personal approaches in the compositional process.” Her previous collection of works, on Another Timbre’s All English Music Is Greensleeves, showed an interest in reviving the values of the British avant-garde from the late 1960s and early 70s, before it was exhausted by Maoism and Minimalism, using the personal and the homespun as the means for experimental practice instead of confirming certitudes. The more recent works and recordings on Trace show Verlaak advancing this line of thinking into new territory; specifically, that territory being the musician’s homes. Each piece was written for the performers heard here, and the act of Verlaak travelling all over between Berlin and Penrith to record them playing her music at home alludes to a wider project in which the goal is not to make a point, but to find out what may be learned. Any thoughts of cosy domesticity are quickly upended by the puzzling tasks the composer sets her musicians: not rebellious but obstinate, in an English manner. For starters, the opening piece Anticipation is the only one requiring a second musician, and thus a cross-Channel overdub of Paul Zaba singing upon Luca Pignata’s accordion, with lulling melodies that gradually tend towards drones, aided by a shruti box that comes and goes. That dreamlike grey zone between melody and stasis recurs in All English music is – with Howard, featuring none other than Howard Skempton on accordion essaying increasingly distracted derivations from the well-known tune, each successive phrase leading further away from the listener’s expectations and towards some unrecognisable form of organisation. An adaptation of this pieces is also played on harmonium by Kate Halsall: All English music is – with Kate begins with the material’s fragmentation and abstraction further advanced, producing a monologue of gruff exhortations.

In the two longer compostions, Whispers finds Kate Ledger at home in York with her piano, but before you hear the keyboard Verlaak’s score first instructs her to gasp a high note and blow into the microphone. It’s the beginning of a meticulous series of exercises requiring Ledger to execute precise moments of extreme pianistic brevity, with mandated singing and breathing on cue, while pitted against electronic bleeps that imply both tuning-fork stringency and smartphone intrusions. Ledger manages it all very cleanly, threading some semblance of melody out of substances that are much drier and more discrete than they first appear. Meanwhile in Antwerp, trombonist Thomas Moore peforms Mutations, a wonderfully baffling work where the notes he plays rise and fall according to some unexplained process that may or may not involve the analog synth bloops that regularly surface throughout the piece and/or the litany of spoken pairs of near-homonyms, alternate pronunciations and false cognates that are rattled off in the background. It’s both simple and dense, the most satisfying yet of her linguistic puzzles to blur word, speech and music. Each piece here, really, functions in the same way as an unsolveable riddle, with a type of intellect that prefers the senses over philosophy. Incidentally, the title track is a brief portrait of Joseph Kudirka at home in Berlin, humming while turning out clotted chords on a music box. It all leaves me looking forward to the next instalment of Verlaak’s music, so long as the Proms commissioners are kept frightened away.

Frank Denyer is English but you couldn’t tell this from listening to his music. He’s created a sound-world so utterly his own that it could plausibly come from any one place or time as another – something frequently said with less accuracy about Xenakis – given how little it seems to rely on any observable cultural tradition. Another Timbre has built up an invaluable edition of Denyer’s music over the years, most recently documenting two major works, the complete Melodies cycle and the immense The Fish that became the Sun. Their new release Screens compiles five more pieces, composed across a span of nearly fifty years. They’re performed by the Octandre Ensemble, who have championed Denyer’s music over the years, including a memorable concert in 2018 which included some of the works presented here. Denyer’s music is intimate and confronting; if it shocks, then it does so through a naked emotional frankness stripped of all rhetorical devices, whether symbolbic or signifying. Another Timbre’s recording emphasises this with a wide dynamic range that still never gets loud except in relation to the extreme tenderness with which Octandre plays. A vast panoply of instruments and objects are used here to create sounds that seem at once natural yet unimaginable. That timbral ingenuity is at the forefront of the two Unison pieces from the early 1970s heard here, with additional voices from Joshua Ballance and Juliet Fraser. Fraser also sings on Screens and 2021’s Five Views of the Path, with a yielding humanity that adds greater poignancy to parts which could easily treated as just another instrument in the ensemble. Fraser and Octandre premiered Screens at that 2018 concert, with Denyer here repeating his spoken interlude. In Five Views of the Path and in 1990s Broken Music, percussive sounds predominate amongst the ensemble, yet Denyer and the Ensemble make the eclectic timbres cohere melodic and harmonious, even when pitch is absent.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Frank Denyer, Maya Verlaak
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Think I’m the wrong type of person to be listening to these records, so assume the following comes from a grumpy old man who has fallen out of touch with the times. It’s these two new releases from People Places Records, each the work of a solo string player. Problematica is cellist India Gailey’s follow up to 2022’s to you through, this time exclusively made of works commissioned for her. Gailey also sings on a number of pieces, in a close-miked untrained voice with a slight catch that imparts wistful disingenuousness. The use of electronics, such as reverb, multitracking, more reverb, sampling, or just an extra touch of reverb, appear on each track. The songs (as that’s pretty much what they are) veer towards watered-down pop music, matched with the fashionable school of poetry that places a selection of overloaded words with as little supporting syntax as possible to deflect from the poet’s precarity of thought. Welcome relief from all the slipperiness comes in Joseph Glaser’s Joinery, an undulating mesh of quietly brittle cello sounds, where the electronics expand upon the acoustical rather than glaze them and Gailey’s sweet singing adds an unsettling touch, preventing the listener from settling into a fixed perspective for once. Another bright spot is Fjóla Evans’s Universal Veil, which uses multitracking to create more textural interest than simply thickening things out and gives Gailey foreground melodies with something to say beyond providing a vehicle for technological effects.

Violinist and composer Leslie Ting has put together a curious collection of pieces under the title What Brings You In. It’s all part of some larger project apparently to do with therapy, but throughout the accompanying booklet the role therapy plays in this record is couched in vague enough terms to ironically suggest it’s avoiding self-interrogation on the subject. There is a somewhat loose, free-ranging feel for exploration in some pieces, particularly Ting’s improvisation with percussionist Germaine Liu and Rose Bolton’s composition for violin and electronics Beholding. The latter piece starts modern-electroacoustically enough and tries on a few conventional tropes but by the end of it, as Ting pirouettes about on some lively little descending sequences, you realise you’ve been kept guessing the whole time. Why the album opens with Ting and Liu playing a small excerpt from Linda Catlin Smith’s sprawling Dirt Road is a mystery, even as the composer herself is brought into the conversation in the booklet about the record’s conceptual foundation. All I can get from it is that music is therapeutic, which… well, yeah. We’re also informed that the sound of sand is “intimate” – a more contentious proposition. Liu’s improvisation with a heavily amplified sandbox really does sound cool, and about as confessional as Xenakis. It’s a fondly accepted thought that art can make the personal relatable, yet here it paradoxically conforms to people greatest suspicion about therapy, that it makes common experience the exclusive property of the individual.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Fjóla Evans, Germaine Liu, India Gailey, Joseph Glaser, Leslie Ting, Linda Catlin Smith, Rose Bolton
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It’s taken me a while to get a handle on Jakob Heinemann’s compositions; not that I found it difficult to like, but it’s hard to get a bead on what exactly he’s doing on these two albums. It’s better not to think about that in too much depth, as the sense of each piece seems to come down to Heinemann’s personal taste. There’s at least a vague allusion to autobiography in some of the pieces, but nothing overt enough to read the music as a narrative, making his idiosyncratic approach to mixing instruments with field recordings hard to pin down. Resonant Ocean came out in 2022, collecting four relatively short works. The common theme is place and location, either in the real world as heard through field recordings, or in the abstracted space of the harmonic series. Heinemann proceeds to mix them up, interleaving two solo tape collages with works for small chamber groups. The music acts in response to pitch content from the tapes, only for the recording location to change and answer in counterpoint. This happens both within pieces and between them, across the album. In the collages, Heinemann plays autoharp and double bass alternately against sine tones and field recordings that cut in and out with no obvious motivation. A mournful string trio in harmonic intonation acts as an interlude. The concluding, title work uses bowed double bass, possibly with low sine tones again, to create uncanny electroacoustic sounds from flute and trumpet. The reflectiveness of the structure to these activities, and the undemonstrative nature of Heinemann’s ensemble writing, can’t help but seem melancholy, albeit without becoming emotive. In this way they function, faintly but indelibly, in a manner reminscent of landscapes.

Having warned against analysis, I nevertheless began to think there were some more complex ideas struggling beneath the surface in those four pieces on Resonant Ocean. A year later, Heinemann released Opacity, a large-scale suite for flute, clarinet and cello, with the composer on bass with sundry objects and field recordings. This work was the product of a year of Heinemann playing with the musicians on the recording (Molly Jones, Jeff Kimmel and Ishmael Ali). The close collaboration with the performers, and the creation of a more complex work in multiple sections, consolidates the impressions of the previous album. The latent intellectual restlessness comes forward with greater clarity, even as the harmonic and textural language remains subdued. When ideas about music are jostling around without resolution, it’s better that Opacity makes its complications part of the subject for the listener to grapple with. Hearing it isn’t difficult; understanding it is another matter. Within the various sections of this work, ambient sounds flit in and out of the sound mix behind the musicians, then brief interpolations focus on improvisational percussive sounds. When the ensemble resumes, they’re never quite the same as before, with pitched sounds falling away to tapping and rustling that mimics the field recordings. It took a while to notice that the recordings themselves are as constructed as the musical material, adding another dimension to the quiet conundrum of what we really hear when we think “real” or “artificial”.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Jakob Heinemann
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