Boring Like A Drill.

I’ve been catching up on some recent releases by Catherine Lamb, who continues to beguile and mystify in turn. Curva Triangulus [Another Timbre] is the sole work on the latest album, a thirty-five minute octet played most gracefully by Ensemble Proton. This is an outstanding work from Lamb, imbued with a warmth and respiration that her music typically doesn’t like to display on the surface despite its construction being worked out with equal thoroughness. It is, as always, composed for a form of just intonation, combining harmonics and overtones of varying complexity to create a spectral sound; but in this instance any semblance of an unfolding process is obscured by recurring cadences, wandering melodic lines and alternation of contrasting instrumental groups, textures and registers. Without drawing attention to itself, it charms with its odd eclecticism, mixing discrete tuning principles into its modal phrases, the modest ensemble harboring exotic instruments both old (triple harp, clarinet d’amore, a reconstructed microtonal arciorgano) and new (contraforte, lupophone). Whether despite this or because of it, the music nonetheless gives an overall impression resembling 18th Century hymn tunes, steady and serene with a little warping at the seams that only reminds you of the sureness of its purpose.

Three works for voices are heard on parallaxis forma [Another Timbre]. Exaudi and the Explore Ensemble give a luminous rendition of color residua, as I heard them play it live last year. The remaining two pieces feature bravura performances by Lotte Betts-Dean: pulse/shade was written for four like voices but here Betts-Dean overdubs herself to form a strangely precise chorus, even as the vocalise is softened by the lack of consonants. The hocketing effect starts to feel a little forced after a while, even as you’re impressed by the halo of resonant tones that suffuse each stuttering phrase, and it seems a smaller work than its length suggests. Perhaps even more impressive and uncanny is Betts-Dean heard solo in parallaxis forma, for voice and ensemble. Explore Ensemble are the musicians again, producing an aura that surrounds and backgrounds Betts-Dean as her voice ascends, sometimes climbing, at others gliding, at times soaring into something beyond normal. Later, the voice has to drop below the singer’s normal range, hinting at the physical demands this music can make while we’re considering the depth of its abstractions. The sound is beautifully captured, the resonance of St Nicholas’ Church at Thames Ditton providing an almost unnatural sheen as it complements the players.

andPlay is a violin and viola duo, the two musicians being Maya Bennardo and Hannah Levinson. They play natural sounds in a natural way, which can be harder than it seems; it can get a little easier when it’s just the two of you listening to each other and the tuning of your strings, getting into the naturally occurring order of harmonics without any external push back towards the conformity of equal temperament. The two works on Translucent Harmonies [Another Timbre] both date from a concert given by the duo in 2018. Lamb’s Prisma Interius VIII makes another appearance here, having been recorded at least once before in an expanded version for recorder and strings with electronic spectral resonance. As a string duet, minus electronics, this “melodic” version reduces harmonic saturation to a bare minimum, with Bennardo and Levinson plotting out a path through just intonation pitches that bleed into each other by association as much as through superimposition. It returns strongly to some elements of Lamb’s music brought out by Johnny Chang’s solo violin plus synthesiser interpretation of Prisma Interius VII, the folkish traces and simplicity of line (not minimal, there’s a difference) stripped of ethereality and artifice, grounded in guttural strings. Kristofer Svensson’s Vid stenmuren blir tanken blomma was composed for andPlay as a companion piece to their concert presentation of Prisma Interius VIII: it’s a longer work that recalls Duk med broderi och bordets kant his solo violin piece also recorded by Bennardo. Also in just intonation, the piece meanders with a roughness and casualness that makes the Lamb piece appear stuffy. Here, the two instruments shadow each other warily, with melody or counterpoint to be more inferred than directly heard from the brief fragments held together by speculative silences. It differs from the solo piece in forsaking the wistfulness and playful approach for a more contemplative traversal of the trail, it’s also about twice as long, so that over the forty minutes Bennardo and Levinson begin to piece together a kind of intuitive continuity that’s more felt than heard.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Catherine Lamb, Kristofer Svensson
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What are the sounds of nature? You think that’s an easy one but then you remember you’ve spent your whole life trying to see what’s in front of your eyes before forgetting to look and replacing what you see with what you’ve learned should be there. It’s harder still for us urbanised folk for whom all contact with nature is mediated in one way or another, before or after the fact. The term “nature” immediately calls up images of pastorals or writhing, quasi-organic forms as seen on the front cover of composer Amy Brandon’s album Lysis (New Focus Recordings). There are eight pieces collected here, mostly short, written between 2018 and 2023, which employ a variety of esoteric techniques to produce music that sounds more excavated than constructed. The album shocks with the opening flute solo microchimerisms, a fleeting vignette in which flautist Sara Constant implausibly hocks up deep aqueous rumbles that evoke the discovery of organisms in a soil sample. The Chartreuse String Trio make threads sound larger than it is, the three instruments drawing upon a wide range of timbres and registers in a piece which exemplifies Brandon’s strange but sophisticated approach to composition. She makes use of microtonality, geometry and rhythmic modulation purely as a means to an end, forgoing any impulse to demonstrate these principles to the listener to focus on producing music that resembles natural phenomena in their manner of operation. Thus threads weaves a counterpoint of irregular, unpitched sounds and complex noises finely differentiated by density and texture, while in the title piece Quatuor Bozzini begin with faint, voiceless string sounds that transform into thick harmonies made of tunings that sound arrived at in the process, rather than decided in advance. Some works definitely use electronics (Intermountainous pits ominous whooshes against Julian Bertino’s retuned 10-string guitar) while others sound like they do, such as the Bozzini’s pairing with Paramirabo and returned keyboards on Tsiyr. Dynamics and intonation are used to ferocious effect, making the music advance and retreat, snapping in and out of focus as though under a zoom lens. The odd one out in this set is the longer and larger Simulacra for cello and orchestra, with soloist Jeffrey Zeigler and Symphony Nova Scotia conducted by Karl Hirzer. The larger forces allow for more dramatic gestures and overt lyricism, but these outbursts are made more effective by sudden, striking gestures whose abruptness and inventiveness make any poignancy feel earned. Brandon’s talent for cutting such moments short also shows her awareness of nature’s indifference in practice.

The Normal Sounds (Moon Glyph) on Lia Kohl’s album aren’t exactly natural but they are real. Each of the seven pop-sized tracks is built out of pairings of field recordings, overlaid with Kohl’s cello and synthesizer ambience. (Ka Baird and Patrick Shiroishi contribute some flute and sax, too.) It has a cool quality throughout, not quite detached, even as it bases each track out of sounds considered at least inadvertent or else straight-up intrusive (alarms, electrical hums); then again, snow sounds are also used, so we can’t really call this a pointed interrogation of modern life. Kohl’s music plays both with and against the found sounds as it best suits her, repurposing for her own needs, leaving the listener to do whatever intellectual work they care to apply in discerning her motives. At times the premise adds more texture than grit, such as occasional distant car horns behind the sax solo (uh huh). Best of all is that the sleeve notes talk about other stuff but never tip you off to the running gag on which the album really is based: Kohl’s choices of keyboard samples and patches are now a greater part of our sonic landscape than the field recordings themselves.

Anthony Vine’s Sound Spring (Kuyin) is a film soundtrack album, but not one that would interest Sony Classical. There is a daxophone, played by Daniel Fishkin, but I don’t think Sound Spring is a horror flick, where this instrument usually seems to find its home. Vine on electric guitar and Fishkin are joined by Maya Bennardo on violin, Will Lang on trombone and Ryan Packard percussion to play along with with field recordings of natural sounds from within, and around the making of, the movie. In its own way, it becomes a reflective documentary, shifting the focus from action on-screen to location and process. As such, the nine tracks do blend into each other in an ambient haze where specific details remain indistinct. Sounds of running water predominate, with faint snippets of conversation occasionally in the background – I feel like this has become something of a trope for audio verité. It is all superbly balanced, with the instruments becoming part of the landscape, playing as much within the natural sounds as over the top of them. I think they should take it as praise that you forget there’s, say, violin and trombone in there.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Amy Brandon, Anthony Vine, Lia Kohl
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Where is the “new” in new music? Some composers work in a style that seems to present something modern, at least on the surface. To what extent is this based on an understanding of the ideas and means of living that are distinct from previous times, and how much of it simply reflects an ear (or an eye) for fashion? Some composers actively try to advance beyond the received idea of concert music, such as Rafał Zapała and his electroacoustic pieces recorded on Futility (Kairos). The blurb describes it as “a provocative album that reimagines the concert experience, fusing music with technology to challenge the traditional performer-audience dynamic”, but then concedes that “this album presents music without interactive layers…. experiencing the full versions is only possible in a live performance”. Neither this nor the “!!! ReadME” file that came with the download push the suggestion that these recordings are alternative versions and thus read more like a disclaimer that we’re not going to hear what this music is really like. No doubt it’s a frustrating situation for Zapała, possibly one that would make a meatier subject for his next project than the gently used concepts presented here. The listener has carte blanche to dismiss the music, as does the composer to dismiss our criticism of it. Members of the Hashtag Ensemble (they’re real) challenge themselves to tricky playing, typically commented on, or guided by, a synthesised voice. Violinist Kamil Staniczek adroitly mimics the intonation of the computer voice in Ablinger-like manner on No Meaning Detected. The voice in these pieces is disappointingly typical of its genre, detached and cynical, superior yet glitched, familiar to everyone through HAL 9000, Max Headroom et al. It rises above the second-remove cyberpunk in certain places with some neat twists in the narrative, such as the title work for the ensemble until the musicians are pressed into some self-conscious acting, and in the final solo (duet?) Scrolling to Zero, where Lilianna Krych plays out a sampler keyboard to fatalistic reductiveness, albeit marred by smug irony. By contrast, Judge Me Again featuring Ania Karpowicz on solo flute with live electronics plays out as a relatively straight and impressively rendered instrumental take-off with deep and crunchy digital processing. The most impressive work is Introverts’ Collective, a piece for ensemble and mobile digital controllers that eschews verbal justifications and presents its cultural dilemma directly, through leading the group into ever-decreasing circles of degenerating loops from which they can only temporarily escape. This one really does seem to touch upon something lurking in today’s polite society, rather than simply assert a received idea. What gives me pause here is that there’s nothing I can hear which suggests how these pieces may come across differently if I heard them live, as intended.

Šalter Ensemble operates on the border between free improvisation and composition (it sez here), so it’s either good or bad that you can guess this from listening to each of the three pieces on their album Tri dela (Bruit Editions). There’s something very much of its time in the way they use a collective approach to composition, in combination with other observed cultural signifiers such as amplification, noise (acoustic and electronic), purported spontaneity and a choppy, quasi-linear approach to time. That last aspect is the main feature of Tomaž Grom’s My Wish Your Command, where rapid changes in texture and material at erratic intervals create the impression of something more controlled than the other two pieces, which each appear to allow a single process to unfold. It’s a late 20th Century conception of modernity – fast, noisy, knowingly irritating, with an increasingly insistent snare drum that steps all over the rest of the group. Interstices / Interferences is jointly credited to Jonas Kocher and Gaudenz Badrutt, both of whom I’ve previously encountered individually (see index). It’s a pointed contrast, with a slow, open texture and varied dynamics. The broad palette of sounds and uncrowded pacing work together to create something ambiguous, if not downright vague, but Šalter maintain a level of energy to sustain momentum and dodge the “listless” tag I’ve used on Kocher’s earlier work, while also perversely working as a composition. The final piece, Elisabeth Harnik’s šum II, is the one that seems most like an improvisation and as such works more as a performance than as a musical statement, with vocalist Irena Z. Tomažin leading the group in a slow crescendo into a loud, impassioned whatever.

Just played Brian Baumbusch’s Polytempo Music (Other Minds) a couple of times and, like with Zapała’s Futility, I’m struggling to hear in the music what’s in the sleeve notes. This is a large, ambitious work for chamber ensemble, ably played by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, which like Futility appears intended to be heard live. Besides the stereo audio version here, there’s also a “virtual reality application” and a phone app (natch) for appreciating the work – it’s immersive, see? I don’t think being immersed would help me as the music rubbed me the wrong way. On the page, it’s technically impressive, with Baumbusch mapping out different tempos and rates for each of the instruments to play through the same material to create multiple polyphonic (and polyrhythmic) textures. Nancarrow and Gamelan are namechecked as expected, as well as minimalism, in its present-day meaning as a synonym for Hollywood. Much of the material is made of simple diatonic arpeggios and ostinati, which makes the performance at least theoretically possible for the ensemble but, even if they nail it as well as they do here (the recording dates imply it’s multitracked), makes for textures with rather threadbare harmony and polyphony, without the rhythmic drive that makes both Nancarrow and repetitive minimal music compelling. The music segues through a dozen movements of different moods, which I assume is the main expressive objective, with the technique a means to an end. If you read the notes and hoped you’d found something to tide over your John McGuire cravings, you’ll be disappointed. Some affecting moments, which seem to be Baumbusch’s true strength, are swamped in reams of aimless roiling for the sake of it. To my ears he’s taken a complex, roundabout route to produce something akin to either John Adams, as a soundtrack for a Virtual Reality app.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Brian Baumbusch, Elisabeth Harnik, Gaudenz Badrutt, Jonas Kocher, Rafał Zapała, Tomaž Grom
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Paolo Griffin’s not as easy to pin down as he first seems. The three pieces on his debut album Supports & Surfaces were recorded in England, Canada and Finland. Each piece shares a common approach to composition, but it’s not the one you immediately think it is. The Purpose of an Empty Room seems simple enough: David Zucchi plays his alto saxophone into a delay loop system, playing two notes slowly in succession, repeating and moving to the next pair, as the texture quickly builds up to a thick but smooth layering of see-sawing harmonies. The inexorable logic of the delay loop is exploited to introduce some more esoteric harmonisation at times, threatening dissonance without hoping to achieve it, or more intriguingly to settle into an uneasy monotony. It all seems pretty familiar, right down to the fade-out. The second piece redirects your attention: Alone, Together is a duet for violin and percussion, sans electronics, played by Aysel Taghi-Zada and Michael Murphy who perform together as Duo Holz. Any logic present in this piece is undetectable, as Taghi-Zada bows isolated phrases of sundry durations in white-key modes with an unsteady but even tread, accented by occasional harmonics. Murphy plays in a slower and looser style on bells and small gongs, not quite precise in pitch, creating a quasi-accidental counterpoint to the melody. The two create intrigue simply by their presence together, then entrench that mystification by wending back and forth in no particular direction in no particular hurry to achieve nothing more than take up over half an hour of your time. Having lifted the album sequence above the ordinary, the final piece Madrigal redoubles by returning to the solo-plus-delay loop method, but this time around creating a completely different impression. Countertenor David Hackston sings a sombre melody that evolves through a series of transformations, with occasional pitch-bends up or down which render the piece more strange and affecting, while also tempting the listener to latch onto them as reference points while Hackston’s voice expands through an ever-growing hall of mirrors. The sax piece used loops as a means of establishing stability, but in Madrigal the loops create uncertainty, with no neat patterning to the uncanny voice. Also, Madrigal ends, suddenly. The three are united by Griffin’s conception of musical slack (pace Ivan Stang) as music “that doesn’t really go anywhere but doesn’t necessarily stay in one place” may therefore ensure it never achieves a definitive state of completion. If you get this on CD the first and last tracks are abbreviated: presumably the first fades out early and the third fades in late. Alone, Together must be heard in full.

The new Sawyer Editions release of Eden Lonsdale’s music shows marked differences from his earlier collection on Another Timbre, even though the pieces heard here were all written around the same time. The common element to the three compositions on ricercari for rainy days is the harp, played by Cara Dawson and accompanied by the ensemble red panel. The use of electronics and reverberation heard on the previous album are here restricted to the opening piece, falling asleep on an airplane, in which lever harp, cello, percussion and electronics are gradually sublimated into a hazy wash of evocative ambience. For the title work, the role of electronics is effectively substituted by harmonium, which binds together the fragile playing of the other instruments into a cohesive, denser sound, yet also suddenly swells into loud drones that drown out the smaller details to create thick, roiling textures. The process seems to invert itself in cycles/emptiness: a slow melody on the harp repeats itself, with harmonic colouration from cello and harmonium evoking low brass and high winds. The piece slows down and breaks apart into isolated sounds, with the increasing presence of silence, before gradually rebuilding itself into a quietly flowing continuum. It seems to function as a counterpart to Alone, Together.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Eden Lonsdale, Paolo Griffin
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There’s a counterpart to those composed drones I was talking about last week, in improvisation when musicians make a piece out of sounds that remain mostly static, where development or progress is more a function of entropy than of a chosen direction. The success or failure of such music hinges upon the musician being aware of the difference between making a sound and digging deeper into it to uncover and identify unique details in the complex that makes up what on first appearance was a simple sonic unit. It can often resemble a process of following your nose, all the better to understand where you already are. Adam Pultz’s two bass pieces on his album Wade (Carrier) seem to take this approach, but he cleverly uses an external impetus to force his hand in a series of small but regular adjustments. In the title piece he bows amplified double-bass in long, regular drones which are further activated through a feedback mechanism; the substance changes more than it develops or accumulates. Some digital processing comes into play and field recordings gradually intrude, opening up the claustrophobic space with sounds that first resemble further electroacoustic enhancements before emerging as a distinct entity. In the second, shorter work the feedback-driven bass sounds more like an outright electric instrument, with a denser texture and higher level of energy. Analyzing each element, Pultz’s obstinate playing could be expected to bog everything down but his adept use of technology makes the whole more than the sum of its parts.

I’ve been listening repeatedly to Explore Ensemble’s superb album from last year, Perfect Offering (Huddersfield Contemporary), with works by Cassandra Miller, Lisa Illean, Lawrence Dunn and Rebecca Saunders. The last name seems like the odd one out, but Explore’s performance of murmurs is freighted with a similar sense of fragile repose, at once relaxed and coiled for action. I did not expect to get that same feeling from a set of improv duets on contrabass clarinet and percussion recorded one day in 2020 with a Spooky Scary Skeleton on the cover, but here we are: pianissimo etc (Tripticks Tapes) pairs John McCowen (former) and Carlo Costa (latter) on three untitled tracks, with McCowen staying still as possible while releasing a iridescent tide of overtones and harmonics while Costa underlines the clarinet’s fundamentals with bass drum. With each piece the clarinet recedes a little further, the low pulses from the first track becoming smoother harmonics seasoned with small gongs and high friction sounds, before finally being subsumed into a complex but still transparent texture of breaths, buzzing and reverberations. I wish more compositions were as lucid as these three tracks.

Phicus is a trio of Ferran Fages on electric guitar, Àlex Reviriego, double bass and Vasco Trilla on drums and percussion. Their album Ni (Tripticks again) is, uh, kind of an improvisation – it depends on how you look at it, but really it all keeps coming back to improvisation. To break it down: Phicus play live improvisations, Covid puts a crimp in their practice, the group gets a recording date, they’re conscious they lack time to get their intuitive chops back together, Reviriego writes a composition “trying to recontextualize and develop further” their musical vocabulary as a counter-intuitive way of stimulating their creativity, the trio take it away in other directions to move beyond consolidation of what they have already achieved. It worked. In Ni they improvise with elevated economy of action and telepathic coordination, making an extended piece which never loses momentum even as it appears to stay still. Reflective silences mark changes in approach and signal structural divisions. Its effect as a composition comes from the absence of any spare moments when you hear a process working itself out, as each new detail arrives as though fully integrated into the overall form. A long strange journey which leaves a strong overall impression, the incidents along the way still catch by surprise after repeated hearings.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Adam Pultz, Carlo Costa, John McCowen, Phicus
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Do we even know what we mean anymore when we talk about drones? I seem to remember a definition given by Robert Ashley many years ago which turned away from descriptions of surface appearance to consider the internal mechanism; the exact details have slipped my mind and I’m not going to look them up now but the idea that stuck in my mind is that drone is a form of music in which the passage of time is experienced on its own terms. In popular and artsy genres, working with the awareness of this concept appear to be broadly assimilated into most modern musical thinking – you can work with it or against it, but it’s there.

Does it make sense to call the three pieces in Mara Winter’s The Ear And The Eye: Music For Four Renaissance Flutes (self-released) drones? Heard casually, each of the three rebuffs the ear with long tones held in apparent stasis. Winter and her colleagues in the Phaedrus quartet make the most of the thickened tones of their Renaissance flutes. She has done a similar thing before with Rise, follow, her duet for contrabass Renaissance flutes, but where the earlier work made use of resonant space and more overt interactions between the performers, the three new pieces use a more thoroughly research and composed approach. Closer listening reveals each piece to be a complex essay in timbre related to pitch and dynamics: Hyacinth harmonises its way through consonances and microtonal dissonances through overlapping pitches which highlight the difference in timbre between each instrument. Incarnadine moves the emphasis away from change in pitch to change in dynamics, exploiting the variations in colouration available without needing to move between registers. Smaragd focuses on sonority, expanding and contracting the pitch space between the instruments to reveal variances in intonation and clarity or complexity of tone. What may be taken for drones are really being used as a vehicle to express the flutes’ relationship between pitch and timbre, a concept made audible. Winter composed her pieces based on “historical sources which described color proportions analogous to the ratios of tonal musical intervals” and created a notation that used watercolours to convey variances in intonation. The colour analogy is studied here and applied to practice to produce ever more sophisticated manifestations of the initially observed phenomenon.

There’s a similar approach to material in Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard’s Colliding Bubbles (surface tension and release), a composition for string and harmonica quartet. Again, a drone, but in service of a more elaborate conceit. Løkkegaard draws upon the behaviours of bubbles in collision, how the forces at work may cause fluctuations in surface tension, or ruptures in which tension is released. That sounds like a principle behind a Xenakis piece, but Løkkegaard’s method and material are very different. It may not even be a method as such, more of a philosophical or poetic guide without seeking a direct analogy in what or how the musicians play; despite this, however, the piece expresses its principle through fundamental activity rather than through interpretation. String quartet and harmonica quartet are to be, one and the same: here, Quatuor Bozzini follow the composer’s instructions to play their usual instruments while also playing harmonicas. Both involve slow, constant tones, simultaneous throughout, presenting a challenge for the musicians. The Bozzinis can maintain diaphanous harmonies indefinitely, sure, but those even tones become more fraught when they’re also required to blow with a similar lightness. Despite the references to bursting bubbles, there’s nothing explosive here, just the constant unsteady and fragile balance between pitch and timbre as the colouration of the two sets of instruments clash and the pitch and force of each note wavers minutely. The piece begins in the high register, slowly descending somewhat lower before finding a sort of resolution, with the transition to a lower register bringing its own challenges in maintaining tone, even as the pitch seems to settle. Both here and with the Winter album, there’s a tension at work which drives the music, with a seemingly implacable surface that reveals itself to be made up of many softer strokes in combination.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Mara Winter, Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard
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I’ve been listening to the latest batch of releases from Kory Reeder’s Sawyer Editions label. Bodies of Water presents two instrumental trios by Sarah Hennies which give further insight into her unusual way of mixing up expressive subjectivity with rigorous formality. The two pieces here employ both of these tendencies at once to exploit the tension between the emotive and the impassive. Lake for violin, percussion and piano proceeds in short sections of repeating units with off-kilter melodic cells that comply with a tendency to settle into new forms of stasis, while the longer Abscission for violin, cello and guitar extends and propagates small amounts of material in which all momentum would appear to be exhausted. In both works, the unassuming material is reiterated and varied in ways that give the appearance of following a strict process, yet the only logic that appears to be at work here is that of intuitively feeling a way through what has already been given. As such, each piece develops through neither building up nor breaking down, but always suggesting that either outcome may be possible if they were not averted by Hennies’ compositional strategies. Each piece taps into a selection of musical ideas from the past fifty years to create a synthesis reminiscent of all of them without being reducible to one specific reference. The musicians (violinist Ilana Waniuk and Duo Refracta, Arcana New Music Ensemble) are steadfast but refuse to be misled into pursuing soulless precision, enhancing the experience of music that alternately takes and gives.

Georgia Denham is new to me. Her collection of chamber pieces with love is a modest thirty-nine minutes long, which along with the lowercase titles seems to match the deliberately understated nature of her music. No audible processes or method here: emotion is at the forefront, with five pieces that are expressive and vulnerable to interpretations and explanations. Denham’s way of conveying emotion is unusual, manifesting as subdued melodic lines and dynamics, in many cases with melody apparent more through inference of voice leading and texture, with the line itself rendered almost flat. Where this method is more typically expected as an evocation of quiescence, Denham manages to present it as though it were constraining an excess of emotion into a coherent form. The piano quintet subject of breathing briefly surges, but only so far, for the ensemble to unite in a profound sonority that needs no lyrical outpouring laid on top of it. The most overt lyricism comes in the pair of violin-viola duets, if bells could sing and if bells could weep, yet even in the former a gentle melancholy reins in exuberance, while in the latter it precludes despair. (To be clear, I instinctively approve of this restraint as it dignifies emotion with classical timelessness.) The final work, to gwen, with love is for piano and string trio and the only work here that barely exceeds ten minutes’ duration. It feels the most complete work here, in the way that it takes up a melodic fragment for contemplation, essaying possible continuations before breaking off and starting over. Somehow Denham makes this feel natural and tender, without seeming timid. It also owes a lot to the sensitive performances from the various ensembles here (the pieces were recorded in the UK and Canada), who know how to apply melancholy in all its shades.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Georgia Denham, Sarah Hennies
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I’ve got some catching up to do after my break. Composer Kory Reeder has just issued another five albums on his Sawyer Editions imprint – I’ll get to these shortly – but this time all feature other composers. Two of his own works appear on Everywhere The Truth Rushes In, released this month on Kuyin. The title work is a string quartet, composed in 2021, which exemplifies Reeder’s preoccupation with composing low contrast music, placing full trust in the quality of his material while preferring not to impress that quality upon the listener through changes in texture or dynamics. The piece can live or die upon your attentiveness, to be either experienced closely from moment to moment or else retreating into an overall impression without recollection of details. The quartet itself plays a long sequence of chords, softly, in unison, throughout – one after another in a manner which would seem both too simple to bother with and too tricky to make it work right. Reeder’s technique is deceptively uniform, appearing to be constant while slipping in an occasional prolonged chord, a small gap, a cadence in an unexpected context. The companion work is The Way I Saw Them Turning, a 2022 piece for voice, flute, viola and piano. Nicole Barbeau is the singer (the musicians here are all local to Reeder’s base in Texas), but you’ll have to crank up the volume knob to hear her. While the string quartet is soft, this piece is mastered at a level barely above a whisper. Listen close and you find both more and less than background music. Barbeau sings a text by Reeder; it’s terse. The terseness is matched by the accompanying instruments, creating a tension with the soft dynamics, but then again everything is spaced out with enough slowness to create a piece that’s skeletal in structure and appearance, at odds with the apparent languor of its progress. You will have to pump it to notice this, though.

Maybe I’m getting the hang of it. Maybe he’s developed his curious, protean animated notation to the point where it directs the listener’s ears as effectively as it does the musicians’ gestures. Maybe it’s the editing and studio enhancements. Maybe it’s down to the use of conventional instruments. Probably all three but I’m leaning towards that last one being the main reason I can get into Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson’s Stífluhringurinn more than the earlier pieces I’ve heard. Gunnarsson’s compositions require ensembles to interpret a digitally animated score that can change on the fly, meaning that the texture and overall shape of the piece can be elusive, with nothing settled until the performance is done. Other works I’ve heard have been scored for homemade instruments, toys and assorted objects which further inhibit comprehension that relates to any existing model. The found objects and harmonicas are still present in Stífluhringurinn, but appear as seasoning for the French horn, clarinet, cello etc. The more refined instruments are more versatile, while an orchestra of bottles and bird-calls offers a narrower palette of sounds and shifts the genre away from composition and towards sound sculpture. Stífluhringurinn was composed in 2019 for the Caput Ensemble, who play it here as a group of thirteen musicians. The two movements, or instances, of the piece contrast between short, percussive sounds and extended tones, with the emphasis moving from one to the other in the two versions heard here. It’s a living, mercurial work in which the independent forces compete or coexist to create a gestalt form that exists in the listener’s mind, ephemeral but indelible. Caput handle their instruments well, both the familiar and the strange, using extended techniques at times to blur the distinction between the two. It may be a paradox that the success of this recording exists through the artifice behind it, as Covid restrictions required the piece to be recorded in small batches, with an additional layer of interpretation given when the smaller groups were overlaid and edited together. The chance to enhance details through this method suggests that I may have found the earlier recorded pieces to be easier to perceive when heard in a live performance. In any case, if you were me, you’d start with this record and work backwards to best appreciate what Gunnarsson is doing. The album is a digital download but also available in a vinyl edition, including a small series of unique detourned album covers which, wonderfully, don’t bother with new vinyl and just include a download code with the LP that originally came in the sleeve, a move I heartily endorse.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson, Kory Reeder
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Back from mental vacation, lots of catching up to do.

Filed under: Music, Reviews, Stupidity by Ben.H

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It’s been eight years since I first heard Lisa Illean’s chamber orchestra piece Land’s End, in a concert with Brett Dean conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra. At the time I wondered which way her music would develop; whether her use of microtonality and some of the more reaching aspects of spectralism would be the basis for further exploration, or fade away as a youthful affectation to distinguish her emerging voice from other composers working in a similar atmospheric vein. She has been steadily building up a body of work, largely in the UK, including a Proms chamber premiere. NMC Recordings has now produced a portrait album dedicated to her work, arcing, stilling, bending, gathering, which provides an opportunity to take stock.

Land’s End is here, performed by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Robertson. It seems crisper than the slightly woozy rendition at the BBC, making the orchestra sound smaller in force but with greater clarity of detail as it picks out the changes in contrasting instrumental colours as much as the arpeggios in just intonation. The other three works are more recent, all from the 2020s and deal with smaller groupings of musicians. Juliet Fraser returns to sing A through-grown earth, previously heard on record as a work for soprano and pre-recorded electronics. The piece has since been revised to add a chamber ensemble of five players, in this instance the Explore Ensemble. Fraser sings lines by Gerard Manley Hopkins set with unusual slowness, as though time has been suspended. Illean holds the opening moment for as long as possible, letting it rise and fall out of almost nothing before settling onto a single pitch. The otherworldly atmosphere of its earlier incarnation is compounded here by the contrast with the acoustic instruments disturbing the serenity of the sampled instruments, augmenting the work with more complex timbral and harmonic colour. Both Explore and Fraser provide a resolute calm that contains these tensions without erasing them, and Fraser’s singing is more direct with less overt ornamentation. The newer version lingers and pauses in more places, adding breathing space.

Hearing this in its first incarnation I suggested that Illean’s music sounded delicate and “occasionally threatened to retreat into preciousness”. As the changes to A through-grown earth indicate, that risk has been deftly avoided. Microtonality and electronics (live or pre-recorded) are used skilfully in the two other pieces heard here, woven unobtrusively into the fabric. Tiding II (silentium) is a trio for the percussion-piano duo of George Barton and Siwan Rhys, with David Zucchi on clarinet*, a piece which brings Illean’s talent for mixing instruments to the forefront. A pensive soliloquy for piano provides the focal point as a recognisable sound, while various washes of harmonics and overtones ebb and flow against it. The other sounds are a complex of electronic sustain, held clarinet* pitches and gongs with other small percussive sounds rolled or struck, including the piano strings, with all three musicians balancing each other to form an organic whole. The matter of the music is wonderfully expressive, with the technical ingenuity feeling like a natural means for conveying its content. The piece is matched by the title work: arcing, stilling, bending, gathering is a 2022 composition for piano, string ensemble and pre-recorded sounds played again by the Explore Ensemble. It’s a supremely beautiful quasi-concerto, with a more active piano part prone to outbursts of animated lyricism, countered by brooding moments of stillness and bowed chords on high strings that push and pull against the piece’s progress. At times the strings play on harmonics over the piano’s notes, while alien elements of just intonation and extended overtones in the electronic part quietly underpaint the scene with ghostly after-images. Explore make the most of this uncanny, nameless exoticism that lurks beneath the surface beauty. It’s a bold, accomplished composition that delivers on the promise first offered by Land’s End.

* It sez here. The tone suggests soprano sax, but that might be the electronic processing.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Lisa Illean
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The latest Music We’d Like To Hear this weekend was a de facto launch for Scott McLaughlin’s album we are environments for each other, with the second half of the programme being a live performance of we are environments for each other [trio] by violinist Mira Benjamin and pianist Zubin Kanga. I’ve discussed the piece before, but experiencing it live reminds you that music heard purely as sound is a separate phenomenon from witnessing it being played. Benjamin, with a five-string electric violin, picks out tones to bow softly which either enhance or interfere with the pitch of the piano strings picked out by Kanga with a magnetic resonator. Kanga shifts the electromagnetic pickup to another string in response, leaving Benjamin to choose whether or not to stay on her pitch or move to another note. Heard live, the delicate exchange between the two musicians becomes clearer – in particular, their good humour as they trade pitches and plot their next counter-move against each other. It also shows how the piece depends on each musician knowing their instrument inside-out: literally, in Kanga’s case, as the keyboard is never touched, all activity focused on the selection of strings. With amplified violin, Benjamin’s own physical input is also minimal. Conversely, the audience’s attention becomes so captivated by the performers that it becomes harder to notice the subtle changes in pitch and timbre that make the musical substance of the piece (I may be speaking for myself here as I happened to be seated close to the action). The performance was considerably longer than the recorded version, partly as the live setting supports the slower unfolding of events, but it also helped in allowing me to settle in and start properly hearing what was being played.

The first half was a new composition by Rie Nakajima titled indecisive and perhaps, although she qualified this by saying it was “not really a composition, rather a situation”. Nakajima was working with a group of musicians with highly developed skills in improvisation – Billy Steiger, Marie Roux, Pierre Berthet and Angharad Davies – and allowed them to do pretty much as they pleased on the tacit understanding that they each shared a fine sense of responsibility and wouldn’t step all over each other. In a way, the piece was a social system like McLaughlin’s, only without set coordinates but with collective anonymisation. Nakajima is also a sculptor, with the concert coinciding with a solo exhibition of her work. Violins were present, but heard only occasionally and faintly: most sounds came from small objects or lightweight kinetic devices made by Nakajima, whose electric motors caused erratic soft noise. There was a lot of high-level craft on display in the use of sounds by the musicians as they moved around the space for the performance. It’s not because the sounds were all gentle, or the machines were clever in an almost whimsical way (an open umbrella with motorised wires irregularly tapping on the canopy), but this isn’t the first time I’ve come away from a Nakajima wishing for something more besides pleasant sounds. Perhaps I’m misinterpreting agnosticism over whether or not a piece should have a point and mistaking it for complacency.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Rie Nakajima, Scott McLaughlin
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The second release under Greyfade’s new Folio book/music imprint continues in the same vein as last month’s treatment of Kenneth Kirschner’s July 8, 2017. Joseph Branciforte has made an acoustic transcription of another electronic work, this time an arrangement of Taylor Deupree’s 2003 album Sti.ll. I have not heard the original, but the four pieces here display incredible craft and ingenuity in embodying the uncanny sheen of electronic sounds while also adding the depth and microcosmic details that distinguish acoustic music. Taking Branciforte’s transmutation as the stand-alone work without wider reference, it’s a fascinating set of four compositions that both mesmerise and stimulate, working with intriguing sounds outside the usual expectations of chamber music.

Branciforte and Deupree themselves play percussion, with cellist Christopher Gross returning from the Kirschner album. For the opening piece, Snow/Sand, Madison Greenstone overdubs clarinets (B-flat, bass and contrabass) on top of cello, vibraphone, bells, snare drums and paper. The compositions dwell on small gestures, finding a particular sonority and feeling their way deeper inside, drifting as needed but moving as little as possible besides where the initial sound leads them. The smooth, rich sound of the combined clarinets are filled out with background tones from the tuned percussion and cello, with small flickering disturbances and articulations provided by faint snaps and clicks, plosive reed notes and struck cello strings mimicking the crackles and glitches used to embellish the surface of modern electronica. Recur changes to a busier texture, more overt in its evocation of skipping, glitching samples, filled with small percussion sounds over stuttering phrases on Gross’s cello, Laura Cocks playing flute and Sam Minaie double bass, with Ben Monder’s acoustic guitar adding an equal mix of pitched sounds and chattering strings. Amazingly, the last two pieces use even simpler instrumentation. Temper features Greenstone alone, overdubbing clarinets into overlapping irregular loops that never quite resolve, upset by recurring guttural tutting and underlined by faint, gritty static from a shaker. There are multiple tensions to propel this music beyond simple ambience: between the smooth sounds and the ruffled surface, the placid stasis and the restless reiterations and, in this version, between organically acoustic sounds and those which duplicate electronic circuitry, such as the steady ECG bleeps heard faintly in the background. In the final piece, Stil., Branciforte performs trills and rolls on vibraphone and bass drum to produce deep but transparent layers of sound that seem greater than the sum of their parts. As I can’t make comparisons I’ll spare you a disquisition on the implications of originals and simulacra, just to reiterate that it lulls and disturbs at once. The accompanying book promises to give analysis of the composition process and re-composition for acoustic purposes, much in the manner of the previous Kirschner book. The details should be interesting, given that this appears to be a more complex job of arrangement, blending acoustic instruments to mirror electronics sounds apart from the typical MIDI samples from the previous release. It’s evidently the outcome of years of collaboration.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Joseph Branciforte, Taylor Deupree
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It took me ages to hear these two albums. I mean, I’d listened to them, repeatedly, but I’d never latched on to a true idea about what was going on. It all seemed too simple: each piece seemed alike, an homogeneous chorale for strings, each presented as a monadic block of sound with fairly uncluttered tonality. What’s the big deal? I couldn’t get past this initial impression. Marco Baldini’s background is in improvisation; he’s recently turned to composition. Everything here was written between 2021 and 2023. Inspiration was found in 16th Century Italian music, which tracks with the approach to polyphony, although Baldini slows it all down and smooths it out as though taking a small excerpt and time-stretching it for close examination. He has thus produced a series of tableaux, or panels, each self-contained yet interchangeable, which may be presented singly or in groups to varying effect. It’s not a fair or accurate comparison, but hearing them is a little like seeing Morandi’s still lifes at first: the apparent undifferentiated simplicity of surfaces invites an initially dismissive response, yet each piece begins to compel closer attention merely by its presence. As with other small things blown up large, they may be perceived as little more than background and largely ignored, or draw one into a labyrinth of subtle details. Heard in different situations, these same pieces have sounded emotive at one time and cold another, at times obvious, at others inscrutable. The two albums here each feature seven pieces and from this basis it seems Baldini prefers darker-hued sounds. Vesperi, recorded in Florence, combines cellos and double basses, sometimes with added low marimba for an added bass hum. The ensemble (Niccolò Curradi, Michele Lanzini, Maurizio Constantini, Amedeo Verniani, Francesco Toninelli, conducted by Luisa Santacesaria) produce tidal sounds, surging with calm but implacable movement. Maniera, recorded in England with members of Apartment House, is lighter, shifting register to violins and viola with cello, but even here a few pieces also feature bass. Apartment House’s approach is a little different, making the sustained chords a little more friable, presumably as the higher pitches would come across as too strident. It’s all starting to fascinate me, even though I still can’t identify one piece from another. Just checking, Corteccia – a quartet for cellos and basses – does indeed break into short phrases over its brief duration. Malkosh is an outlier, with pizzicato double bass over low cello and marimba tremolo. Others reveal their characters over time, hinting at stoicism, turbulence, muted confessional.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Marco Baldini
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There’s a paradoxical tension at work in the best of slow, quiet music. While appearing faint and fragile, it maintains resilience through the integrity of its structure, each element supporting the others without reliance on a mass of sonorous substance. The progress made through such a piece from beginning to end may be surefooted even if it appears to be intuitive, or it may be more precarious. The three pieces collected on Nomi Epstein’s album shades suggest a turn in her compositional ideas from the use of pre-mapped patterns which are less heard than felt to plans which are less certain and subject to change. The oldest piece here is Sextet from 2011, which bears the marks of its making most clearly. Epstein’s collaboration with the musicians from whom she wrote the piece resulted in a series of drawings, each made of short lines hastily drawn on top of each other; these were transcribed into sound, producing a seemingly endless succession of short phrases, each consisting of a single sound produced by multiple instruments. Base pitch, harmonisation and instrumentation may vary from one to the next, with the acts of writing, performing and listening each becoming a resource for contemplation. The musicians of the Apartment House ensemble take up the role of interpreters for this recording, bringing an equally fine level of sensitivity to each sound, in part and whole. The 2019 piece sounds (for Berlin) takes a more flexible approach to organising materials and greatly expands the timbral and textural range, even as the number of musicians heard here is reduced to four. The recording, made in Berlin with Christian Kesten (voice), Michiko Ogawa (clarinet), Miako Klein (violin) and Joseph Houston (piano), was the result of a lengthy period of Epstein working and rehearsing with the musicians. The generous time in development can be heard in the exquisitely colourful playing, balanced by exceptional responsiveness and judicious timing between each player. At times, it seems almost as though field recordings are being used, when scrabbling over the violin body, rattling on muted piano keys, whistling and rasping breath sounds are introduced, each appearing suddenly, sounding like natural phenomena far removed from those of the instruments. Kesten sings wordlessly, providing timbral colour at first before unexpectedly emerging into the foreground for some brief moments. The new piece here is shades, a string quartet written for Apartment House last year for this recording. Epstein has used a more open structure here, with the musicians engaged in mutual listening in a way that determines timing as much as timbral balance. It makes the piece more volatile than her earlier works, with less certainty for the listener about where it may ultimately lead. Glissandi are used frequently in some places, eschewed in others, with movement from one to the other never regularly defined. It makes the overall form of the piece more differentiated and changeable than the earlier work, producing greater complexity in the shape and opening up variety in expressiveness which would normally be achieved through resorting to romanticism or other allusions to literature or the theatre.

There is indeed a piece called Distant Music on the new Paul Paccione album Distant Musics, but the title carries an alternate meaning. The five pieces here have much in common with those by other composers working with the slow and quiet these days. What sets them apart on initial hearing is that Paccione is aware of how tenuous the presence of the slow and quiet can be. The opening piece, Exit Music, is a string trio in which single notes are layered over each other in plaintive harmonies until everything recedes to just one pitch whose prolonged persistence implies the piece is ready to peter out before finally regaining some momentum. The trio here (Mira Benjamin, Bridget Carey, Anton Lukoszevieze) play without vibrato in a way that manages to suggest the purest of tones in places while still imparting subtle coloration from moment to moment. While listening to other small ensemble pieces like Gridwork and the aforesaid Distant Music I started to wonder if it would be lazy of me to say it resembled Morton Feldman’s music from the mid 1960s, but then I remembered just when Paccione wrote this stuff. The earliest piece here is from 1980, the latest from 1990: truly music from another world. In fact Paccione has cited Feldman pieces from the mid-60s as an important influence, but this is a rare example of music that is now being heard as new today where making a Feldman reference is directly pertinent. While the style is familiar to us now, Paccione’s compositions were made at a time where he was required to create a context largely on his own. Influences can be observed: Paccione studied with Harley Gaber (apparently his only student) and listening to Benjamin, Chihiro Ono, Amalia Young and Angharad Davies play Violin it’s hard not to hear Gaber in the striated keening of bowed strings with metal mutes. Subsequent work with Kenneth Gaburo and William Hibbard are cited as formational experiences behind the compositions heard here. Lest you get the impression he’s some West Coast Feldman, minimalism via denatured Zen, I’ll remind you there’s more overt rigor in Paccione’s work: Gridwork has similar brooding, introverted harmonies but precision in timing and clear-cut phrasing, while Distant Music employs a broader palette and cleaner counterpoint. Finally, Nancy Ruffer and Emma Williams play the 1983 flute duet Still Life, hovering between playful and pedantic as they dip in and out of an underlying regular pulse to ring the changes on a gamut of notes, until you suspect they aren’t permutations at all, then suspect it’s a permutation too complex for you to grasp. Or it’s an endless compound melody.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Nomi Epstein, Paul Paccione
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Do not try to think too much about what you’re hearing when listening to El Jardín de las Matemáticas (The Garden of Mathematics); you’ll end up tying yourself into intellectual knots while trying to rationalise why you’re digging it, which is part of the point. The album is a collaboration between Alvaro Daguer, Pablo Picco, Tomás Salvatierra and Mark Harwood, making a loose alliance between Chile, Argentina, Australia and Germany with no stated motivation or justification, leaving the implication that they just wanted to make music together, of some kind. It starts off sounding crude, like amateurish outsider art, but the types of sounds being used in the thudding processional are incongruously sophisticated. The instrumentation is a wilfully eclectic mix of South American, Oriental and Western with electronics added to the folklore, ensuring that from whichever viewpoint the music may be considered as Exotica. The sound of unfamiliar instruments triggers the reflexive thought that we should approach this at least partially as anthropology, which sits uneasily with the perception that the cultural references here are being made up on the fly (it could be heard as psychedelia, but not as Tropicália). It doesn’t take long for it to stop sounding crude, but it reserves the right to regress whenever the mood takes. Some of the tracks are downright lyrical, with added prettiness of nature recordings, while others verge on the ritualistic (a good covering term when you don’t understand the purpose). In all this effortless confusion, the music carries on the work left off by Kagel, an Argentinian composer all too aware of the slipperiness between centre and periphery, wrestling with unknown instruments and asking difficult questions about authenticity and cultural transmission, realising the two are fundamentally incompatible. Reading the fine print, the album appears to have been created in stages, being recorded in one country then forwarded to the next for reworking, further complicating any lurking agenda. As I suggested, it’s only difficult if you start thinking about it, otherwise you can just enjoy the cruise.

Jardín de las Matemáticas has been released by Penultimate Press, who have also put out C​.​D., the new album by Ralf Wehowsky under his RLW alias. It’s a pair of large works (40 and 50 minutes) dealing with the subject of Colonia Dignidad, a German evangelical cult settled in Chile in the 1960s. In their remote compound, cut off from the wider world, the inevitable squalid crimes and atrocities took place, with the added twist of the knife coming from their collaboration with the Pinochet regime and the German diplomatic officials reluctant to probe beyond the idyllic German facade the cult leaders portrayed. RLW’s collages are never dense in texture but he heavily works the materials and approach for his subject, making each sprawling soundscape an indirect picking over of the colony’s legacy (victims still seeking justice, the compound itself now a tourist resort). When speech is audible, it’s heavily processed to push it past intelligibility, regardless of your language comprehension. Much of the material appears in the form of overlaid improvised melodies realised on MIDI instrument patches, adding another distancing layer. The first piece (Reue?) draws inspiration from the contradictory testimonies of those involved in the colony, the second (Knochenstückchen) focuses on the repressive and paranoid atmosphere of the place. Both are indistinct in their treatment of the matter, shifting focus away from the sensational and exploitative to brood upon the collapse of values and what this may mean in terms of music. While much collage is geared towards the didactic, C​.​D. stays unresolved, turning over fragments of bad memories that many would rather had been forgotten.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: El Jardín de las Matemáticas, Ralf Wehowsky, RLW
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