I’ve been writing up the new batch of releases by All That Dust, who had their launch gig on the weekend. Sadly, Georgia Rodgers had to cancel at the last minute, but cellist Séverine Ballon remained to play a Bach suite for the punters. The two were originally to play Rodgers’ Late lines, an electroacoustic duet. The cellist’s bowing is manipulated through digital granular synthesis, but the layering and transformation is directed much like Scelsi’s manipulation of musical notes, always focusing ever inward, drawing closer to the source to open up new realms of perception. There are no Scelsi-like spiritual claims made for this music, leaving the listener free to explore a heightened awareness of the sensory aspects of sound. All That Dust has made binaural recordings of Late lines and a similar work, A to B for solo percussionist with electronics as a download release.
In A to B, Rodgers works with Serge Vuille on snare drums and cymbals, turning steady rhythms into pulses of complex sound verging on white noise, yet constantly taking on new colourations. The effect of both pieces suggests the aural equivalent of monochrome paintings with rigorously worked surfaces of multiple layers, revealing unexpected but elusive colours and shapes. The sleeve notes invoke Robert Irwin, whose work engages space more than surface, but close listening to these recordings on headphones opens up that dimension as well. (Late lines began as an installation.) At the same time, the subject of each piece is the physical aspect of musical performance: contact between surfaces, as though seen on a microscopic level, with even the simplest interaction made up of multiple events.
New things were learned at the launch gig. My memory has and has not been playing tricks on me when hearing Cassandra Miller’s vocal music. Juliet Fraser’s performance of Tracery: Lazy, Rocking was truly ephemeral, you strained to hear and understand and then it was gone. These pieces come out differently every time, with the performance of the Tracery pieces in particular clearly an act of listening, reflection and meditation on the moment with which the singer is presented.
The new Kontakte (an excerpt played in 4-speaker surround sound) sounds great even when played in a bar. The musicians’ discussion of their approach reminded me that, for all the emphasis I put on how distinct the instruments sound here, they still blend and emerge from the electronic sounds and are distinctly embedded in the sonic space. In many performances of the work it so often sounds like musicians and tape are simply playing in parallel.
We also heard Plus-Minus Ensemble give the second performance of Tim Parkinson’s String Quartet 2019 which premiered a few days earlier in Reading – home of the Samuel Beckett archive, of course. The transcendentalists had the Unanswered Question; 2019 has the “Nobody:”, “Literally No One:” meme. String Quartet 2019 is a simple statement, made quietly and sincerely, with no evident prompting for its existence and no apparent response expected. Each phrase is followed by another, a story that twists but never turns, never hinting how this might all end. In a way, it doesn’t, really. There is some call and response, but much of the time the quartet plays in rhythmic unison, with harmonies kept thin. The first violinist takes up the melody alone, and then nothing happens. “Make sense who may.”