Boring Like A Drill.

In these days of self-isloation I keep getting told that teleconfernced gigs held over Zoom are becoming a thing, only to be subsequently told that they’re not really a thing because the time-lag between participants makes coordinating the music impossible. I don’t know what technology was in play for this Telematic Concert from ten years ago, but synchronisation is neither a technical nor aesthetic issue. It’s an improvised duet between sometime collaborators Pauline Oliveros in New York and Reynols guitarist Alan Courtis “piped in digitally from Buenos Aires”. The two drag out sheets of sound between them with amped-up accordion and guitar respectively, each modifying their instruments until it can be hard to distinguish one from the other. When they do play acoustically recongisable sounds – never at the same time – their signal choice of sounds is instructive. Oliveros blasts a klaxon-like drone that jars with everything around it. Courtis’ feedback howls like Robert Fripp locked in a death-plunge with a Balrog. Whenever the situation threatens to settle into an ambient exchange, one goads the other into something more aggressive and sinister. Towards the end, both musicians suddenly crank up short, high pitched bursts until they create a chillingly evocative soundscape reminiscent of a dockside battening down for bad weather.

I think Spleen Coffin still has this on preorder for next month, coronavirus willing. I got sent a download which fades out halfway through to change LP sides, though it’s clearly a single piece.

It all just reminded me how much Oliveros’ presence is still missed today. A few years back I dischi di Angelica released another of her improv collaborations, but I’ve only heard it just now. We should be grateful for whatever we can get and, considering that Nessuno teams her up with Roscoe Mitchell, John Tilbury and Wadada Leo Smith, people should probably have gotten into this on the names alone. It’s a live set in Bologna from 2011, two large-scale pieces with a snappy encore. As with Courtis, all the players here know that sometimes it’s better not to play. There are moments when it starts to drift into something lugubriously spacey – a perpetual standby when keeping Jazz at arms-length – but the music constantly redeems and renews itself, with each member of the quartet deftly pushing anomalous sounds back and forth in an uneasy equilibrium; although, like this sentence, it seems more of a personal challenge than artistic necessity to sustain the structure for so long. It never gets outrageous, but it remains reassuringly strange throughout.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Alan Courtis, John Tilbury, Pauline Oliveros, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith
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It’s good to remember that music is still being made. There’s a new album out soon by Juliet Fraser – I’ve raved about her singing before. In terms of presentation, spilled out from tangles is more of a showcase for the singer herself than for a particular composer. Four pieces, each by a different composer, all of them for soprano with only electronics for accompaniment. All four works were written for Fraser; the oldest composer here is in her early forties, the youngest not yet thirty. Throughout the disc, electronics are used only to provide backing: the emphasis here is less on advanced technology and more on how it is used in different ways to provide a sympathetic pairing with the voice.

Nomi Epstein’s collections for Juliet is a simple arrangement of glissandi in vocalise, with several recorded versions of Fraser heard simultaneously. Strangely, with nothing but voice, this piece sounds the most electronic: as tones merge and diverge in slow sweeps, beating frequencies and modulations arise in ways that augment the voice into something more than human. Fraser sings pure tones – almost; there is always some warmth in her voice, a vibrato more felt than heard. What seems at first a technical exercise becomes a much more reflective and intimate experience as the piece progresses. Epstein places much of the construction and interpretation of the piece on the singer; it’s a much more complex process than appears to the casual listener. Fraser’s realisation imbues the music with a sense of development and direction, making it sound natural and deceptively easy.

Lisa Illean’s A through-grown earth sets lines by Gerard Manley Hopkins to an ensemble of sampled and recorded strings, bowed and plucked, but subtly transformed. Harp and zither gain a harmonic sheen that hovers in the background, high overtones joining Fraser’s duplicated voice in ghostly chorus. She sings delicately, but with a quiet strength, her vibrato more expressive when signing poetry. Illean’s music often has that delicate quality too, which in the past has occasionally threatened to retreat into preciousness but is redeemed by her interest in just intonation and microtonality. Colouration inevitably takes on a darker, deeper hue and both composer and singer avoid the easier choices. The electronics in this piece allow more control of the tuning and add to the otherworldly atmosphere.

In this context, Sivan Eldar’s Heave feels the most conventional work. Fraser sings with great sensitivity and sincerity “a story of growth: out of the earth, into one’s own body and, finally, memory… body into light”, with an elegantly composed electronic soundscape. There’s plenty of tastefully detailed geological sounds reminiscent of the BBC Natural History Unit at its most accomplished, and I can’t help but feel that I’ve heard it all somewhere before, more than once. Lawrence Dunn’s While we are both returns to the same form as Illean’s work, of Caitlin Doherty’s poetry set to music in just intonation. The unfamiliar tuning is played on purely electronic instruments, with no obvious acoustic model. Just intonation lends itself well to unhurried music, and Dunn’s piece slowly unfolds in a dreamlike haze. Fraser sings with even greater expressivity here, almost like a lied, which just adds to the strangeness when the suspended harmonies break into high-pitched little trills. It feels simultaneously like a very early work for FM synthesisers and something very new.

The sleeve notes list two of the works as receiving their first public performance at Kettle’s Yard on 2 April. Sadly, that never happened, of course. Hopefully Fraser will be able to perform this programme live, sooner rather than later.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Lawrence Dunn, Lisa Illean, Nomi Epstein, Sivan Eldar
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Waiting for things to blow over, I’ve been sorting through old files and dusted off an old piece. Decommissioned is an hour-long piece made back in 2004. I don’t know how to describe this piece. It doesn’t seem like anything else I’ve done before or since.

There was a small edition of CD-Rs which ran out yonks ago, so it’s now on Bandcamp for free.

In fact, while Covid-19 drags on, almost everything on my Bandcamp is free/name your price (i.e. free). I’m giving away download codes for the other albums, while they last.

Chain of Ponds: chance determined feedback synthesis.
kde7-gfp6 zq6x-3q7y ztdp-5tua 3zqg-bbm7 5y83-whk5 rkzl-h5gf antj-jrrm jbua-5zkr e6xx-jf89 gncj-kp7z tj9d-3m7y t92c-h6af

Piano Sonata No. 1 (Toccata Furioso): chaotic fractal microtonal extravaganza for three-handed pianist.
9r8d-hzln ylns-vtve 3eae-gbz3 a6fg-3×94 rzdn-cvgm d2qv-h8r6 uxtx-y47x xekp-7maq h838-5z3t qnxy-bgl7 3h6n-j56r 5q3x-6r8l

Redeem codes here.

Filed under: Music, Self-promotion by Ben.H

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The scene starts in a charity shop in Echuca, where a young Australian man with sideburns and a Planet of the Apes t-shirt finds an Atari 2600 game console. When he plugs it in a crudely synthesised voice begins to stutter its way through Bataille’s ‘Theory of Religion’, with cryptic embellishments to the text. Inspired, the young man interprets the speech by setting it to a real rap beat on an 808 he naturally carries around with him at all times, but the instrument has been distorted by prolonged exposure to the Australian rural sun.

A paddlesteamer docks at the pier, and a sailor on deck commences to recite the exciting true story of the discovery of Australia. The waistband of his Calvin Klein undies is pulled up over the top of his breeches, revealing a message stitched above the crotch that reads “Escaped refugees welcome here.” A chorus of sailors join him in song, but no sooner have they begun than a freak storm capsizes the boat.

The location switches to Melbourne’s Federation Square development, where an emerging artist wearing a ‘Team Bataille’ baseball cap is installing an expensive piece of public art. An antenna connected to the artwork picks up the synthesised voice transmissions from Echuca, which directs a pivoted concave mirror to focus the sun’s rays into a powerful beam which incinerates the surrounding architecture in a pattern the shape of the Yorta Yorta land claim.

Back in Echuca, the sailors have struggled out of the river onto the pier and assess the damage to the paddlesteamer. An elegy to the twilight of colonialism is played by the Jindyworobak String Quartet: three middle-age men and a women in batik shirts saw slowly and sadly at eucalyptus saplings while domestic cats devour small native fauna.

An Australian Poet is reported dead in non-suspicious circumstances. The sad event is commemorated by a reenactment of the encounter of Flinders and Baudin, with the sailors dressed as Françoise Hardy solemnly recounting the Poet’s demise to the accompaniment of twist music by Serge Gainsbourg. The town’s inhabitants gather for a wake, with a DJ playing a special dance mix of the music on a limited edition vinyl reissue on the Ecstatic Peace label.

As the stuttering voice of reconstituted Bataille dissipates the scene shifts to a carport in Glen Waverley. Two teenagers attempt to foment suburban revolution by channelling the ghosts of Robyn Boyd and Iannis Xenakis, then challenging each other to an apocalyptic game of pingpong. Their activity summons the ghost of Percy Grainger, who immediately devises a free-music machine in the form of a ping-pong table shaped like a three-dimensional Galton board, down which balls may continually cascade according to the laws of probability. After much exertion the local council rezones the block to light industrial.

(1 April 2002.)

Filed under: Music, Self-promotion, Stupidity by Ben.H

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