Boring Like A Drill.

My personal setbacks from coronavirus have been trivial compared to others. One of the disappointments has been the second missed chance to see Johnny Chang and Catherine Lamb’s Viola Torros Project performed live. Their double CD was one of the outstanding releases of 2018 and I was looking forward to hearing them at Counterflows in Glasgow this spring. As a small consolation, Cafe Oto’s Takuroku series has now given us Preliminary Study for V.T., a sketch exploring pre-mediaeval musical styles across Eurasia. While the Viola Torros pieces use spectral augmentation through reverberation, subtle feedback and voices, this Preliminary Study features just Chang and Lamb in a viola duet, recorded back in 2017 and reworked into a piece this year. It’s starker and more subdued, of course, closer to first principles that make it seem as much a distillation as an embryonic version of the music’s later, more developed forms. The interweaving violas play modes derived from Arabic, Byzantine and Indian music, all within a very narrow range of pitch and dynamics that brings attention to small changes in the grain of the instruments as much as their intonation. I did not give much attention to the musicological implications of the finished works at the time, as the material by that time had been transformed into a vehicle for broader timbral exploration. On the Takuroku recording, the material is heard more clearly, making it a useful addition to what I hope is a continuing series of V.T. works.

I listened to Aisha Orazbayeva’s Music for Violin Alone a couple of months ago and have come back to it repeatedly since then. Her Takuroku release Slow Change continues in a similar vein of home recordings for solo violin. Two of Orazbayeva’s exploratory works sandwich one of Orlando Gibbons’ viol fantasies, which is here played with a deliberately light touch to produce and fluting, breathy tone; Gibbons’ Jacobean sense of impeccable order faintly outlined in what Cage would call “empty” sounds. The Fantasia carries over from the first piece, in which Orazbayeva plays with paper threaded between the strings, muting and distorting the notes. For the title piece, she has created her own answer to James Tenney’s Koan from her previous release, a gradually evolving tremolo whose sonic metamorphosis is brought about by imperceptibly guiding the bow from bridge to nut.

It’s easy to describe features of Bruno Duplant’s music but he’s still hard to pin down. In his earlier Chamber and Field Works there are musicians and there are the environments they occupy, where each are present but neither makes demands of your attention. Each frames the other, with emergent properties. His Covid lockdown piece insaisissable(s) instant(s) is a piece about time, where time is an empty space upon which competing emotions and thoughts may intrude unbidden. There is a piano, sometimes, and the outside world can be heard, but at a distance. The piano’s silence becomes the subject, speaking of withdrawal indoors, moving back and forth between contemplation and impatience. As for ambience, the piece is measured out in regular domestic squeaks and thuds from around the room with a steady insistence of overfamiliarity that threatens incipient cabin fever. An electrical hum comes and goes, which may or may not help to relieve the tension. Who said this stuff is relaxing?

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Aisha Orazbayeva, Bruno Duplant, Takuroku, Viola Torros
No Comments »

Like many people – judging by the interview on this album’s web page – my knowledge of Ernstalbrecht Stiebler’s music centres on the CDs of his 1990s music released on Hart Art. Based on this, I had mentally labelled him as “Euro-Niblock”, listened to it, enjoyed it and never went into it too deeply. An album of new pieces has now been released on Another Timbre, works for strings composed between 2007 and 2016: Für Biliana shows both how Stiebler has continued to develop as a composer and how listening has changed over the past quarter-century. Beginning with two short solo works for violinist Biliana Voutchkova, Für Biliana is made out of double-stops in which held notes are harmonised on the other string, alternating in almost cadence-like figures; in Glissando the moving tone on the double-stops slides in, or out, of unison with the held pitch. In each piece, the music is formed of phrases instead of a steady drone, with occasional tremolos in Glissando that make the piece resemble a slow caprice. Heard in retrospect, the attenuated romanticism in these brief works becomes more evident in those Nineties pieces. There’s a continuous balancing act between the instability of the harmonic language used and the stability of its immobility, where neither can truly claim precedence.

Voutchkova is joined by cellist Michael Rauter for Duo 4 / Parallelen, a longer work from 2007 where each plays overlapping dissonances in a kind of antiphony. The language is pure Fifties avant-garde, an unresolved major seventh, but it is transformed by its stasis, effectively becoming its own tonal centre. Nevertheless, the tension between the two suggests a resolution is still needed and Stiebler achieves it through silence, as each successive iteration starts to fade away into something more gentle, eventually finding rest.

I lied when I said this album was made of newer pieces. Stiebler’s Extension for string trio was composed way back in 1963 and it’s incredible in the ways it both resembles and differs from his recent work. Joined by Nurit Stark on viola, Voutchkova and Rauter play the ephemeral material with a steady, unaffected solidity, adding inflections and articulation to a recurring tritone for almost twenty minutes. It’s a prescient work that goads the critic into drawing comparisons with La Monte Young’s trio, but it’s more interesting to compare it to Stiebler’s own Duo 4 / Parallelen. Both with essentially the same subject, Extension prolongs the harmonic stasis with differentiations in attack, phrasing and dynamics, elaborating a detailed chamber work out of a minimum of developed material, while Duo 4 / Parallelen takes the same approach, but with greater subtlety and refinement. Where the earlier piece uses pizzicato disruptions and changes in speed to vary the texture, the latter work makes use of alterations in solo and duo voices, phrasings and rests.

This weekend I dug up those old Hat Art discs again and heard how those works sound much less like a function of a process than I remembered. Thanks to Für Biliana we can hear now how those pieces relate to the music that came both before and after it, simultaneously.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Ernstalbrecht Stiebler
3 Comments »

I’ve been puzzled by Leo Chadburn’s pieces for speaking voice and ensemble: Freezywater dispassionately lists place-names that encircle the greater London area, The Indistinguishables pits a string quartet against a list of species of moth, recited with equally solemn blankness. The music is undemonstrative but fraught with the potential of escalating to the tragic, offering no readily apparent commentary on or illumination of the text, nor vice versa. Each achieves a semantic impasse that simultaneously invites and resists interpretation. Hearing them both, my mind kept protesting that there was less going on than met the ear.

Chadburn’s new record, The Subject / The Object, gives both ears and mind something more formidable to grapple with. The cool surface presented in those earlier chamber compositions has become more resistant here: The Subject / The Object can exist only as a recording, a fixed object, as it were. Instruments are reduced to voice and electronics, precisely machined into two halves of exactly twenty minutes each. The Subject is a sentence, underpainted with ominous synth rumbles that churn up the background. The spoken sentence continues in a single breath through an endless cascade of conjunctions and modifiers through which the subject slips without ever being pinned to a defintion. It’s an ingenious work of linguistic construction, vocal intonation and editing, that impresses your conciousness while the sounds get to work on the lower levels of your mind.

If it reminds you of Robert Ashley’s works for speaking voice, it might first be the resemblance in the editing that hooks you in, but really it’s the lure of a narrative thread that continually pulls you along even as you lose the sense of it. The voice is speaking and you listen, long after the words have ceased to register in your head. As with most of Ashley’s stories, I’m still not sure how it ends and if I were to go and hunt down the conclusion to find out what it all means then I’m sure I would be looking in the wrong place. The Object is the wordless counterpart, a necessary negative of multiple drones of vocalise. It plays the voice like a sampler with an empty memory, where void becomes meaning by default.

When you’re writing a violin solo. YOU, A HACK: [bunch of notes on staves]. GEORGE BRECHT, AN ARTIST: [* polishing]. One night after too many drinks I announced to nobody in particular that Fluxus invented dank memes. Both are hellbent on stripping away context and explanation to find an irreducible, irrefutable non sequitur. It came back to me when happily listening through all fifty-seven minutes and forty-nine seconds of Luciano Maggiore & Louie Rice’s Synthesised voices and low frequencies to eat crisps with. The title tells you exactly what it is. The synthesised voices, though, they speak words; a barest minimum of semantic content – an exhaustive list of permutations of the words NO PA PA ON – rendered beyond any semblance of or desire for comprehensibility. Like a bad joke told well, it should be intolerable but for its frankness and savvy stupidity, with no prospect of nor attempt at a payoff. It is easy to forget that the truly impersonal is also guileless. As with Chadburn, the words dissolve into sound and produce music. Strange, but still music, of a type that reminds you that no music has any truly existential reason to exist at all. The blurb gives you the links to the websites they used to generate the piece, should you wish to make a copy for yourself. There’s no point to having one version of this, so why not have two?

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Leo Chadburn, Louie Rice, Luciano Maggiore, Takuroku
No Comments »

Takuroku put out a batch of cool new stuff each week and I want to do them justice but I’m lazy. Will get more detailed on some of them later but for now:

Astral Social Club – ACID BARF. Neil Campbell dishes out a beat that just won’t quit despite it being subjected to every synth-pop indignity under the sun. The perverse will to endure becomes a gag that’s beaten into the ground and then beaten some more until it gets funny again.

Aylu – Frida. It starts out more normal than Astral Social Club but somewhere along the way it slips into madness and random goofiness made all the more winning after the straight beats have revealed themselves to be po-faced pop. Second guest appearance by pets.

Cam Deas – Rhythmic Landscapes. The blurb namedrops David Tudor’s Rainforest, which got my hopes up too high. In fact, it’s a nice set of field recordings of birds mixed in with overlapping patterns of percussion sounds. After a while it sounds too much like being on a verandah out in the country, sitting too close to the windchimes with a killer hangover.

Floris Vanhoof – Falala Falderiere Falderaldera. Nifty phasing electronics that jitter back and forth appealingly, interspersed with a frog pond that sounds just as electronic but isn’t, probably. It’s better than the title and I’m not dissing the electronics when I wish the frog track was longest.

Johnny R. Spykes – Less Effective Rhetoric. Plenty of action, but while sax and harsh electronics can be great fun in a pub they’re hell on the home listener. Most extreme is the mismatched stereo separation, except for one skronk recorded in low-bit mono.

Kazuhisa Uchihashi – Breathing Vegetables. Plenty of action, but at least we can have as much fun as Uchihashi is with obsessive pitch-bending, bouncy one-string guitar action and ditzy loops. The manic glee is infectious. There is a daxophone.

SHLIMP WARC – THGIE DRSOW. Acid Mothers Temple veterans Tatsuya Yoshida and Makoto Kawabata dust off some leftovers from a trio album only without Richard Pinhas, which helps brighten things up a little. Kerrazy drumming with ironic 80s guitar squalls and random keyboard barrages. Party like it’s 1994.

Naima Karlsson – [Vital Organs]: I. Heart Protector. A mere fifteen minutes, but one of the most substantial releases so far. A genuinely hypnotic piece for organ and electronics that retunes the listener’s awareness simply by breathing.

Ecka Mordecai – Critique + Prosper. A cellist and vocalist, Mordecai produces a set of personal recordings that aren’t so much introspective as self-possessed, letting the listener find their own space inside her sounds. I like to think this album was also made in a shed.

Otomo Yoshihide – 「Small Stone」. Frenetic atonal guitar soloing that unexpectedly cools into a clear-eyed reflection on the nature of protest, from the independence of public prosecutors in Japan to the independence of Hong Kong from China. A surprisingly moving sonic essay on the anxious balance between peace and vigilance.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Takuroku
No Comments »

The morning after I saw Mittwoch aus Licht in Birmingham, I turned on the news and heard that Neil Armstrong had died. Suddenly, the Helicopter String Quartet made sense to me; in particular, the instruction that the scene be introduced by a compere who then leads a Q&A session with the performers and the audience after the quartet has been played. Like so many aspects of Stockhausen’s operas, it seemed an inexplicable but surprisingly rewarding decision to frame the scene in this way. Why single this scene out for audience explication? Next morning, it all became clear.

All mankind went to the moon; Armstrong was our delegate. The astronauts brought back photos and moon rocks for us to marvel over and discuss. Stockhausen couldn’t get all of us hovering in the air over Birmingham, so he brings the musicians and the pilots back to the audience so we could ask them what it was like. Birmingham Opera Company just streamed a video of the entire opera over the weekend and this line of thought came back to me. I didn’t write about Mittwoch at the time – it was all overwhelming and took too long to get down in words. Besides, many others wrote so well about it. In particular, there was analysis of the double image presented by the opera, which the production didn’t make overt but was present enough for the observant audience member to detect, in disconcerting glimpses.

The Helicopter String Quartet is a key part of the double image: like the moon landing, a technical triumph of ultimately limited value. The central figures of Licht – Michael, Eva and Lucifer – are largely absent from Mittwoch until the final, complex scene. Instead, we witness humans coming together in noble endeavours that are thwarted by their own vulnerabilities, compromised from the start by flawed premises. Each success, whether sending a string quartet into the air, a “world parliament” reaching agreement, or orchestra musicians passing audition, is heavily qualified by mundane, material considerations and circumscribed by limited vision. The Licht operas function as 21st century mystery plays: in Mittwoch, we witness humanity acting on its best impulses yet stumbling in the dark without the guidance of the divine. When the great planet-shitting camel (work with me, here) makes its entrance in that last, complex scene and starts singing in the signature bass tones of Lucifer, it’s a warning that we have been led astray.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Karlheinz Stockhausen
No Comments »

The variety on display at Takuroku continues to amaze. Here are three home recordings, made during and for the mitigation of Covid lockdown. Han Bennink’s Musical Collage for Mara captures the restless energy of his live percussion sets, jumping between casual tabletop drumming, interventions by a couple of pets, and household members rolling metal boules across the wooden floors. It’s like a set of snapshots of life in a very musical house, which gives it all a charming air of casual spontaneity. When things do settle down, it’s because something has grabbed Bennink’s attention, such as how many different timbres can be coaxed with a pair of brushes out of what I like to imagine is an upturned Quality Street tin.

Yoni Silver takes it outside with his Sun and sky and garden breeze, a compelling contribution to the undervalued ‘men in sheds’ genre. Inside the makeshift musical temple in his backyard, he evokes a suburban bucolic idyll out of wind and string instruments, supplemented by his voice and various found objects. While Bennink takes action, Silver is contemplative, allowing the sounds of the surrounding birds and breezes to provide an outline for his music to shade in, building up a gently shimmering soundscape of a quiet, self-contained summer.

Since we’re imagining that home recordings are glimpses into a musician’s home life, then Xenia Pestova Bennett‘s Atonal Electronic Chamber Music For Cats seems to fit right in here. Perhaps her house really is littered with superannuated electronic detritus; in any case, she’s made a succinct collection of pieces using old keyboards that have just reached that awkward age of sufficient cheesiness. (She kindly specifies for synth nerds exactly what she’s working with: Yamaha CS1X, Korg MonoSynth 2000, MicroKorg Synth Vocoder.) It’s always a kick to hear an album that’s as good as the title. Each piece sounds like a groovy bit of background music from an episode of Tomorrow’s World that goes just a leetle too far. It’s ridiculous fun, precisely because each pastiche is so well made, with affectionate care. Expect to see a massively overpriced vinyl edition for a future Record Store Day.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Han Bennink, Takuroku, Xenia Pestova Bennett, Yoni Silver
1 Comment »

Good to see some people making better use of Covid-19 downtime than I have. It’s been a while since I wrote up any music by Lance Austin Olsen or Jamie Drouin (aka Liquid Transmitter) but I’ve just been hit with three new releases in short order by the two of them working together. Well, two of them are new: Snowfield is a reissue of a collaboration from way back in 2003. It began as a four-track sound installation, made up of field recordings of the two artists “interacting” with a small patch of snowbound landscape. On paper, it looks heavier on concept than on substance, but Drouin and Olsen have worked their material into seven distinct tracks of finely differentiated sounds that come together in collages that are very soft, very long, nearly white.

The two new collaborations show how their collaging chops have deepened over the years, mixing eclectic elements into something more complex yet equally organic. Both were conceived during, and resulted from, the self-isolation of pandemic lockdown. With direct working together now impossible, the pieces were created through a process of exchange, sending files back and forth online. The French Drop is a set of five pieces in which perspective and focus slip back and forth from one state to another; as in an optical illusion, each graspable image hovers between two identities, never fully resolving into one. Drouin’s synthesisers never settle into being a mere backdrop to hold Olsen’s objects and found sounds together: both sound palettes fuse into one portentous, if ambiguous, whole.

Olsen has worked this way before, with long-distance collaborations that cross the equator, not just across town. But what is space or distance these days, anyway. With less of a direct programme or idea driving the project, both The French Drop and This, And The Other Space, released a few weeks later, allow for a more purely musical experience than some of Olsen’s other work, so that the listener’s mind is free to conjecture as to what lurks beneath the surface. This, And The Other Space may be bolder in its contrasts, with more discrete elements sticking in the mind, but the dual storylines collaged together here merge into one experience which the listener may not disentangle. The two albums act as counterparts, each forming a double image of space, place and subjectivity.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Jamie Drouin, Lance Austin Olsen
No Comments »