Boring Like A Drill.

Damn this is a good title. It feels self-explanatory and yet it keeps you listening for a deeper meaning behind it. As such, it matches the music perfectly as each successive movement adds a layer of sentiment that hovers close to wistful melancholy, gently rocking itself into more troubled depths. Oliver Leith’s good day good day bad day bad day is a forty-five minute duet for percussion and keyboard, played here by the GBSR duo: George Barton and Siwan Rhys. A keenly observed ambiguity presides over the piece, not least in the sounds themselves: a mixture of samplers and instruments such as the waterphone blur the lines between each musician’s role, when heard on record. The inventive use of instrumentation adds depth and complexity, while the duet form of the piece gives clarity. Together, they manage to combine the bright and the plaintive into an indivisible whole. It feels like a piece that will continue to grow and change for the listener, even as a single recording.

This is Leith’s longest work to date yet its musical language is more direct (compared to the handful of pieces heard to date). There’s a simplicity that appeals to the listener in the manner of the populist wing of the minimally modern composers, but with an emotional sophistication which just deepens with each successive listen, where so many others would quickly wear themselves out. The piece does not necessarily get darker as it proceeds, just more sweetly inextricable in the complexity of its mood. The piece welcomes you in as it refuses to explain itself, like a favourite love song that gratifies your need for sadness. At the first performance, Barton and Rhys played on stage surrounded by domestic furniture, as though in their living room, “a private thing, a home space, some mugs, a rug, maybe a lamp in the middle of a concert hall.” The two musicians play with an evenness and interior calm that makes the music’s formal structure and changes in instrumentation flow naturally without apparent effort. They make it all seem inevitable, even as the outcomes remain unknown, with a transparency that makes their playing inseperable from the music.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Oliver Leith
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The Wet Ink Ensemble describe themselves as a collective, but with a ‘band’ atmosphere. As you would hope, they place an emphasis on improvisation and collaboration accross genres while also fitting more or less comfortably into a recital hall programme (subscribers may disagree). Their collection Smoke, Airs is the latest release on Huddersfield Contemporary Records and features the four electroacoustic pieces they premiered at last year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Three of the recordings are taken directly from those premiere performances; Charmaine Lee’s Smoke, airs was recorded again in New York the following month with Lee herself joining in as a vocalist.

Lee is as much an improviser as a composer and her piece allows Wet Ink some freedom in how interpret the score’s framework of ’empty’ sounds, building substance out of a texture of partly-voiced breaths, rasps and electronic noises. It’s suitably atmospheric, but with enough substance to raise it above pure ephemera. The sounds are inarticulate while still being expressive, and both Lee and Wet Ink know when to pause and when to change course to stop it sounding entirely like old-school free improv. It can still sound a little self-conscious at times, with Lee’s twittering and trills sometimes filling space as much as expanding the textures: the BBC broadcast of the live premiere was more subdued but allowed the sounds to create a negative space, at the expense of dramatic impact.

Pierre Alexandre Tremblay’s (un)weave works in a similar vein of acoustics and electronics on the threshold between sound and noise, using free play to make complex details within a predetermined structure. Here, the premise is more adversarial, with the musicians running a gauntlet of electronic ticks, thuds and acoustic interruptions, static and a persistent tinnitus hiss. Then, a third of the way through, they’re obliged to start over. From one moment to the next, there’s a menacing weariness to the sounds, but taken as a whole it feels a little too neatly packaged. What might have worked as a bristling, repressed chaos straining at its restraints comes across instead as just sufficiently tamed. Your attitude may vary.

The two remaining pieces are more straight-up composition. Kristina Wolfe’s A Mere Echo of Aristoxenus is a diptych of acoustic reconstructions of lost sites from ancient Greece. Thankfully, it is not imitative Classical exotica but informed by Wolfe’s research in music archaeology, drawing on Greek accounts of examples of the exploitation of resonance and reverberation. The pieces bear repeated listening: what had, at first, seemed the least interesting music in the set became intriguing. Wolfe allows sonic spaces to open up, using slowness in the first piece to reveal how each sustained sound is disturbed by subtle undercurrents, while in the second the muscians yield to the background, serving to articulate and transform a continuous electroacoustic rumble. Wet Ink’s players switch smoothly from fluid to glacial as needed.

The standout here is Bryn Harrison’s Dead Time, another of his tours de force in messing with your perception of time, sound and memory. It feels like cheating to single this one out as I’ve enthused about Harrison’s music before, but this work continues to refine his techniques into ever more subtle forms of bewidlerment. In Dead Time, Harrison’s slowly unfurling loops and repetitions are more ghostly and dreamlike, with the musicians repeating as though to themselves, lost in suspended thought. At times, it sounded like an echoing loop of tape, then I had to remind myself that it is, in fact, tape. Pre-recorded and live musicians echo each other without it ever being readily clear how the two may be distinguished. Whenever the music somehow pulls itself out of its spiral, you’re not sure if it has moved on or has started over: everything seems the same and yet you recognise nothing. Wet Ink’s musicians play with the same wan, faded quality of a worn-out tape, pushing the muted sounds of Harrison’s earlier music into a dim, muffled dreamworld, consciousness almost smothered.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Bryn Harrison, Charmaine Lee, Kristina Wolfe, Pierre Alexandre Tremblay
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I’ve ranted about field recordings before, spouting off a poorly-connected set of complaints which can be boiled down to the medium’s general tendency towards complacency. No such thing in Zach Rowden’s piece We were listening to music on his new Takuroku release We were talking about music. The signal intrusions of electronic mediation, duplication and distortion hiss and crackle throughout, mixed with various levels of fidelity. Pipes and bowed strings slowly loop and drone amongst a persistent grey hum of urban open spaces. It is music as a practice, of activity located in space. If the dirgelike playing reminds you of folk music, then it is only because those qualities have been buried, unearthed and denatured to the point that any tenuous claim to authenticity comes from the act of claiming those traditional roots through modern practice. Rowden constantly reminds you of the self-reflective aspect to this music, turning it into both an archive and a document that calls into question any authentic representation, other than of itself.

Is music an art form? Of course, you say, that’s an easy one. But is it really? Music, I mean. Derek Baron’s Fourteen Latches of Heaven and Earth hits you with art of the uncomfortable kind, the sort that you may first wish to dismiss as music. Its fourteen tracks are less collage and more mosaic, each element working together to present an image of music that causes us to question and pursue the deeper workings beneath the bland assumptions we typically make when we listen. Yes, every element is musical – in most cases, a brief sketch on upright piano – but labelled in a way to imply that these have been turned out and casually filed away over the years: ‘e j05 copy (2013)’ is a typical example. They’re pretty and charming miniatures, but presented here as unfinished or as offcuts. The titles reflect personal references without any accompanying significance. Other elements intrude, the ambient background, drum machines, a harmonium solo, uncategorisable sounds. The juxtapositions resist context, neither thematically nor through quotidian accumulation. The centrepiece is a long, tortuous runthrough by Baron and with Dominic Frigo of Bach’s Herr Gott, dich loben wir on recorder and guitar; their laboured playing presents music as a form of cultural transmission at its most unpolished and brutal. The album ends inconclusively with an excerpted recording of a choir being taught a mediaeval Salve Regina, another unresolved act of musical pedagogy. Far from a diary or sketchbook, Fourteen Latches of Heaven and Earth is an artistic statement, presenting music as work; uncommodified labour as both its material and its technique, the machinery of how music makes sense of the world laid bare.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Derek Baron, Takuroku, Zach Rowden
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“…started thinking about how popular music gets used as material these days. Once, tropes from rock or jazz would be incorporated into other musical styles to act as a signifier of that genre; now, the substance is reworked into new forms.” A gig I heard last year popped back into my head when listening to Bill Orcutt’s new solo guitar album, Warszawa. Having come to know his music relatively late and largely by accident at a gig in Brighton maybe ten years ago, I hadn’t made the connection to more recent experimental guitar music until now. What I remember from the Brighton gig was insistent activity that stayed resolutely in one place. The connections to rock came from that focus on the grain of the sound against its rhythm, listening inward, using the consistency of sound as a vehicle for the smaller timbral details to come to the fore. Warszawa is a more relaxed and varied affair, even as it features nothing more than Orcutt’s electric guitar without further adornment. The two untitled tracks are taken from a gig in the titular city last autumn. In the first, Orcutt plays melodic figures with varied pacing and elaboration, from gentle arcs to frenetic zig-zags. It’s all grounded by the open bottom string, plucked repeatedly to give a root to all the ornamentation. For all the activity, there’s a calm, steady concentration to the playing that can make it all unexpectedly sound soothing. The second piece (or side, I think this started as a cassette) is even more relaxed, which perversely makes the music even more fraught. The fixed bass is still there, but less frequent, the pace often slows to a pause, breaking the track into several sections. The restless pensiveness counter-balances the calm activity of the first half: Dürer’s Melancholia in reverse.

A superficial, fragile calm can also be heard in Threshold, a collaboration by Ed Carter and Jessica Lee. A lockdown recording, it combines Lee’s clarinet – layered over itself in slow, overlapping harmonies – combined with ambient sounds in and around her house. The environment may be encroaching upon the purity of the unaccompanied clarinet, or perhaps the clarinet is intruding into the everyday suburbia. The ambiguities are enhanced by the use of binaural microphones that open up the context and prominence of each sound, and by an Aeolian harp that is threaded through the piece, blurring boundaries between figure and ground even further. The clarinets and harp sound sweet and unhurried, but as the ear becomes trained on the details beneath the surface it all takes on a more troubled aspect. The sounds hover in limbo, neither private nor public – music heard on the doorstep, unsure of whether to venture outside or to welcome the listener in. For now, it marks time in an uneasy balance; a smile of optimism with a furrowed brow.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Bill Orcutt, Ed Carter, Jessica Lee, Takuroku
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A long year ago I wrote about Jérôme Noetinger’s sublime collaboration with Anthony Pateras, A Sunset For Walter. Cafe Oto has now put out two new Noetinger collaborations, recorded over Covid summer, again featuring his use of a Revox tape recorder as an instrument. Noetinger’s live shows typically have a playful element, exploiting the unpredictable nature of bending sounds through manipulating tape directly, with the mad-scientist theatricality adding to the off-kilter element in the music. As stand-alone recordings, they retain that spirit of adventure recording-only adventures through the slightly messy technology at work and provocative formal conceits that challenge the musicians’ creativity.

The concept behind Propagations is simple. Noetinger and Anthony Laguerre exchange tapes they have made and do a number on each other’s recordings, “just like in the 80s”. Although no longer dependent on physical media and the postal service, both Laguerre and Noetinger seem to be using their tape decks in their ‘edits’ of each other’s work. Each of the two 15-minute tracks is a noisy, chaotic ride of electronic sounds that never stick around for too long. This is just as well, for as with all chaos there are occasional irritating and boring moments mixed in between effects that range from cheesy to inspired. It keeps you guessing, particularly with questions like: is it all really that simple? In an attempt to drill down and distinguish the two pieces and the two artists’ work I kept hearing similarities arise between them, with a kind of symmetry that suggests each track started as the reverse of the other before the additional transformations took hold. Maybe I’m hearing things, but authentic-sounding chaos usually carries an underlying design.

The concept behind Nos cadavres is simple. Noetinger and Jean-Philippe Gross exchanged tapes, but only the last 10 seconds of their recording for each one to carry on after the other in a game of Exquisite Corpse. So the exchange passes back and forth, each new contribution adding a new twist to a hallucinatory continuity that makes itself up as it goes along. In lesser hands, this lack of greater context would wear thin pretty quickly. The length of each section, however, was allowed to be anywhere from ten seconds up to seven minutes, so that moments of stability are allowed to emerge and define an overall shape, however mysterious it may be. Gross and Noetinger are also smart enough to vary sounds from the continuous to discontinuous, allowing silences to both break up the information overload and create more distinctive sonic forms. Between them, they manage to put together a dazzling range of interesting sounds over the course of the two extended tracks. Surprisingly, each listening has added further intrigue, so far.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Anthony Laguerre, Jean-Philippe Gross, Jérôme Noetinger, Takuroku
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As well as releasing lots of fine music by new composers, Black Truffle has been preserving the legacy of the old masters. In particular, they have been steadily releasing recent pieces by Alvin Lucier. I went into details last year about a magnificent concert given at the Round Chapel in Clapton by the Ever Present Orchestra. That gig was recorded by the BBC but I don’t think it’s been broadcast. At least, the new ensemble pieces from that concert have been recorded and released a couple of months ago by members of the same group. Works For The Ever Present Orchestra is made up of new recordings of these works that coax iridescent interference patterns from the interaction of acoustic instruments and electronic tones. In this case, the electronics are provided by e-bowed electric guitars, adding another subtle layer of complexity and colouration. The pace here is brisker and the textures sound more transparent than what I remember from the concert: this may be due to the resonance of the Round Chapel, a reduction in personnel or just that my attention is no longer distracted by the theatrical presence of the large ensemble at work in intense concentration.

Lucier doesn’t so much reward attention as demand it. As writer Brian Olewnick observed after listening to String Noise, another release from this year, “Alvin Lucier once again testing my patience. And testing it well.” If I thought Lucier was getting lush and lyrical in his old age, these three hefty pieces for solo and duo violins brought that conceit crashing down around my ears. Tapper is the solo work, from 2004, written for Conrad Harris who plays it here for nearly an hour. The performer repeatedly taps the body of his instrument with the butt end of the bow while moving around the performance space. That’s the piece. No strings involved at all – except, of course they are. As I said, his music demands your attention. It’s no Fluxus exercise in mundanity, and Harris plays with the same combination of rigour and flexibility afforded a Bach partita. Lucier fans will spot the connection to his 60s echolocation piece Vespers and how the sound is shaped by its surroundings, but Tapper removes the extramusical rationalisation and focuses on the sound as music itself. If you don’t listen, you miss the tiny gradations in decay and shading, augmented by the resonance of the violin’s body, as well as its strings.

The two remaining works are played here as duets by Conrad Harris and Pauline Kim Harris. In Love Song, from 2016, they play long tones using only the open E string, while moving in a circular motion around the performance space. Their two violins are joined at the bridge by a long wire, which transfers resonating tones between the instruments. As the players move, changes in the wire’s tension adds to the complex microcosm of tones produced by this minimum of overt activity. A fascinating sound, if you’re paying attention. Halo, composed last year, is similar to Tapper, but requires the violinists to move through the space bowing long tones, making each slight shift in sound less prominent while producing the finest detectable gradations in sound colour. The alchemical qualities of Lucier’s music persist to this day, with less focus on the demonstrative or pedagogical angles and a more assured reliance on their art.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Alvin Lucier
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