Boring Like A Drill.

The crowd was small and well-spaced, by necessity. After fifteen months without socialising, it looked like I wasn’t the only one who was both a bit excited and a bit anxious at once, which made for a subdued audience: in good spirits but gentle, like a recuperating patient. I was back at Cafe Oto hearing Apartment House play live again, like old times.

Having just said that the ensemble had amassed a formidable repertoire of new and rediscovered music, the evening’s programme emphasised the point with its unusual shape and even bolder than usual choice of pieces. First half was a premiere by a guy I’ve never heard of. Dead Creek Organum by Henry Birdsey (the “Vermontian rust-drone man” it says here) is half an hour of densely-packed microtonal chords, roughly hewn into long, close-fitting spans. Tonight’s full ensemble played, string quartet (Gordon MacKay and Mira Benjamin, violins; Bridget Carey, viola; Anton Lukoszevieze, cello) modulated by pedal tones from an electric organ (Kerry Yong on various keyboards). For the audience, it was acclimatisation through immersion, retuning to heightened musical sensibilities.

The second half commenced with Yong playing Adelaide composer/pianist Stephen Whittington’s compressed but capricious take on Strawberry Fields as an incongruous introduction to several graphic scores, focusing on the overlooked and unexpected. Apartment House have performed selections from Louise Bourgeois’ Insomnia Drawings on other occasions, having noticed that these artworks drawn on music paper are “eminently performable”. With strings and string piano combining thin, raspy sounds, they take on an appropriately disturbing but hazy sonic form. Two Impulses by the Slovak Milan Adamčiak was more densely woven, with a score that intersected Adamčiak’s interests in art, music and visual poetry.

Personally, the most fascinating piece was Roland Kayn’s Inerziali. Kayn’s best known for his electronic, cybernetic works (or should be known – a Bandcamp page is dedicated to mastering and releasing a large backlog of mostly unheard pieces) but this early piece revealed his compositional roots in serialism, aleatory methods and stochastic composition. Inerziali is an open score of unspecified but finely organised events and combinations. Apartment House produced a taut, rapid interplay of prepared instrument sounds, using exacting means to produce complex sounds far beyond the usual consideration of pitch relationships. It’s an intriguing insight when hearing his later works, which build grand, forceful impressions from the curation of intricate details.

To finish, Milan Knižak’s Broken Music presented itself as a kind of musical antimatter. Like his negotiably playable collaged records, the score is fragments of defaced and collaged scores, which Apartment House played amongst recordings of the records. The matter here is as much in the gaps and the breaks, audible faultlines where the content has been lost, literally skipping from one anonymised fragment to the next. Crucially, unlike most collage, anything coherently recognisable is shredded, rendering typical considerations of content and taxonomy useless. You’re left with undifferentiated musical protoplasm, new to our ears because it’s unrecognisable. The ensemble boldly dedicated itself to alternating scratches and atomised half-gestures to produce something which forces effort from the audience to even hear it, in a way that registers. It’s a good way to start over.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Henry Birdsey, Louise Bourgeois, Milan Adamčiak, Milan Knižak, Roland Kayn, Stephen Whittington
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I don’t enjoy writing bad reviews. If I can’t find anything interesting in a work then I prefer to leave it alone instead of use it as a pretext to tell more bad jokes. There has to be something in it to engage attention. When I last heard a significant chunk of Matthew Shlomowitz’s music, I was disappointed that the type of humour I’d heard before in a couple of his brief pieces was almost entirely absent, with its gentle provocation of what may be considered music supplanted by misplaced certainties that shut out further possibilities.

Mark Knoop’s recording of Shlomowitz’s Explorations in polytonality and other musical wonders, Volume 1, a set of seven piano pieces composed last year, has come as an immense relief. The opening piece “Parlour Nancarrow” takes it’s model’s piquant harmonies and staggered polyrhythms and turns them into an evocative prelude, redolent of Nancarrow’s impossible player piano studies but with the pastiche domesticated into impressionism. The precise, tricky rhythms at first sound like the piano is computer-controlled, or mechanised, but I’ve personally witnessed Knoop playing Peter Ablinger so I know he is capable of just this sort of feat. Shlomowitz’s casual wit persists throughout the set, with occasional callbacks of those Nancarrow chord progressions flitting by amidst convolutions of ear-stretching bitonality, like Nicolas Slonimsky’s keyboard exercises with more pointed artistic development.

Each successive piece finds new ways to delight and/or repulse the ear, bringing back those open-ended questions that had gone missing. It’s never played for laughs, which makes it all the funnier when you catch small phrases occasionally looping a little beyond their cue, or when a particularly frilly dance-step stumbles over irregular block chords. They reference kitsch without stooping to become kitsch itself. The po-faced “Classic chord progression with Neapolitan, doubled at the minor 2nd” could be heard as Ives or as a parody of Ives (itself an Ivesian concept). As the cycle progresses, the musical pretentions grow in ambition as the rhythms get more slippery and chromatic romanticism elides into deadpan deflation. In the concluding “Variations in octaves” Knoop gives a masterclass in sounding out of sync with himself, but he plays the entire score with the relish of an actor making the most out of some particularly juicy dialogue, finding the right level of archness or elegance to add a subtext to each passage.

If I had to complain then I’d prefer a cleaner recording, but this is more than enough for now. Am I happy with this music’s challenges just because they are cast in the more conservative form of a piano recital? I don’t think so; these pieces show the listener what may be heard instead of telling them what to hear. I hope there’s a Volume 2.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Matthew Shlomowitz
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Sometimes you can’t help but hear things the wrong way. I first put this on by mistake, having thought I’d cued up Booker T. & The MG’s. I’ve had worse surprises and stuck out the whole thing. Stand closer when you have something to say is a new release on Mappa, that Slovakian cassette label – the description sounds agonisingly hipsterish, albeit less so the closer you get to Slovakia. The band here, however, is Tasting Menu, a trio from Los Angeles: Cassia Streb, Cody Putman and Tim Feeney. Their instrument is their studio (the room, that is; not some old Eno adage): concrete floors, fire doors. If you’ve been to live gigs of this sort of music you’re already picturing the venue in your head.

Two separate sessions are recorded here, made a couple of weeks apart, basically group improvisations for found objects and abraded percussion. Long swatches of varying grain and textures, verging on sound sculpture. They apparently worked over the room systematically and that constraint helps greatly in making this a much more compelling musical experience than simple indulgent noisemaking. Heard live, you’d want it loud and all-engulfing; as audio (or cassette) it works surprisingly well even if not fully cranked. The middle part of the first track is particularly effective as the soundworld veers away from the expected and stays for an ominously long time. Maybe it shouldn’t have moved on – instruments appear at the end of each track. The opening of the second track adds deep ambient tones and ends with a jumbled mass of distant extraneous noise from the street outside. Then there is, inevitably, a sax.

More site recordings appear in HOLES, a similarly recent recording by the Melbourne musician Tarab on his promisingly named Sonic Rubbish label. The term ‘space’ takes on multiple meanings here, with the material making up these collages comprising “sounds borrowed from various rooms, the things that happened in them, and those that come in from outside.” As soon as it starts, it stops again: abrupt silences permeate all five tracks. Spaces open up inside other spaces. Sometimes, the scene shifts without warning. Percussive room ambience is displaced by sparse electronic beeps, TV transmissions, digital interference. Longeurs of liminal acoustics isolate sonic events, rendering them inexplicable. I’ve only just played this once and what’s got me more excited than usual here is the compositional nous at work that not only gives the captured sounds a shape and a point, but also asks questions both of the listener and the materials. HOLES never takes its contents for granted and replaces the complacent trust of an “authentic” musician in their tools with a probing skepticism that renders dull questions of aural representation moot. Here, all meaning is in the mediation.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Tarab, Tasting Menu
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Over the last twenty-five-plus years, the ensemble Apartment House has amassed a formidable repertoire of new and rediscovered music, much of it recorded on the Another Timbre label. I’ve been listening to their release of Jim O’Rourke’s string trio Best that you do this for me, composed for the ensemble and recorded late last year, on and off during the past few weeks, mentally wrestling with needless doubts. It makes me wonder, in turn, if I’m thinking too much about it, or too easily pleased by it, falsely believing that there is more to it than meets the ear. Whatever intellectual or sensual attitude I take, after hearing it again I always come away satisfied that its frail, simple outline contains a maturely conceived and executed musical plenitude.

A year ago, I heard a concert of Apartment House playing a selection of old and new works by O’Rourke. It was an impressive concert and I found the newer works particularly charming, so it was an initially disturbing surprise to hear Best that you do this for me. It seemed like a regression, to the unadorned earlier works in the concert programme: too easy, too conveniently minimal. It’s a flexible score, made of segments in which each musician softly bows a harmonic on muted strings and hums along, or sings, or whistles. One event per segment. Timing is unspecified but tends to be slow. Apartment House play here for about an hour. Haven’t we all heard something like this before? No, as it turns out; we haven’t.

For a start, O’Rourke has created an open score of elegant simplicity and eloquence, inviting a wide range of possibilities in content and continuity while maintaining a clearly defined form. The three string instruments may enter freely, allowing variations in phrasing and texture that remove the episodic structure of the score. The voices, untrained and trying to match or harmonise the instruments, add further colouration through their inexactness, compounding the sounds the way that electronic signal processing might, but in ways that cannot help but recall connotations of profound fragility. The three musicians (Mira Benjamin, violin; Bridget Carey, viola; Anton Lukoszevieze, cello) are essential in making this work so effective here, showing the type of deep understanding and respect for a score that allows them to puruse it in ways that enlarge upon the music in ways the composer may have not forseen.

Right from the start, the musicians combine to make a strange warbling effect of gentle, uneven bowing and humming interfering with a faintly wavering harmonic. Each successive phrase adds to this otherworldly atmosphere. Changes in bowing become a major element in the piece’s progress, adding tension, complications and resolutions as they go. Pauses emerge from the score and between the musicians. There are dramatic turns, spaced at roughly even intervals. O’Rourke cites Martin Smolka as the inspiration for added vocalising, but for me it strongly recalled Morton Feldman’s Five Pianos, another work that finds poetic excess in straitened technique. Far from a regression, Best that you do this for me shows a distillation of O’Rourke’s recent compositional approaches into a single coherent, contemplative moment.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Jim O'Rourke
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The word ‘manic’ pops up twice in the press release for Alex Paxton’s album Music for Bosch People. ‘Garish’ should be used too, meant as a positive; it should come as no surprise from the cover art that this music is played by an amplified ensemble with saxophone, electric guitars, drum kit and samplers bouncing around Paxton’s trombone. The bright, clashing colours and patterns in the packaging threaten the listener with a “fun” experience, which too often means music that is at once hectoring and ingratiating. Paxton and his crack team of musicians thankfully avoid this for the most part.

I got the download version of this, with the tracks tagged as ‘Jazz’, so I had to strip those tags out before listening so I wasn’t too prejudiced against it. The album falls into two halves: the long title piece, with a mani-… let’s say frantic solo coda of Paxton vocalising on trombone, and a suite of “Prayers”. The musical idiom throughout is good old-fashioned New York Downtown free improv: constant activity, frenetic and eclectic. TV and movie samples break out amongst the music, like listening to alternative radio in 1990. Is this an exercise in retro pastiche? The remarkable thing here is that Paxton has composed this densely-packed free-for-all, while allowing the musicians scope for improvisation. The advantage is that the momentum and inspiration never flags; the disadvantage is that it never soars to any exhilarating highs, either. For all its wildness, the music tries its best to stay likeable and so remains harmless, never acquiring even the undercurrent of casual menace that makes this kind of playing come alive for the listener. Heard in the wrong frame of mind, parts of the long track come across like attempted humour, stiff and forced.

Given Paxton’s and the ensembles adeptness with the established techniques and technology, he seems strangely reluctant to use it to say anything new – hence the impression of pastiche. The second half of the album is stronger, as he uses his devices in a new and more interesting way. These five short tracks were made by Paxton using cheap MIDI keyboards, improvisation and multitracking as compositional devices, building up layers of improvised solos and then transcribing them into notated arrangements for ensemble. Everything is much more fluid in these pieces, with fleeting gestures and soundbites appearing and disappearing with greater independence and mutual indifference, thus sounding with greater spontaneity. It allows a track titled “Prayer with Strings and Joan Rivers” to be crude and witty without needing to slap you on the back. Even as these tracks are less dense, the musicians can create more connections between the sounds and present the listener with a more complex experience than the title piece.

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Tags: Alex Paxton
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To uncultured ears such as mine, avant-garde vocal performance often falls into a sort of uncanny valley; the moments in which it resembles human expression without reaching verbalisation are when it seems most alien to human experience. I’m listening again to Jason Kahn & Antoine Läng’s Insub release Paratopia, which pairs two improvisations by the duo using their voices as the sound source. The first piece documents a recent performance, made in a forest during lockdown last year. The only technological interventions made to their voices is through the use of megaphones; these amplify small, incidental mouth sounds over vocal content. More importantly, they act as filters which thin out the voice, hollowing out the vocalisations for greater prominence on aspirations and fricatives. For a long time, the voice is not identifiable and the piece sounds like an improvisation for found objects and abraded percussion. Long swatches of varying grain and textures, verging on sound sculpture. This could be detrimental to a recorded percussion performance but the use of voice adds more than novelty, adding different details that would never arise otherwise. The forest ambience adds it own subtle complexity. Once the piece passes twenty minutes more recognisable vocalisations start to emerge, but for me the effect was less transformative and more left me wondering where the track could have been truncated to have kept the sounds in a different realm, outside of human measurement. The second track captures one of the duo’s first performances, with voices weaving in and out of the greay zone between man and nature with that restless urge to make more of a show which has been almost tamed in the later recording.

Last year I reviewed Biliana Voutchkova’s recordings of Ernstalbrecht Stiebler’s violin pieces dedicated to her. Her Takuroku recording Seed of Songs presents her as composer as well as performer. As with many Takuroku releases, it documents her response to forced inactivity in the year of Coronavirus. Unexpectedly, it doesn’t depict the artist at work, or even in a prolonged moment of quiescent contemplation. Seed of Songs was born out of attentiveness, from time without motivation to create. Late in the year she responded to this existential act of listening by recording small sounds – violin, her voice, objects, environmental sounds. Early in the new year she created this collage which is both empty and full, an excercise in receptiveness to what might become. Voutchkova’s voice is present throughout, even if mostly through its absence, as an intermittent thread. In repeated listenings it sounds different each time. One time I was surprised that it was much emptier than I remembered it; this last time I just realised that the violin appears much earlier than I had thought and small sounds teem throughout. Things that Voutchkova might recognise of herself – voice, violin, handmade sounds – remain faintly distinguishable from the surrounding environment. Like Dürer’s Melencolia I, it depicts an impasse which has conditioned the mind to a heightened state of perception, ready to make things new.

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Tags: Antoine Läng, Biliana Voutchkova, Jason Kahn
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The theme here is prophecy, which may be why so much of the album seems presently unknowable. I’ve been aware of Reinier Van Houdt only as a pianist, interpreting the likes of Michael Pisaro, so hearing him as a composer-performer delivers the unexpected. The first instrument heard is acoustic guitar and piano is added in small doses as the album progresses. Electronic sounds and treatments pervade the music. Van Houdt plays everything himself, in recordings made just earlier this year.

Mouths Without A Head is a collection of fifteen vignettes that work together best when heard as a suite. The download I received mistakenly sequenced the tracks in alphabetical order and so I first heard the album as a collection of potent fragments. In correct order, these fragments coalesce into a quiet but disturbing progression of elements finding stability before dissolving. The point of origin is Orlando di Lasso’s Prophetiae Sibyllarum, a set of 16th century motets with 20th century chromaticism. In its most straightforward moments, Van Houdt plays a type of antiphonal chorale of single notes, on guitar or piano or in tandem, call and response. The music is calm but never settles into a fixed tonality. Deep ambient washes rumble below the surface or rise to overwhelm the instruments, electronic static crackles into life just when things seem all sedate.

Van Houdt’s notes talk about the role of the voice in this work, even as it is never heard plain. Stutter therapy tapes of extended vowels are in the mix, all but indistinguishable from wind recordings and synth pads. As prophecy, it is necessarily inarticulate, hinting at ideas that are left to the listener’s conjecture. Digital delay and reverb give one passage an almost New Age sound, while another is a comfy, nostalgic wash of synthesisers reminiscent of 1970s library music. These are little more than illusions, repeatedly dispelled, most emphatically by the “Presocratic Grid”, a long excercise in scratchy electronic noise that overlays its rhythms until verging upon voiced speech. Van Houdt manages these stark contrasts by making each change multiply and confound what has gone before. The most expressive piano playing is deferred almost to the end, followed by the bleakest and most blank of codas. Is this an act of nullification, or clearing a space for the listener’s questions? It’s an album set to grow in your mind with each successive listening.

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Tags: Reinier Van Houdt
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You don’t have to be smart or knowledgeable to enjoy stuff. I just got hold of Thomas Ankersmit’s new release Perceptual Geography and spent the weekend getting off to it, so much that I forgot to read the sleeve notes or remember what I liked about his last album, Homage to Dick Raaijmakers. Perceptual Geography is a piece Ankersmit has worked on over the past few years, built up from sounds made on the Serge Modular synthesizer; it sounds gorgeous. The wide range of sounds, from piercing bleeps to deep, organic rumbling, is a testament to Serge Tcherepnin’s instrument building and Ankersmit’s musical chops. Finely distinguished colourations in noise evoke natural forms, but the type of nature at work here is unformed and primal, testing its bounds for a structure that would contain it. It’s this protean quality, suggesting limitless possibilities in both material and composition, that seems to distinguish electronic music I love from the majority of pieces I find to be dull, safe and antiseptic.

In the latter half of the piece the phased beeps and pulses emerge from the fabric and I started congratulating myself for picking up on the hommage to Maryanne Amacher, until I remembered that I hadn’t read the sleeve notes yet and of course it was Amacher who introduced Ankersmit to the Serge synthesizer and he’s worked with both Amacher and Tcherepnin. The album comes with a substantial interview transcript between Ankersmit and Tcherepnin, which provides a lot of historical background. While apparently more ‘pure’ in its construction than Homage to Dick Raaijmakers, Perceptual Geography is no less complex in its sounds. It had been a while since I last listened to the earlier work and the psychoacoustic effects had slipped from my memory; this new piece makes itself less “about” those phenomena by inserting them as one more complicating factor in making music an immersive, all-engaging experience.

While I’m praising examples of this genre, I should mention Phil Julian’s Carrier Dynamics. Made at Ina-GRM Paris in 2019 and released last year, it’s a suite of eleven ‘intervals’ exploiting what appears to be a restricted set of tools based around pulse generation for maximum effect. Emphasising shape and texture over colour, each track could be misheard as a particularly forbidding moment from Stockhausen’s Kontakte, but Julian’s means of organising the material are very different. The lack of sleeve notes means I’m guessing all of this, but each section tends towards stasis or, occasionally, chaos, with slips and glitches in the surface suggesting an algorithm at work, if not an element of randomness. The short opening sections develop more complex textures before suddenly reverting to longer stretches with little discernible movement. Within a relatively tight timeframe the music alternates between favouring sound sculpture, patterning, and transformation, deftly avoiding a consistent overall form. If there’s a detectable plan at work here, then you’ll be kept listening right to the end in the hope of finding it. It’s all bracingly inscrutable.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Phil Julian, Thomas Ankersmit
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