Boring Like A Drill.

Evan Johnson’s music is hard to hear. Does everyone say that about him? While other composers may reward your closer attention, Johnson just seems to compound your uncertainty. Are you sure of what you’ve heard? When it’s over, you remember the experience of listening, but the image created in your mind is defined by its obscurity. The music’s reticence is compounded when the medium is an instrument identified with the personal and intimate forms of expression, as in Ben Smith’s collection of Johnson’s piano pieces lists, little stars issued by All That Dust.

The prevailing mood across these pieces is one of extreme introversion, where even the titles seem to be deployed to deter further inquiry (the brief mon petit pleurant is succeeded by the cycle mes pleurants, two works use ‘dehiscences’ in their titles). The 2010 piece hwil is about thirty seconds of almost inaudible deliberation at, if not on, the keyboard. There is a proliferation of precise actions in each score, somewhat in the manner of Kurtág, but the aim is not on clarity of intricate details. Johnson’s music may be faint but it is not frail; at times it is almost crude in protesting its reticence. The greater part of the two pieces in Dehiscences, Lullay (“Thou nost whider it whil turne”) is smothered in a blanket of white noise, cutting out suddenly as though to catch the listener in the act of eavesdropping. The rare loud notes at the start of mes pleurants‘ “Se Zephirus” have a similar effect.

When the piano is heard, its statements are deliberately half-formed, unresolved, with even the more expressive flourishes smudged by claustrophobic pitch spaces. You hear the thought process itself, in all its agonising uncertainty, without the cleaned-up end product. The two earlier works heard here attempt to make their sonic content inconsequential, while the later pieces make strategic use of the relative presence or absence of musical substance. The largest work here, 2013’s “atendant [sic], souffrir”, lists, little stars, is a duet in which the fuller sound is balanced by more delicate playing, more a displacement than a dialogue. Despite, or perhaps because of its greater length, it’s an easier piece to follow; but this may also be due to acclimatisation through the opening tracks on the album.

The sound quality is particularly good, given the extreme dynamic range needed to catch a reasonable impression of the piano in performance. Ben Smith would appear to play with all the exactness and greater musical consideration needed to bring these pieces into tentative life, with a talent for letting each sound fade and die in their own way. As a further vote of confidence, he is joined by Ian Pace for the title duet.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Evan Johnson
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Listen: Mattin is doing something to his audience, individually and collectively. What that something might be is not immediately clear, but after a while you start to get an idea.

“The room was completely dark. I entered the space and started to engage with each member of the audience individually asking questions quietly into their ear and then I performed an even more intimate gesture and then I asked for reflections afterwards. The rest of the audience could only hear whispering and laughing without really knowing what was going on.”

A music concert is at once an social activity and an intimately personal experience. Mattin’s piece, performed in a small venue in Berlin back in 2015, exposed the paradoxes of that uneasy duality. Each action performed here worked directly and indirectly, building a relationship of shared trust and consent while exercising the tensions of uncertainty, anticipation and apprehension: a kind of direct-action Luc Ferrari composition on achieving intimacy.

The recording of Licking Ears released last month (non-copyright but there are CD-Rs) is itself almost nothing, as it teases its way into the listener’s consciousness. With attention and accustomisation over time, as for the audience members in the room, the nature of the piece gradually makes itself known, but each participant yet withholds a little of the experience from the others. For us, listening to it now, the voyeuristic aspect of public performance predominates here. To listen, we must make ourselves complicit, or become empathetic, or else distance ourselves from the entire exercise. It’s another one of the ways that Mattin keeps testing us on the differences between what we hear and what we understand.

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Tags: Mattin
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Given that composing, playing and listening to a piece of music are distinct and unrelated acts (per Cage), then what can one hear in Sam Salem’s London Triptych? The three electroacoustic pieces, made in close collaboration with the Distractfold Ensemble from 2015 to 2017, draw their inspirations each from William Blake, Austin Osman Spare and Nicholas Hawksmoor. As might be expected from such a roll-call, the work feeds upon an occult reading of London that has seemed to accumulate steadily over the last few decades, paradoxically as the city becomes ever more global: inevitably, the spectre of Iain Sinclair is invoked. As with Sinclair’s work, you have to believe that the shaping forces behind the work really are there for the resulting form to take on any significance outside of itself. For the rest of us, the energies unleashed in Sinclair’s writing or Salem’s music are patterned in complex (but not intricate) ways that are left for us to decipher.

Salem’s pieces require the performers in groups of two or three to play a variety of amplified objects and electroacoustic constructions combined with electronics and tape (a video element is also present in live performance). It’s a sonic phantasmagoria of sounds both indefinable and hyperreal, with Distractfold adeptly handling each device with the ingrained knowhow of a keyboard or violin. The third part, The Great Inundation, was given a live broadcast a few years ago; in this later recording the sound is fuller and presented more confidently, showing both revisions and additional elements and Distractfold’s greater absorption of Salem’s esoteric language. It pays to play this loud, as colour and texture take up the forefront of the piece’s interest, considering the opaque structure and absence of clear details. With each piece, a more recognisable element emerges from time to time, with cello added to the mix in the last section and voice in the latter two. The voice is high and clear, repeating two or three notes, at odds with the bristling surroundings: a still point in the turbulent landscape which may be mistaken for a guide.

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It’s a mug’s game, really, messing with the classics. No matter what your intentions are, you will probably come across as a wannabe iconoclast or a toady. The need for your work to become a statement in itself is thrown into the shadow of a much more respected work. You choose to make your own work incapable of standing on its own merits, without it also needing to change the audience’s perception of a venerable classic. To succeed, your own work must walk a knife-edge between disrespectful and too respectful.

Karlheinz Essl’s Gold.Berg.Werk takes a performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and inserts live electronic interludes. It has existed in several forms over the years, originating from his collaboration with a string trio playing an arrangement of the Bach. Essl describes his interventions as a confrontation and a liberation. This new version returns the work to keyboard, played by Xenia Pestova Bennett on piano, with Ed Bennett producing the live electronic spatialisation: a transducer has been placed inside the piano, so that the instrument’s acoustic resonances enhance the electronic sound while it is projected around the performance space. I missed the live performance last month and so was not able to hear how the electronics change from one rendition to the next, which may have helped my understanding of what is happening here.

Pestova Bennett plays a selection of twenty variations here, in groups of five bookended by the electronic interludes. The big problem here is that Essl’s interventions are occasional and ephemeral, such that for all their technical artistry, they are soon forgotten again once the Goldbergs resume. An addition of this type can be very effective in other media, such as architecture, where the presence of old and new persist in coexistence, but in this temporal scheme Essl sounds like he is politely interjecting from time to time to voice agreement with what has been said before modestly withdrawing again. It appears that Gold.Berg.Werk is to be considered as a work in toto, in which case the two composers’ elements share a very unequal partnership. Essl had marked out a particular selection of variations for his work, based on the intial string trio arrangement, and elements of the string playing modelled in the electronics persist here. In Pestova Bennett’s performance, she alternates between the canons and character variations, where Essl grouped them together.

It is perhaps best to hear this recording as Pestova Bennett’s take on Bach’s Goldbergs, even more than Essl’s. She seizes this opportunity to take on the work’s daunting reputation by interpreting it afresh, “as a living and evolving organism”. In this incarnation she presents a nicely variegated set of variations, with lively contrasts in texture and expression from one to the next, emphasising Bach’s range of voices and manners, using the electronic sections to present the whole as a vast patchwork rather than a continuum. Ed Bennett’s work on spatialising the sound to open it up even more is best heard in the binaural recording, which is also available as a download.

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Tags: Karlheinz Essl
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Does this sound funny to you? I think I’ve heard enough music tuned in just intonation lately to stop it sounding immediately ‘weird’, so that the strangeness to be found in Christopher Otto’s multiple string quartet rag′sma is in the complex beauty that arises from a few pure, simple harmonies. The conventional tuning on your keyboard or sequencer is fudged, to tidy away loose ends when moving from one key to another. Intervals made of pure ratios sound clearer and sweeter, but when you start stacking them up on top of each other they drift, slightly but always further and further from the original tone. Otto makes this tiny paradoxical discrepancy the driving force of his new composition.

In rag′sma, two pre-recorded string quartets start from the same place and slowly weave back and forth on these simple harmonies, with each step building from the previous note instead of from a common reference tone. One quartet inexorably rises while the other falls, albeit at a rate too small for the ear to distinguish. After about a minute, multiplication of these simple numbers means that each quartet has deviated in pitch by one ragisma, which works out to about one two-hundred-and-fiftieth of a semitone (or one-fifth of a schisma, if that helps). Can you hear a difference that small? By itself, no; in context with other pitches, yes, in mysterious ways.

What would otherwise be the same harmony can shade from sour to sweet, clear to cloudy, all on these small inflections of intonation. Here, the differences are subtle enough that the more common acoustic interference phenomena of beating and overtones are not prominent. The piece is a constant, radiant source of exotic colourations in harmony and timbre, with strings taking on a buzzing quality before resolving into a singing tone, minor key shadings on warped major triads, pitches that seem to arise from nowhere. The spiral-like movements around the tuning chart (suggested in the cover art) reflect the structure and effect of the piece: too slow and steady to make you dizzy, but a process of constant change that never lets you pin down exactly where you are until the ride is over.

This album contains two versions of rag′sma, the two-quartet recording described above and an alternate version where a third quartet plays live over the other two. The live quartet plays harmonic tropes, fading in and out with chords that augment and transition between each turn in the spiral. While denser in texture and harmony, the third quartet’s higher register brightens the overall sound and gives more extroverted colouration to the piece. The album sequences this version first, preparing the ear to appreciate the relatively more sombre two-quartet version. Oddly enough, it’s hard to immediately reconcile that the second track is made from the same basic foundation as the first, such is the effect that a small increment in tuning can have on the whole.

I didn’t see anything in the sleeve notes if someone worked out how many different pitches are played in this piece (I’m remembering how Ben Johnston’s 7th String Quartet took a simple process that branched out into 1027 tones), or if the constant shifting rendered the exercise moot. If you’re wondering how on earth a string quartet could play this stuff, it’s to do with Otto being first violinist and co-founder of the JACK Quartet. This appears to be his first major composition recording, after having nurtured an interest in alternative tunings since being a student. There’s no mention here of what, if any, technical support was needed by the quartet to get the right intonation and synchronisation between the three recordings. Having heard them play Rădulescu’s Fifth at Wigmore Hall some years back like it wasn’t a big deal, it could well be that this perfomance is another outcome of years working together on projects like this and other spectralist works made from harmonic overtones. Their playing here maintains a baroque serenity, somewhere between a consort of viols and a glass armonica. I presume it would be a challenge for others to attempt it.

Each mix has been spatialised in its own way. It’s getting released on vinyl and as download, not sure if a binaural or multichannel digital file will be made available.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Christopher Otto
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