Boring Like A Drill.

“It’s like looking at someone with short hair. We could tell if that person had long hair in the sixties and now has short hair, as opposed to the guy who’s always had short hair since the fifties.”
Peter Gena, in conversation with Morton Feldman

Having first heard parts of Richard Emsley’s for piano series, started in the mid 1990s, I little suspected that these pieces signalled a change in style from his earlier work as an accused member of the British New Complexity School. The austere arrangements of undeveloped points and blocks of sound in for piano start to make a new kind of sense with this background information: the static sound-world of these later works isn’t necessarily a disavowal of the B.N.C.S.’s frantic activity, but a fresh approach to some of its values. Where the B.N.C.S.’s notorious ‘black page’ approach to notation asymptotically aspires to re-create musicianship in free flow, Emsley’s unadorned sounds can be heard as emulating the interior processes of musicians, in reflective contemplation of the stuff of their art.

Still/s is a cycle of twenty-four pieces for five musicians, composed between 2002 and 2019. On Saturday, they were played in their entirety for the first time by Apartment House as part of Music We’d Like To Hear. There were two concerts, of about two hours each, to get through the whole set. The first hint of Emsley’s approach is that each piece is for only one to three of the five instruments (the musicians here were Mira Benjamin, violin; Anton Lukoszevieze, cello; Heather Roche, clarinets; Nancy Ruffer, flutes; Kerry Yong, piano). The series was originally conceived as a counterpart to artist Joan Key’s painting, the juxtaposition of repeated shapes and muted, near-white colours finding an analogy in Emsley’s music.

These are not pieces to be approached with a restless mind, unless one is seeking to silence the internal monologue. Many of the pieces stick to one or two pitches, echoed back and forth between instruments. The apparent stasis is at odds with an inherent instability in each piece, as Emsley notates his isolated sounds in aperiodic settings, frustrating any definable pattern that might otherwise emerge. Other pieces set out gamuts of notes to be played in irregular permutations; more rarely, a piece will be made up of a brief motive heard in variations. Successive pieces will seem to vary only in instrumentation, before the next abruptly introduces something entirely anomalous: simple sounds presented in a way that is anything but simplistic.

In retrospect, the series unexpectedly reveals a microcosm of musicianship, with minor forays into studies in timbre, intonation, extended techniques and rhythm. With their focus and their awareness of the potential inside each unprepossessing piece on paper, the musicians of Apartment House steadily zoomed in on this microcosm, expanding on each hidden facet while remaining as near-monochrome as possible. What impressed most was the use of instrument tone and register, with flute and violin, clarinet and cello at times blending almost indistinguishably, at other moments coming close to mimicking each other, alto flute against cello harmonic, E-flat clarinet in just the right place to match the muted violin.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Richard Emsley
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Thanks to the musicians who keep exposing me to contemporary Canadian composers I’d have otherwise never heard of. Quatuor Bozzini’s set of Michael Oesterle’s Quatuors opens with a nice comfy chorale that almost immediately drops away to a near-inaudible skein of harmonics. This piece, Oesterle’s String Quartet No. 4, is the latest and longest of the four pieces heard here (but not the entirety of his output for string quartet). The piece moves casually back and forth between slow pulses of alternating chords and scurrying patterns of harmonics, before returning to chorales and whispers. Oesterle gives no programme other than to assert that his musical materials are always “geometric, expressive, and puritanical”. It is the most subtly disorienting piece in the collection, as each passage yields to the next without any formal structural division, while beguiling sounds are tempered by a secretiveness as to where, if anywhere, the music may be directed. Quatuor Bozzini’s style of playing ideally evokes that shrouded expressivity, never loud but each phrase always indelible, however softly it is played.

The remaining three pieces are more easily apprehended, each falling into neatly digestible sections. String Quartet No. 3 “Alan Turing” from 2010 explores patterns, gestures and textures with an appropriate sense of wonder and discovery mingled with loss and regret. The Bozzinis bring out the gentle playfulness of each movement, slightly darkened by the melancholy of its subject. The harmonic language and gestures at times recall the freshness of a previous generation’s “post-minimal” tonality in its first flowering, before it was worked in harness to the service of Hollywood soundtracks. The titles of 2016’s Three Pieces for String Quartet evoke various animals but Oesterle’s notes again cite geometrical puzzles as each piece’s prime mover, claiming inspiration from Stravinsky and Cage. I can hear a kinship with Ruth Crawford in here, which is the highest of praise. The earliest piece here, Daydream Mechanics from 2001, is the most extended and hushed movement in the collection, with genuine whispering, searching out unexpected consequences from an otherwise confined grid of chordal patterns. Quatuor Bozzini’s championing of this composer, matching his language with a refinement of style that moves from rapid filigree to near-stillness in the same mode of emotion, reveals depths slowly swirling below the undemanding surface.

Mark Ellestad’s career as a composer has moved slowly, with extended pauses. Another Timbre has revived him from obscurity in the new collection Discreet Angel, drawing together three pieces written between 1988 and 1994. I’ve listened to these many times now and still haven’t gotten any closer to what’s happening inside them, despite the intimacy of instrumentation, performance and recording. The 1994 piece, Sigrid, is a brief tape of Ellestad overdubbing pump organ and Hardanger fiddle, the interweaving chords layered and worked into aural broadcloth. The dedicated application of craft to an undemonstrative result is the signature of the three pieces heard here.

Sigrid appears as an interlude to the larger-scale works of much lower density. Both are, in context, memorials for Ellestad’s parents. Discreet Angel itself is for guitar, with just enough musical stuff to expose the instrument’s vulnerability when played at anything less than a continuo. The pauses and unaccompanied notes allow the silence to leak through, creating music that is neither whole nor broken, neither active nor still. For guitarist Cristian Alvear, expert interpreter of some of Wandelweiser’s most esoteric works, the balance of sound and silence is deployed into the fullest and most lyrical playing I’ve heard from him. In the Mirror of this Night is a duet for violin and cello, played here by Mira Benjamin and Anton Lukoszevieze. Equally slow, it finds its own path as it meanders across forty-five minutes, but again, even when all has been heard, the ultimate course of that path remains obscure. At any given moment in each of these pieces, the music itself is never forbidding, but the wider context defies the listener’s attempts to comfortably accommodate it inside any known form or structure. Benjamin and Lukoszevieze trade solo parts or join in unison almost as often as they work together. Ellestad himself praises the musicians for their “restraint, patience, stillness and a willingness to bring flexibility to time and repetition.” I can’t really add more to that, save that they convey the music with immediacy while still keeping it unknowable.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Mark Ellestad, Michael Oesterle
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I guess there is still a lot more that can be done with guitars; as with pianos in previous centuries, the synergy between artistic creativity and technological development is prodigious. It’s still a bit of a mystery what exact role technology plays in Fredrik Rasten’s solo album on Insub Svevning, where what sounds like an electric guitar is not. When previously heard in his collaboration with Vilhelm Bromander, Rasten’s guitar was mostly bowed to produce complex overtones. Here, everything is plucked and, while the overtones are simpler, they predominate. Svevning is two prolonged studies in arpeggiation, each successive note combining with the last to produce beating frequencies. There’s tremendous sustain in the harmonics, which suggest they have been electronically induced, yet Rasten also sings pitches against the guitar to extend and perturb the resonance of the strings. Despite the technical emphasis on psychoacoustic phenomena, a different effect takes over as content is subsumed by duration. With each piece running to forty minutes, the consistency becomes mesmerising for the listener while it becomes wearying for the player, leading to turns in the course of the music that suggest human need over theory.

Meanwhile, Intonema have released a solo album by Finnish guitarist Lauri Hyvärinen. Cut Contexts crops selections of the guitarist’s practice over the past two years of Covid retreat, presenting a set of five scenes of aural portraiture. Guitar playing is heard as a work in progress and as an activity in place, a given situation subject to transformation. While the guitar here might focus on technique, the emphasis is shifted by the locating presence of environmental sounds and by relocating device of setting each piece into a seven-minute window of time, framed by silence as needed. It creates a kind of cubist presentation, in which the often cosy domesticity of the subject matter is skewed by an oblique depiction in strictly formal terms. The method neatly excises the potential self-indulgence of the diary format that lurks beneath other pandemic documentaries. Why are there not seven pieces? Probably because that would be too many.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Fredrik Rasten, Lauri Hyvärinen
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What a strange piece! What I’ve heard of Eva-Maria Houben’s music tends to fall into either of two categories: static, dispassionate music that becomes oddly affecting by its very remoteness, or static, dispassionate music that refuses any sympathetic connection with the listener. together on the way is neither: a collaboration with the GBSR Duo that’s built on the premise of suspense, in which the processes of time are suspended even as you are aware of time’s passing. At least, that’s how it comes out in this live recording of the piece in Huddersfield. I suspect the piece may take on a slightly different character each time it’s played, as a continuing collaboration between the three musicians. (Sadly I couldn’t make the London performance last weekend.) The piece is an extension of Houben’s previous work with pianist Siwan Rhys, A peaceful, silent place, premiered at LCMF in late 2019: a work of inner calm and patients that ranged from subdued to almost imperceptible. For together on the way, Houben’s organ playing and Rhys’ piano is joined by GBSR partner George Barton on percussion and while the pacing and textures are similar, the newer work sounds like an inversion of the previous performer dynamics. Houben maintains a steady drone throughout, too soft but too rigid for the listener to believe that it can stay the same. Barton and Rhys add brief, isolated interventions that provoke but never disrupt the stasis, leaving the listener perpetually waiting for a change that may never come. It’s unexpectedly dramatic, even ominous, if you allow it to be. You wonder, between the three of them, when they will allow the impasse to break, either change or drop away, or whether they can keep up the suspension of the faintest of sounds indefinitely.

The latest Magnus Granberg release reunites him with Skogen, here as an ensemble of seven musicians recorded last June. How Lonely Sits the City? wends its way around Granberg’s prepared piano, joined by harp, tuned and untuned percussion and amplified objects. A pair of violins complete the ensemble. The predominance of plucked and struck instruments here gives the piece the sparsest texture I’ve yet heard in Granberg’s compositions, even more so than in his quartet Nattens skogar. Allowing for finer shades of dark and light, it’s a cold and spiky piece, with soft but short sounds played in denuded textures. Occasional bursts of electronic noise add to the alienating experience. While recorded in summer, the piece sounds empty and wintry, largely it seems as an effect of Covid; a reflection on the world shutting down and doors closing for musicians everywhere. Interestingly, the piece also began as a quartet, but while Granberg added parts for a larger ensemble, the prevailing mood remained small and sparse, with each musician adding to the overall work as sparingly as possible, making each individual sound count.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Eva-Maria Houben, Magnus Granberg
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The pandemic’s legacy of space and contemplation lingers in the most social of artforms, even as things are just starting to open up around me. Francesco Serra’s Guest Room is a triptych made from empty space, vacancies that seem to offer nothing more than pure resonance. The apparent purity of floating harmonics is deceptive and false, as with the serenity of a depopulated landscape; in each successive iteration, Serra reveals more of how the evenness of sound is eerie and disturbed. Using a month-long residency in Teatro San Leonardo in Bologna, by then closed to the public, he arranged microphones beneath the vault of the church’s nave to record the echoes of his electric guitar off the walls and ceiling. The diffuse clouds of sound are hard to discern as guitar-like; the notes also mention the presence of snare drums, which you suppose are there for high-end resonance until the third part hits with dramatic force.

I haven’t really discussed Robin Fox’s music here, despite admiring it for many years and having played on the same bill as him several times. Fox’s special way with vintage synthesiser and electronics was frequently married to a visual component, keying his music to oscilloscopic light projections or to dance performance. For the former case in particular, the integrity of the concept required music of relatively simple sounds and gestures to be most effective, to the point that considering audio recordings of many of his compositions seemed to be an exercise in bad faith. The two parts (in fact, separate but related pieces) of Threnody To Now are a different matter. Recorded alone in the studio during lockdown, using a modern modular synth, each is a focused, meditative activity in clear, direct tones and gestures. The two parts clear an internal space, with the repeated harmonic movements moving beyond frustration into equanimity. Too restless and hard-edged to be a New Age sop, it gives you the real deal instead, quietening the mind through considered action. It’s a concise study of the effectiveness of Fox’s deceptively minimal musical language.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Francesco Serra, Robin Fox
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It’s been a busy couple of weeks, partly because I finished up a new piece of music. It’s on Bandcamp if you want to take a peek. Normal service will resume shortly.

I had a bunch of unused recordings left over from making my feedback synthesis piece Chain of Ponds. Not wanting to waste them, I fed the recordings into the feedback system used to make them in the first place, creating eight 30-minute stereo files of more complex sounds.

These files were at first mixed together to make a composite piece titled An Entire Bottle of Hospital Brandy in 2021. I eventually decided the piece needed more work. For this new piece, the eight recordings were fed into a matrix mixer that randomly switched outputs so that any of the 16 channels may be modulated by any other. Each of the resulting eight modulated signals were then fed through a gate controlled by a different signal path, so that only certain parts of each output are audible. After a half-dozen or so revisions, the system is now capable of producing a more varied range of sounds and textures over an indefinite period of time, using only minimal additional processes.

Gate sensitivity and volume level are controlled manually, but this performance uses minimal intervention. The eight outputs are panned across the stereo range. Inspiration was drawn from David Tudor’s performance practice and from Henri Pousseur’s Paraboles-Mix.

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

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