Boring Like A Drill.

(Part one here.)

It was wonderful to hear Cage’s Eight played live, in the round no less, at the Music We’d Like To Hear concert in St Mary at Hill. I said I’d found the version in the Apartment House box set from last year a relative disappointment, owing to the potential for dynamic contrasts in the piece that were passed up. Sitting in a small church, however, with the winds and brasses encircling you, the small differences in timbre and force of breath became alive. With greater spatialisation, Apartment House’s emphasis on sustained tones at the expense of short sounds set the flexible structure of Cage’s composition in clearer relief: having created anarchic harmony, he made anarchic antiphony possible as well.

The sounds in the church seemed particularly warm that night. Mira Benjamin and Anton Lukoszevieze played Mark Ellestad’s violin and cello duet In the Mirror of this Night, having recently recorded it for Another Timbre. In this setting, at close range, it all sounded particularly sumptious. As a communal listening experience, the piece’s wandering is less unknowable, becoming more of an exemplar of what Cage had called purposeful purposelessness.

The previous evening, members of the Plus Minus ensemble played works by Sarah Hennies, Alexey Shmurak and John White. White is a composer who should be appreciated now to avoid the rush. The pieces selected – involving piano, clarinet, double bass, percussion – were characteristically short, such as the two examples of his piano sonatas, Nos. 105 and 143. Less Scarlatti and more a late bagatelle by a Beethoven who interests have turned from tonality to oblique commentary, the piano sonatas exemplify the dual traits of White’s music appearing both benign and threatening. Each miniature, neatly assembled and considerate of your attention, conceals a nagging interrogation of the assumptions upon which it rests: a forced extension, a moment of stiffness, an unresolved lapse. In another time and place, his brief, pleasant pieces would have had him gaoled as a subversive. In this time and place, he instead suffers the small mercy of being regarded in much the same way as an outsider artist, despite his significance and achievements. He’s what, eighty-five now? The compositions heard were composed between 1989 and 2004, with the exception of his old party piece, Drinking And Hooting Machine, where Plus Minus were joined by volunteers from the audience to alternately drink from and blow across bottles, running down to empty.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: John Cage, John White, Mark Ellestad
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I still take John Cage for granted, forgetting how long it’s been since heard any played live. After the much-discussed box set of Number Pieces played by Apartment House on Another Timbre last year, it was good to hear the ensemble interpret several of them in person. At three gigs in one day at Wigmore Hall (missed the third) they played Four6 and Seven2, while at Music We’d Like To Hear the following Saturday they played Eight. Four6 doesn’t specify the sounds to be played by the four performers, just that they select twelve repeatable sounds, to be played when cued by the score’s elastic time-brackets. For this version, Heather Roche on bass clarinet, Anton Lukoszevieze on cello and percussionists Simon Limbrick and Chris Brannick fulfilled Cage’s wish that the sounds emerge as though without source, brushed into being. The sounds remained calm, without the sort of punctuation that Cage’s score permits, serene and transluscent even when at their most complex. Apartment House’s realisations of the Number Pieces strongly favour sustained sounds, while remaining sensitve to Cage’s way of thinking to avoid a ‘top-down’ approach that can destroy the delicacy of this music. It also seemed a very “full” version of the piece, with faint but pervasive sounds; in some interpretations Four6 can sound like articulated silence (Lukoszevieze’s programme notes drew a direct comparison of this piece with 4’33”).

Perversely, I was more aware than usual of the silences that open up during Seven2. This long piece (52 minutes, Four6 is 30 and Eight one hour) may the ultimate example for a case to be made for Cage as an ‘ambient’ composer, enfolding the listener in a bath of sustained low-voiced sounds. Cello, bass clarinet, bass flute, bass trombone and double bass are joined again by the two percussionists. The percussion is again unspecified, and Limbrick and Brannick’s knack for unusual but subtle sounds seeped into all of the instruments’ colouration, making this performance particularly warm.

The two Wigmore Hall matinees were supplemented by two more pieces. Ryoanji, Cage’s mid-1980s piece for soloists playing organically sliding tones over a hieratic rhythm, played in this case by two percussionists instead of the usual one, taking advantage of exploring Cage’s interest in “staggered unison”. The rarely-heard Speech 1955 is a long work for five radios accompanying a person (in this case, Miles Lukoszevieze) who occasionally reads from newpaper articles. It’s an arid piece, which is perhaps a sign of how a good piece of art can change to reflect the times in which it finds itself. Nearly seventy years on, it’s hard to imagine how the piece may have first sounded to an audience yet to be immersed in pop art. Cage’s ideas about globalism and multiple attentiveness were still developing, but however this piece may have once heralded the dawn of an information economy, it now effectively demonstrates its current dismal state. In this respect, it’s unnerving how Speech 1955 refuses to entertain in the function of a quaint anachronism.

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Tags: John Cage
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I’m not buying into the premise of this year’s London Contemporary Music Festival, back after a Covid-induced hiatus, but after two hot nights beginning in bright light under the skylights at the Woolwich Fireworks Factory the third evening turned grey and rainy and I prepared for the gig by looking out over the bleak lower reaches of the Thames while a cold wet wind blew through me. The first act I caught was Andy Ingamells giving Nam June Paik’s classic Sonata Quasi Una Fantasia a dedicated performance that was still very British in its repressed melancholy. I’m going to focus on the compositions here, as the improvisations, poetry and videos left me wondering if I understand anything about them. (The videos were a mix of “spent an hour too long looking up something on Wikipedia” and a revival of the early 80s New York genre “I’ve been here so long I assume my personal fuckups are generally relatable”.)

I’ve now heard more Evan Johnson, as much as it is possible to hear his music. Richard Craig perfomed his solo bass flute émoi with a confidence that made its faint sounds seem sourceless, a low sighing between a breath and a hum that floated through the large, populated space just audible but undeniably present. A big moment was the premiere of a new Frank Denyer piece, commissioned by LCMF. Five Views of the Path matched soprano Jessica Aszodi with the Octandre Ensemble playing an eclectic mix of instruments ranging from baroque to homemade inventions. With Denyer, the exotic colouration is used as expressive material, sound as evocation. Aszodi had a thankless role sitting among the musicians, picking out high notes in vocalise that mingled with the trio of recorders and struck berimbaus. Strange colours and percussion were a recurrent theme, particularly on the following night. The Explore Ensemble gave the first UK performance of Clara Iannotta’s Eclipse Plumage, a complex woven rope of small sounds that intertwined to produce an ominously indefinite chord that continually transformed its medium and displacement. Percuissionists and normal musicians alike operated a large array of small percussion and amplified objects, backed by a grand piano rigged with an electromagnetic device to induce sinister emanations.

Also receiving its first British performance was Rebecca Saunders’ percussion duo dust II, an extraordinary work quite unlike anything I’ve heard by her before. Caspar Heinemann and Christian Dierstein gave a bravura performance as they moved from the audience to the front of the room, onto and eventually across the stage, managing a dizzying array of instruments. Saunders adopted a more relaxed pace than usual, allowing the intrinsic complexity of the sounds to provide her busier textures. Sounds were combined beautifully, with a strong focus on metallic semi-pitched sounds. The firm grasp on the material and the progression (in sound and movement) from one place to another made the piece work as music and not just a virtuosic exercise, even as the momentary effects were dazzling. To complement this, the evening began with Crystabel Riley‘s requiem of solo drumming, a prolonged study in fusing rhythm into timbre.

The Saturday evening gig began with another revived Fluxus piece, Ben Patterson’s First Symphony getting its first British airing. Someone asked me to sit on the left side of the hall for this piece, but I didn’t trust them and so sat on the right. There were four premieres that night, commissioned for the event. Cerith Wyn Evans’ …)(. finally got its complete airing, long deferred since the preview given in 2019 for its expected debut the following year. At that time, “the hieratic, slow-paced performance on piano and gongs was betrayed by a perfunctory and non-committal ending” and here the pay-off was a listless antiphonal chorale from the orchestra. Not the orchestra’s fault, given the heartfelt work they put into Tyshawn Sorey’s tone poem for cello and orchestra, For Roscoe Mitchell. Soloist Deni Teo and the pickup orchestra conducted by Jack Sheen played this beautifully scored and phrased work with rapturous solemnity, reminiscent of Feldman’s Cello and Orchestra but with fuller, less stifled voicing for the cello.

Hard not to roll the eyes at the prospect of an orchestral premiere by Elvin Brandhi aka one half of Yeah You: this kind of crossover almost never works. Except this time it kind of did. Brandhi’s GIFF WRECK took her usual materials of noise and vocal aggression and displaced them onto a video screen of two vocalists sitting at home deploying auto-tuned effects, mimicked and counterposed by dense bursts of orchestral textures. Brandhi herself kept true to her peripatetic style, pacing round the perimeters of the hall occasionally adding her own amplified interventions. Oliver Leith’s
Pearly, goldy, woody, bloody, or, Abundance trended heavily towards the jokey side of his work and probably went too far. That was probably the point but it’s at the expense of the piece’s staying power. An exuberant mish-mash of triumphant fanfares, complete with aural pyrotechnics, its self-conscious humour is good fun but disposable in the manner of Wellington’s Victory, which again is probably the point.

Mariam Rezaei’s frenzied activity on turntables and samplers for her lengthy solo SADTITZZZ was a remarkable achievement, being a virtual skronk solo that had all the singlemindedness of your typical free improv muso while being more inventive and fun than about ninety percent of them. It also worked as a nice teaser for the concluding act of the night, when Roscoe Mitchell himself appeared. He’s eighty-one now, I think. Typically considered to be jazz, which is an all too limited understanding of his musical achievements. Having just subjected people to my jazz-deafness, I prepared for disappointment but didn’t hear it in that way at all. A slight figure but mesmerising on stage, he captures the audience through plain statements that he then eloquently expands upon into detailed arguments, extending motives in different directions and then relating them in ways that are intuitively clear without ever exact repetition. He also knows when to stop, and deploys silence to pointed effect. Solos on soprano and baritone sax were then followed by percussionist Kikanju Baku, who emerged from the back of the hall as a disruptive trickster figure. Once at his drum-kit, his relentless attack acted as harsh colouration with rhtyhmic variance. Mitchell played off and against this barrage, equally unruffled whether he was matching the flow or simply commenting with isolated notes. A captivating ending.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Andy Ingamells, Ben Patterson, Cerith Wyn Evans, Clara Iannotta, Crystabel Riley, Elvin Brandhi, Evan Johnson, Frank Denyer, Kikanju Baku, Mariam Rezaei, Oliver Leith, Rebecca Saunders, Roscoe Mitchell, Tyshawn Sorey
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I’ve been out all week and my brain is fuzzy. Last Sunday it was to see Morphogenesis playing at Cafe Oto, for the first time since 2015 I think. This was touted as featuring the original members but Clive Hall had to drop out and was replaced by Jonathan Bohman. At least this time they were all in the same venue: for their previous gig Ron Briefel preferred to broadcast his part from his car parked out front. This could be taken as a sign that the group has mellowed with age, now that they’re approaching the end of their fourth sporadic decade; however their sound check consisted of them playing out on the street for about an hour, inviting passersby and musos from the matinee show to get amongst it with their equipment.

Their group improvisations, made with a plethora of random objects, electronics and digital/analog interference (also a piano), deftly elude the do-a-bit-of-everything-all-over-the-place performance style that such a setup usually invites and quickly gets tedious. They play with a wealth of detail while maintaining a coherence in mood that is achieved through group activity: each follows their own path without any pressing concern to defer to the others, a novel consensus achived through the simple expedient of letting everyone talk over each other. The gig broke into four distinct pieces, each heavier and more sharply defined than the last. It’s like eavesdropping on a group of awkward middle-aged nerds doggedly pursuing their particular passion: intriguing, colourful and even illuminating, even as you fail to understand the subject. I can relate, as someone trying to learn how to socialise again after an extended reclusiveness.

Back again on Tuesday for Lucy Railton’s long-deferred two evenings, mixing her interests in modern composition, electronics and cello improvisation. The improvisations grouped cello with voices and saxophone (Sharon Gal, Caroline Kraabel, Sophie Fetokaki) and with two basses, electric and acoustic (Farida Amadou and John Edwards). The former was sparse and pure to the point of excess, the latter blunt and busy. The two compositions were a new work by Catherine Lamb and Morton Feldman’s Patterns in a Chromatic Field. The Feldman is a sadistic piece, right out of the gate demanding melismas in harmonics from the cello and octave-leaping chords from the piano, all rapid, all pianissimo. Ten years ago in the same place I heard it played in the most gruelling of circumstances, so by comparison this occasion seemed deceptively benign. Railton and Joseph Houston played it in a plainspoken style, at a pace neither forced nor lugubrious. It was a demystifying performance, which favoured presenting variations in colour and tone over maintaining a single, ambiguous state, even offering moments of surprising brightness.

I didn’t catch the title of Catherine Lamb’s piece, if it was mentioned. It was born out of the two of them working together in Berlin, originally as a solo work for cello augmented by Lamb’s use of resonant spectral synthesis. On this occasion, it was played without electronics, with Lamb instead joining in as second musician on viola. At times I’ve found Lamb’s solo compositions for acoustic instruments excessively plain, but this was not the case here. For the viola part, she extrapolated the overtones implied in Railton’s playing, creating a sort of counter-melody that would emerge and disappear as a distinct entity. They played in relative tuning, Lamb basing her intonation on the harmonics of Railton’s pitch, a kind of sonic tightrope-walk that showed strength and resilience even as the apparent means of support were almost imperceptible.

For the rest of the week I was at the London Contemporary Music Festival, with additional excursions to Wigmore Hall for Apartment House playing John Cage. I’ll get around to these later, for my own sake. After seven days of live music, people and art-venue beers, it’s all been a little too much. In fact, I should be back at LCMF right now but the pull of a night in and a home-cooked meal is too strong. Doubtless I will regret it later.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Catherine Lamb, Lucy Railton, Morphogenesis, Morton Feldman
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As someone who instinctively distrusts curatorial conceits, this new album from the Birmingham Record Company should be welcome. anthem is an LP-length collection of five works with no common composer, ensemble, event or location; the presence of each piece becomes its own anomaly, which is kind of refreshing in itself. The sleeve notes are distractingly apologetic, in the British manner. A couple of pieces are ‘meta’-music, while others could claim to be but are not.

Emily Abdy’s anthem begins the set well by thwarting expectations and raising apprehensions. Abdy, armed with electric guitar, chants a repeated phrase that grows in intensity even as it folds in upon itself; behind her, the Thallein Ensemble play a swirling crescendo. It all collapses like a facade, retreat followed by a giddy mess of inarticulate revelation and dismissal. The whole thing takes on the rhetorical devices of “empowering” art and deploys them in the opposite direction of the genre’s null certainties. I hope I will never understand it.

I’ve described one piece by Andy Ingamells before (in collaboration with Maya Verlaak). In Petting Zoo, his method is similar to Tape Piece in that the ‘music’ is created through the inadvertent consequences of competing activities. Ingamells is emcee and narrator, describing the process by which he made, or didn’t make, the piece while inviting members of the audience onto the stage to pat, stroke and otherwise gently molest the musicians in Apartment House as they play. It can occasionally err on the side of trying to bluff its way through its own self-consciousness, but leaves open the question of whether an attempt to fail at making music constitutes a failed attempt.

Genevieve Murphy’s suite of five short pieces F.I.N.E (it stands for Fucked Insecure Neurotic Exhausted) comes from a concert by the Nieuw Ensemble in Amsterdam in 2015. As with the other pieces mentioned so far, it’s a live performance with audience reactions apparent throughout. For the recording, we are of course disconnected from the experience, and the album shrewdly excises the applause from the end of each piece to preserve their status as isolated musical artefacts for contemplation. F.I.N.E is a pop-art style of redolent fragments, both found and created, juxtaposed in apparently arbitrary fashion to create a whole. Musical topics are touched on at arm’s length, through spoken permutations, hymn tunes and recorded conversations. Again, the question rises as to whether the nature of music is being interrogated or swerved.

Maybe a composer should just sit down once in a while and write a piece of music. Between Petting Zoo and F.I.N.E, Ryan Latimer’s orchestral bon-bon Gorilla and Orange Sun drops in like an uninvited guest, appearing all the weirder for it. The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra give it the refined enthusiasm it needs to fulfil its mission. Its qualities – full, colourful, innocuous and short – make for an archetypal BBC Proms commission, but took a wrong turn here and landed in Huddersfield by mistake. The closing track, Corey Mwamba’s kr-ti-sa, compounds the bewilderment by not being a concert recording at all. Mwamba withdrew from live performance a few years ago by way of protest and now makes his jazz through overdubbing himself in a home studio. I cannot meaningfully comment on jazz as all I can hear is that it sounds like it is meant to sound. In that respect, it shares a quality with a Proms overture.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Andy Ingamells, Corey Mwamba, Emily Abdy, Genevieve Murphy, Ryan Latimer
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