After blowing off going to gigs all year I actually made it all the way to Wigmore Hall to hear the JACK Quartet play Catherine Lamb’s divisio spiralis, composed for them in 2019. It’s a long work, just about ninety minutes, punctuated by pauses. The string quartet play with amplification but no other types of electronic processing that Lamb has often used to augment the harmonic space of her music. The quartet plays in just intonation, gradually opening out from a narrow band of frequencies in the higher range, introducing more readily discernible melodic fragments before slowly sinking to the lower depths of their instruments. The melodies and chord changes are plaintive and cadential, particularly as they only briefly rise before gradually tending downwards. The JACK Quartet played this with stoic bravura, using thinned-out, vibratoless tones that nevertheless filled out the sounds with the harmonic spectrum Lamb would have hoped for, with clear ringing pitches, beatings and other (psycho)acoustic phenomena quietly present throughout. Besides its length, it’s a difficult and conflicted work, in which system and sentiment share an uneasy cohabitation. In the moments it evokes rarefied folk music, it renders the surrounding sections indistinct, and never quite balances its apparent wish to be both demonstrative and impassive. This creates a curious state in the listener where you’re never quite certain what you’re hearing at any given moment; you have to keep your ears open and note the strengths and vulnerabilities as you find them. That’s an admirable achievement in itself, but her more recent string duet I heard at Cafe Oto last year resolved these elements into a stronger and more coherent work.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Catherine Lamb
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Quick takes, mostly warm
Monday 17 April 2023
Seán Clancy: Ireland England. It’s been ages since I’ve listened to any 70s German synth-rock, so listening to this reminded me of hearing analogue synth space-grooves for the first time. A free-flying piece that maintains focus even as pulsating arpeggios and airy drones fade in and out for longer than most Krautrockers could manage, anchored by a seriousness of intent. This is a single take recorded drecitly to a handheld device, also on video with text projections for the piece’s insipration.
Fabrizio Modonese Palumbo: ELP. Listened to this blind and thought it was some wide-ranging noise improv by a bunch of precocious adolescents with a lot of energy, complete with a quaint sample to kickstart the whole shebang. Turns out Palumbo has a long and distinguished CV and this is a solo affair made as part of a project relating choreographed movement to sound. I’m glad that sophistication doesn’t come through, lest it dull down the flawed but lively tangle heard here, but disappointed the title isn’t a reference to Tarkus.
Henning Christiansen: Op. 1984 (160C) Goodday Mr. Orwell, Green-Ear-Year. Having been overwhelmed by the five-hour montage of Op. 176 Penthesilea I did not expect this. Christiansen and his local guitar hero son play a gig together and holy shit invent the Boredoms a year early, right there on stage. The punters are not pleased; neither is the tortured ghost of B.A. Zimmermann when they summon his presence.
Ed Williams: Decomposition Study. Two organists (Christoph Schiller and Anna-Kaisa Meklin) play counterpoint on an organ of 16th Century design, tuned in sixth-tones. Microtonality nerds hoping to geek out to nuances of intonation will find themselves frustrated as Williams adds another compositional premise, with himself and three other assistants – well, obstructionists, really – systematically messing with the wind supply; basically like a John Cage organ piece only somebody hired Stan Freberg, Mark E. Smith and Eric Morecambe to man the pipes. Timbre, tone and dynamics break up in non-intuitive ways that seemed understated on first listen, overstated on the second.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Ed Williams, Fabrizio Modonese Palumbo, Henning Christiansen, Seán Clancy
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3 by 3, 1 by 3, 1 by 2.
Thursday 13 April 2023
There are some new Jürg Frey albums about on Elsewhere and Another Timbre but I’ll get to them later. Circles, Reeds, and Memories (Elsewhere) documents a concert in Limburg late last year by the trio of Germaine Sijstermans, Koen Nutters and Reinier van Houdt, playing one of their compositions each. I’ve discussed other pieces by all three individually, so here we get to compare their styles more directly. Even while there are strong resemblences, you can detect Sijstermans’ disciplined approach, Nutters’ slow accumulation from the smallest array of pure sounds, van Houdt’s tendency to narrative and slowly developing drama. The trio play clarinets, harmonium, small organ, all blending in ways which I’m sure we’re used to now, although Nutters seems to give Sijstermans more prominent work to do on the clarinet than in her own pieces. The new wrinkle here is the presence of ‘objects’ and tape recordings which rumble underneath the otherwise smooth surface to produce interesting blemishes; or it may be the presence of an audience in the chapel. Neat twenty-minute chunks to sample each composer’s work.
Is he rambling? Giovanni Di Domenico, I mean. The album’s credited to the trio of Domenico, Silvia Tarozzi and Emmanuel Holterbach, but Domenico gets composition credit and, more crucially, “later completed” the work with editing and more of his piano in post-production work. L’Occhio Del Vedere (Elsewhere) is a one-hour piece for microtonal piano, frame drum and piano with the scale, dynamic and interplay of instruments that all resemble late Feldman, but the impetus here favours performance over composition. The harmonic language is similar too, with the piece beginning with an ascending piano scale echoing Feldman’s Piano and String Quartet and Tarozzi’s piquantly tuned violin recalling his propensity for pointedly enharmonic notation. Those resemblences end as the piece tends to drift from one idea to another, a more relatable wandering than Feldman’s formal decisiveness. There are moments when that relatability becomes a weakness, with passages that seem to go nowhere but are too forgiving to command your attention. The real kicker is Holterbach’s large frame drum, which softly hums and throbs behind the violin and piano duet, producing strangely oscillating subharmonics that push everything back into the uncanny again.
Biliana Voutchkova and Sarah Davachi are definitely not rambling in their Slow Poem for Stiebler (Another Timbre), a tribute to the composer Ernstalbrecht Stiebler. Back in 2020 Another Timbre released an album of Voutchkova performing Stiebler, including his violin solo Für Biliana. This duet by Voutchkova and Davachi combines violin, voice and reed organ to stretch short moments from Stiebler’s composition into long, long held sonorities that let harmonies and overtones float around inside each extended phrase. It’s a fittingly odd way to address Stiebler, as his late work such as Für Biliana has seen him moving away from the intensely examined harmonic stasis of his best known pieces, even venturing into florid but creaky improvisation. Voutchkova and Davachi capture both the improvisation and the stasis – even as their piece is notated it expects great flexibility from the performers – with music that is equal parts meditative and analytical.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Biliana Voutchkova, Emmanuel Holterbach, Germaine Sijstermans, Giovanni Di Domenico, Koen Nutters, Reinier Van Houdt, Sarah Davachi, Silvia Tarozzi
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Lizzy Welsh: The Target Has Disappeared
Sunday 9 April 2023
The latest release on Discreet Editions comes from Australia. Don’t be fooled by the cover: The Target Has Disappeared features contemporary composers at the more provocative end of the spectrum, each with a work for solo baroque violin performed by Lizzy Welsh. Why baroque? “Gut strings are perfectly imperfect. They contain so much complexity that has been ironed out of sound through the modern use of steel.” The grain of the instrument’s voice, the violinists touch and intonation, are at the forefront of the three works here. Alexander Garsden’s Chaconne (for I) concentrates on fleeting arpeggios, breathy and skittish, gathered into phrases that fade in and out again like slow breathing. The simple structure of contrasting pulses draws out the tension in the material as it hovers between pitch and string noise. Samuel Smith’s archive is a longer piece which elaborates on these ideas, adding to the complexity of pitch by retuning the top string to an overtone (7th partial) of the bottom one. Harmonics abound, with the gut strings compounding the nominal purity of timbre. Welsh makes the most of the wide variety of attack and dynamics at play in this piece, creating a visceral sense of layering between counterposed voices, strongly differentiated by character and spatial presence.
All three works were composed for and premiered by Welsh, recorded here after several years of working with the composers and their music. The final work presented here adds sounds besides the violin. Natasha Anderson’s The Target has Disappeared is a reflection on personal loss that premiered with visual projections in 2018. In its present form, a short, simple melody is underpinned by electronic sounds which serve both as commentary and quiet obstruction to the soloist. By this means, the first half of the piece resembles a concerto, with the two forces often alternating instead of working together, keeping Welsh’s solo reticent and fragmentary. Instead of building, the piece reduces its means; in the second half the electronics have slipped away and Welsh holds long, single notes on the violin while softly singing. Voice and instrument are each gentle but raw, filling the supposedly inert material by being alive to its own vulnerability. Anderson’s electroacoustic compositions have been a bit scarce in commerically available recordings and I’m not aware of many pieces by Smith or Garsden floating around out there so this new release is most welcome.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Alexander Garsden, Lizzy Welsh, Natasha Anderson, Samuel Smith
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Three threes always
Sunday 2 April 2023
I don’t want to be nasty. Almost all the music I discuss here raises ideas that interest me and I want to engage with, even if I dislike it. I’ll usually delete the dismissive comments made in draft because I’m approaching these as an artist as much as a critic; nobody’s getting rich in this genre so there are no real mercenary or cynical efforts to dismiss as unworthy. Having said that, appreciating the craft of a piece of music is a different thing entirely from trying to give it the respect of considering it as a work of art. Keep this in mind if I carp that Bruno Duplant and Seth Nehil’s collaboration the memory of things doesn’t beat you over the head with attempts to be stunningly original in form or medium – most things don’t need to be. Not familiar with Nehil at all but Duplant’s work with him here has produced a trilogy of very slick aural collages, each about the same length, which allude to sounds rather than present them directly, much in the fashion pioneered by Brian Eno’s On Land. Anything too specific is overlaid with a patina of clicks and crackles, which will strike you as either too calculating to induce nostalgia or as a means to direct you away from ambient vagueness. It’s another marker of Duplant’s eclecticism in his musical practice, which values intellectual curiosity over a firm identity.
“Les Capelles documents the very first time Garazi Navas, Miguel Angel Garcia, Àlex Reviriego and Vasco Trilla played together as a quartet.” I’m always dubious of these things where improvisers get together and expect some magic to happen right off the bat. It puffs the spurious ideals of spontaneity and authenticity that hamper improvisation as a medium. No matter how good it sounds, you always wonder how much it better it could have been after some more work together. The above quartet play accordion, electronics, double bass and percussion respectively, all in that evocative style where everything sounds electronic even though it isn’t until the accordion shatters the illusion. As with the Duplant/Nehil album, there are three pieces here of equal length and I would take it as a compliment to the depth of the acoustic performance that it took me a while to get stright in my head which album was which. They do not bore, and it’s all played in a chapel in Barcelona so it sounds lovely.
I’m listening to a set of three pieces all about the same length (again?) by Erik Blennow Calälv, with pianist/composer Lisa Ullén, Finn Loxbo on guitar with Ryan Packard on percussion and electronics to accompany Calälv’s bass clarinet. They’re all experienced and judicious improvisers, so I presume there’s an openness to the scores to allow the slow but free interplay that flows through each piece. Each piece – Bi, In yo & Iwato – is apparently based on a traditional Japanese scales, but what with the overall texture and Ullén’s prepared piano goddamn it sounds just like Magnus Granberg to me. I mean, that’s great and all, but still. The smaller scale adds to a more accessible intimacy, so if you’re pressed for time then this album’s a good way to get a surrogate Granberg fix in more manageable chunks.
