Jürg Frey just turned seventy, which might mark a time to take stock of his work so far. It seems to describe a process of steady development, gradually transforming without any sudden turns. Two new releases focusing on recent ensemble works confirm this view: Borderland Melodies on Another Timbre collects works from 2019, 2021 and a 2020 revision of a work from 2014 which display definite but subtle changes in compositional approach. The Apartment House ensemble turn out for Frey again, featuring Heather Roche on clarinet and Raymond Brien on bass clarinet. The opening title work augments them with violin and cello, each sadly tiptoeing back and forth from one pairing to another until halfway through when a piano interlude appears, then withdraws, without ceremony. From there, the second half seems to proceed slower than the first, as any sense of development or momentum no longer matters. It’s a solemn adagio that that firmly engenders a pensive mood out of its two-note patterns, even as Frey doesn’t seem to be pushing the sounds around too much.
The clarinets are joined by string trio for L’état de simplicité, a work parcelled into four movements. The titles here are all descriptive of the music: À la Limite de sens plays with extremes of range, starting low then staying high, most breath provided by the rasp of strings; Toucher l’air is as faint as possible without dissolving into the imperceptible. La discrète plénitude allows the grouped sonorities of the instruments to play chords that sound quiet but full, then concludes with bare melody of plucked strings with punctuating chords in Les zones neutres. The ideas are the essence of simplicity, even poverty, but in his maturity Frey seeks to flesh out the basic concepts into music that pleases the senses at least as much as the mind. The concluding piece Movement, Ground, Fragility is a half-hour work which unites all the above instruments with unpitched percussion that fills Frey’s silences with a crosshatched background for seemingly selfcontained pitched sonorities. Once again, things change halfway through when the previously inert, unmatched shapes start to fit together in a way that accumulates momentum almost despite itself. Having reached a certain point of development, it quickly fades out instead of seeking a summation.
If you’re familiar with Frey then it all starts to sound a little too familiar, until you start to think about the instruments and realise you’re hearing them as a composite, neither in a functionally expressive role nor as pure “sound in and of itself”. Frey has reached a point where he employs techniques from previous generations of forward-thinking composers in ways that still sound fresh without reducing the instrument’s role to that of a vehicle for transmitting either pitch at one theoretical extreme, or timbre at the other. Elsewhere’s latest disc of Frey’s music is the 51-minute chamber ensemble work Continuité, fragilité, résonance. Completed in 2021, the piece reunites tow of his repeat collaborators, Quatuor Bozzini on strings and Konus Quartett on (don’t panic) saxophones. Frey has composed quartets for each before, and now he has meshed the two together in this expansive work, with no compunction about letting the full ensemble flow, nor with restrictions on the instruments’ inherent sonorities. In Frey’s own intimate way, it maintains the heft and sweep of a chamber symphony, laying on phrase after phrase of ensemble playing and steadily building things up to an inverted climax where the music suddenly stops. An extended, slightly muted coda follows, which simply ends without a resolution. Does it sound too full? It’s not correct to say that Frey is getting indulgent, for he has been so before, only in his earlier work it was with silences and repetitions. These pieces aren’t breakthoughs or revelations like I Listened to the Wind Again is, but they serve as a consolidation of his art.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Jürg Frey
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More noise, but distant: Andrea Borghi, Evan Lindorff-Ellery
Tuesday 23 May 2023
People keep finding sounds to play with. Andrea Borghi has made the eight pieces on his Palsecam EP by working with VHS tape recorders and their tapes. It reads like a gimmick or an ideas-piece relying less on sound and more on the concept of meta-commentary on dead media and obsolete technology, but it doesn’t play that way. Borghi eschews directness, preferring to use his given means as a technical limitation to guide his process at least as much as his own taste. He ekes out small, faded sounds with a dull electronic patina, keeping the scale of each piece small to concentrate the reduced palette of effects into something detailed but thin. The sounds are fleeting and elusive, refusing to let much stay around or assert its presence enough for your mind to get it in focus. It’s intriguing when you notice what’s going on, letting each moment pass by, although not intriguing enough to attract your attention in the first place, unless you’re tipped off to the gimmick.
The two pieces on Evan Lindorff-Ellery’s Swollen Air are titled Electric Guitar Feedback Field Recording iPhone Objects Contact Mic and Amp Hum Electromagnetic Feedback Field Recordings Contact Objects Mic Handling minimal edit, which gives some insight into the prosaic approach taken here. The two sides of this tape are all about documenting process, using intervening technology like phone recording to dirty up the sound as he coaxes something approaching music from obstinate and limited means. The listener shares in the artist’s process: side 1 ends with Lindorff-Ellery sitting in his hot, stuffy room blowing his nose after feeding bursts of static through his amps; side 2 finds him struggling to maintain momentum as his chosen method proves ultimately unrewarding. I salute his patience but would have appreciated him handling the situation with less equanimity. Perhaps in a live situation it would work better, as he’d have to juggle with the complicating factor of simultaneously holding audience expectations at bay.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Andrea Borghi, Evan Lindorff-Ellery
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Semi-tonal: Petr Bakla, Bekah Simms
Sunday 21 May 2023
The curiously named Late Night Show collects three piano-oriented pieces by Czech composer Petr Bakla. I’ve heard one piece by him before, the orchestral There is an island above the city which I described as “pursuing the more sinister implications of settling down in one place”. The principle applies here too, with each piece taking an idée fixe and drawing elaborating details from it through increasingly close examination rather than through extension; deduction instead of induction, as it were. The pianist Miroslav Beinhauer is the soloist in all three works and his supple playing gives each piece an insidious warmth that draws the listener in to music that could sound obsessive and alienating in harder hands. Bakla’s writing and arrangements help immensely to create this sound, of course; the pair’s skills are demonstrated most overtly in the closing piece, No. 4 for solo piano, which in the second half unexpectedly opens out into florid runs of notes layered with expressive chords, producing a rewarding complexity that feels like a discovery for composer, pianist and listener alike.
This relaxation of musical strictures may be down to the piece being Bakla’s oldest composition on the album, from 2013. The most recent is his very unconventional Piano Concerto No. 2, written in 2021. Miroslav Beinhauer is accompanied by eight members of Brno Contemporary Orchestra, with Pavel Šnajdr conducting. Beinhauer reiterates an ambiguous, rising scale (shades of Feldman’s Piano and String Quartet) set against hocketing low winds, brass and strings that come and go, transforming the stillness into a pulsating, shimmering surface of dark facets which occasionally catch a flash of light. Major Thirds from 2016 is in fact for piano and string quartet and may be the most striking work here, with Beinhauer and the Brno soloists dwelling on an arpeggio that rises and falls without any significant release until any consideration of pitch is irrelevant other than as a vehicle for other musical attributes to establish themselves as the subject. At times the strings slide in pitch, combining with the piano to create complex tones and multiples, at others they provide staggered layers of accompaniment, divided into pairs with one duo playing so softly as to sound like an electronic reverberation of the other.
The blurb to Bakla’s album describes him as working with sounds more than notes, and this could also apply to the Newfoundland composer Bekah Simms, whose style is a type of splintered, or blasted, expressionism using technique to dramatic effect (cf. Lim Barrett Saunders Romitelli). Bestiaries is a brief survey of three ensemble pieces from 2019-20. The performers here – Cryptid Ensemble and Ensemble contemporain de Montréal – keep the energy levels high throughout while still holding the structure tight so the driving force of Simms’ writing never stagnates into pure indulgences of timbre. Foreverdark has amplified cellist Amahl Arulanandam suitably grinding and groaning against an electronically-enhanced ensemble, while Bestiary I & II puts soprano Charlotte Mundy behind the mic with a similar setup. While keeping to the same atmosphere, the vocal work takes a slightly gentler approach and avoids the temptation of strained histrionics, a surprising achievement in itsef. A work for smaller chamber ensemble, from Void maintains the haunted gothicky sound and disturbing noises without the aid of electronics.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Bekah Simms, Petr Bakla
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Noise versus Noise
Sunday 14 May 2023
I thought something had gone wrong. I’ve been taking a little noise holiday, away from the likes of Jürg Frey for a bit, and figured it was time to get around to the first compilation issued by Party Perfect!!!, another one of these composer collectives who take their irreverence seriously (see website for details). PP-01 begins with an untitled work by Michelle Lou: I know her stuff, right? Finely observed electroacoustic phenomena, that sort of thing. Instead my ears got blitzed with a barrage of harsh electronic noise that made me initially think I had a corrupt file or put on the wrong track. Turns out that Lou’s untitled is a four-part digital electronic suite of ruthlessly clipped and distorted audio that gleefully assaults the senses for forty-seven minutes. Parts of it sound like when you try loading a non-audio file into a media player to see what happens, and I’d like to think some sections are precisely that. When you get past the initial shock, you start to notice the details carved into this brutalist sound scuplture which, together with performative flourishes of bravado, sustain the piece beyond the deadening effect of relentless sonic bludgeoning (cited as an inspiration in the accompanying booklet). After Lou’s piece, there’s another two hours worth of electronic compositions by Stefan Maier, Michael Flora and Other Plastics, each just as abrasive and confrontational. The booklet includes recipes, too; they’re vegetarian, but one is for a barbecue sauce so…
Trombonist Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø has produced a pair of works on Dystopian Dancing that attempt to push solo performance techniques beyond the defined constraints of the instrument. The first was recorded in 2019 and exploits the close amplification of his trombone with air and microphone artifacts to produce unstable constructions that haphazardly flip between pitch and noise. Oversaturation and use of plastic mouthpieces and mutes add to the quasi-electronic atmosphere but in the second half it reverts to an improviser’s comfort zone of exploring extended low-end snorks to play for time. The second piece was made about a year later and projects material from the first into an electroacoustic collage that stays lively for longer, particularly when normal brass sounds re-emerge towards the end, commenting on the chaos with a queasy mock fanfare.
Noise of a completely different kind comes from Jacques Puech’s cabrette. A cabrette is a small French bagpipes, for when regular bagpipes aren’t irritating enough. Gravir / Canon pairs compositions for the instrument by Guilhem Lacroux and Yann Gourdon respectively. In the former Puech overdubs himself with constantly ascending scales at different rates over a steady, clacking rhythm that resembles a kind of folkloric take on James Tenney’s For Ann (Rising), but with the cool psychoacoustic effects replaced by a manic exhilaration that’s both uproarious and a little scary, especially as it just keeps on going. In Gourdon’s Canon Puech is joined by four other cabreteers to play overlapping patterns in a staggered formation as suggested by the title. The gestures are more relaxed here but even so it shares with Gravir the same dogged, obsessive pursuit of a compositional idea until the excessiveness becomes the point. That, with the massed nasal timbre of the pipes creates a bracing, febrile work that you can get a high out of if you’re in the right mood while simultaneously driving your housemates up the wall.
