Boring Like A Drill.

Pauline Oliveros is one of those artists whose genius is sufficiently radical for her vast legacy to be generally acknowledged but rarely examined. A cursory review of her career highlights her pioneering work in electronics, free improvisation and psychosomatic music, but until now her work as a composer for ensembles has been overshadowed by the focus on the meditative and collaborative aspects of her practice. The imbalance is being addressed by two new albums, the first from Another Timbre featuring members of Apartment House. Sound Pieces collects six pieces, composed between 1975 and 1998, and marks a critical introduction to performance of Oliveros’ music without her direct involvement. The earliest piece here may also be the best known: Horse sings from cloud has appeared in a couple of versions on Oliveros’ albums and on this occasion uses clarinet, violin, viola, cello and percussion to produce long tones held over sustained chords. With one exception, the realisations here are all compact pieces, sub-10 minutes each. These works, David Tudor from 1980, Quintessential and From unknown silences from 1996, and 1998’s Sound Piece present distinct works that juxtapose sounds in novel ways. Quintessential, for example, places isolated sounds into a freely-arranged structure, while David Tudor finds new ways of creating continuities through joint activity. It’s curious that the pieces don’t seem to belong to a particular point in time, with no sign of reflecting trends or fashions whether in the Seventies or the Nineties. These are text pieces, giving brief instructions to the performers, so it’s easier to associate them with the late 1960s, particularly Christian Wolff’s open compositions which find a form through the musicians’ consensus. This field of interpretation is grist for the mill for Apartment House, a collective who can make even the least promising material come alive. Apparently, practically no rehearsal went into most of these recordings, placing musicians who have worked together frequently with some newer faces to create music very much focused in the moment. Despite the strong spiritual associations with much of Oliveros’ later work, the emphasis in these pieces is on the immediate experience of sound, without reliance on a grander philosophical (or theosophical) aspiration to give the music meaning: compare with Stockhausen’s ‘intuitive music’ to hear the contrast.

The long work on the album is the forty-minute Tree/Peace from 1984, for string trio with piano. It is structured in seven sections and provides specific pitches for the musicians to work with, but leaves the deployment of that material open to their interpretation of associations to be found in the programmatic text. The album’s presentation shies away from the drama school connotations of the interpretative text, possibly for the best, as Apartment House produce a slender but substantial chamber work of small but significant contrasts in atmosphere and texture, with points of structural reference and moments that almost resemble traditional compositional development. In their hands, at least, the work has an unassuming but assertive presence with greater and lesser characteristics that become more apparent with each listen; a far cry from the usual homophonous haze associated with meditative music.

Meanwhile in Canada, Art Metropole has released a provocative testament to Oliveros with their book and album Resonance Gathering. The audio component begins with a spoken word piece by IONE, poet and Oliveros’ widow. Recorded in their home in 2021, The Sound Of Awakening alternates speech and silence, with phrases that start on the self and move outwards in situation and history. It describes a struggle between individual and collective, of progress and setbacks. Old battles return with new significance, throwing the past into a different light. It’s a fitting introduction to the recording of Oliveros’ large composition To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation, which takes up the remainder of the album. Composed in 1970 for anything from six people to a large orchestra, it presents her group methods on a larger scale, at a turning point between her earlier and later approaches to music. Using coloured lighting for the space, changes in colour cue the musicians on how to use the five pitches they have selected in advance, singly or in groups, with greater or lesser freedom. Notes are played long and allow for wide ranges of modulation. The performance heard here comes from the end of a series of concerts and rehearsals in Toronto by the collective Public Recordings and artist/composer Christopher Willes. There’s about twenty people, musicians and non-musicians, producing an immense, vibrant wall of sound reminiscent of some of the Scratch Orchestra’s concerts-cum-public rallies or a particularly wild Fluxus gig. The apparent simplistic directness of the score, which strikes us now as a marker of that time, carries with it at least some self-awareness often lacking in politically-charged art, with a consciousness of the contradictory implications to imposing self-discipline. That, along with the single-mindedness of a diverse group, affords the piece some enduring power. As listeners, we cannot say if the concert experience was agitating as well as agitated, but it’s good to hear a spirited approach to a piece that gets namedropped but otherwise never heard. Well, here it’s heard in part: three fifteen-minutes excerpts from each large section, with fades in between, from a piece written to be 135 minutes. It would be preferable to have access to the whole thing as a download, in addition to the versions prepped for a limited edition double-LP plus book. As an aural appendix, the book comes with a flexidisc of long tones recorded by the individual orchestra members which you are invited to manipulate to create lock grooves. Perversely, the download provides a demonstration but not the stems for your own non-destructive creative session.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: IONE, Pauline Oliveros
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Had not one but two very pleasant surprises from Penultimate Press; well, more than two really. I’m sure I’ve never heard of Robert Piotrowicz before: he’s a Polish composer and sound artist (don’t panic) and I wish I knew more about him because the three pieces on Afterlife are the kind of serious fun I can really get behind. These are fully electronic pieces, although what is sampled and what is synthesised remains elusive. They work as extended studies in hyperreality, made all the more hallucinatory by using that grey area between physical and virtual as the starting premise instead of the ultimate goal. Piotrowicz has created what sounds like an enormous pipe organ, tuned in 1/3-tones instead of conventional instrumentation and capable of summoning and dispelling entire ranks of additional stops at the wave of a hand. The first two pieces, Rozpylenie (Overdusting) and Noumen seethe and scintillate, making sudden turns in mood and harmonies in ways that seem capricious yet also calculated to retain tension and concentration as he shapes each piece in ways that verge on sheets of electronic noise without ever quite shedding an uncanny resemblence to the acoustic phenomena of organ pipes (which in turn can be pretty uncanny in themselves). The title work is as long as the first two put together and forgoes the tighter focus to produce a dirge-like chorale that swings back and forth between denatured chords to build up auditory hallucinations and then strip them away, only to find new apparitions lurking underneath.

I said more than two surprises because although it was nice to see a new release by Jérôme Noetinger and Anthony Pateras I somehow expected a kind of follow-up to their contemplative A Sunset For Walter from a few years back. Nuh-uh. 15 Coruscations is an entirely different beast: a suite of electroacoustic vignettes that build up into a deceptively devastating montage of analogue and digital electronics with manipulated found sounds that traverse the highest and lowest ends of the genre. The piano is gone, but the tape-munching and synth module graffiti remain, along with more subtle and devious collaging methods, created both in real time and the editing suite. The sounds are fresh and things move fast, mixing and matching ephemera with a quick-witted decisiveness reminiscient of the most subsersive pop art. (There’s that idea of serious fun again.) Too wise to identify a specific target for their subversion, Noetinger and Pateras nevertheless hone in on their theme; as the sequence progresses, the pacing of events broadens out and leads the listener into more reflective spaces. As the novelty and restlessness dissipates, the greater focus on sound and atmosphere holds the listener in the expectation that darker forces could erupt at any moment. It’s a neatly freighted expression of hope. Both of these albums look like they could be released on vinyl but apparently aren’t because screw inferior-sounding consumer object fetishism.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Anthony Pateras, Jérôme Noetinger, Robert Piotrowicz
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All That Dust has released its fifth batch of recordings, three of them as downloads in binaural audio. I went to the launch concert on Wednesday to hear live performances of some of the solo pieces by Rósa Lind and Soosan Lolavar, as well as a spatialised electronic piece by Aaron Einbond. I’ll get round to them later, but for now I want to mention the two binaural releases featuring soprano and label co-founder Juliet Fraser. The first is a performance of Alvin Lucier’s Wave Songs, a piece I don’t think has been commercially available before now. There are eleven short, wordless songs accompanied by two sine wave oscillators close enough in frequency to create beating tones that can be counted. The singer is required to sing tones precisely specified above or below either electronic frequency. Exact pitch is hard to discern when the interference of close frequencies create pulses, and with each successive piece the difference between the two sine waves narrows, from 48 hertz in the first piece down to 0.5 hertz in the last. To stay as accurate as the score requires is an excercise in futility, yet the pursuit of an ideal is as much of what makes us human as our failure to achieve it. As with much of Lucier’s work, the musical interest comes from the discrepancies between scientific perfection and human intervention, with no need to exaggerate the degree of their deviation. Fraser sings in a way which mixes precision with a softer edge (compare and contrast her rendition of Morton Feldman’s Three Voices with the version by Joan La Barbara, who first performed Wave Songs) that makes each song pulsate and shimmer. I lied when I said it’s wordless; the penultimate song sets words by Lee Lozano, the artist whose paintings inspired the piece, on the human limitations on transforming science into art. Despite all this, the music doesn’t rely on a romantic notion of imperfection: if someone were to sing it perfectly, it would be as stupendous as Giotto drawing a circle freehand.

Newton Armstrong’s The Book of the Sediments is one of a set of pieces Fraser has commissioned that draw on the writings of Rachel Carson for inspiration. Armstrong’s use of electronic shadowing of introspective melody is reduced here to essences, focusing on fragments of text reiterated in slowly rising patterns while overlapped by microtonally-tuned electronic sounds. The comparison with Wave Songs is instructive, with some 25 years of history intervening between the two works. At first the impression is that of a more developed Lucier piece, as solid tones beat against each other and Fraser’s calm recital of charged words, but the sounds from the speakers steadily grow more complex, sounding more and more like acoustic instruments before crackling, scattered rain-like sounds cover everything. The theme of the piece is accretion, as one layer replaces another, and the ending does not suggest a final state has been reached, just that observation of the process has concluded.

Another of the Rachel Carson works recently released, this time on Another Timbre, is Laurence Crane’s Natural World, an odd and affecting work of some duration. Fraser and pianist Mark Knoop wend their way through song and field recordings with a pacing that’s too slow to be considered relaxed and too deliberate to be dreamlike. After a lengthy introduction of descending piano phrases and unresolved cadences, Fraser enters with nature observations sung in repeated, gradually rising lines. The pairing with genteel chordal accompaniment makes it all seem rather stately, in a quaint and English countryside way. The qualities of Fraser’s voice come to the fore here, imbuing the words with a mixture of simple dignity and melancholy. The tone is reminiscent of Crane’s earlier European Towns, also premiered by Fraser, both in its cycling of lists and its wistful atmosphere. At times, human music gives way to recordings of nature, before resuming on a slightly different tack from before. Natural World falls into two long sections, ‘Field Guide’ and ‘Seascape’, with a briefer chorus as an interlude, making a piece nearly an hour long. The Chorus is a vocalise of descending glissadi, accompanied by birdsong and somewhat bluesy piano chords. Before ‘Seascape’ begins, the piano has given way to a small, portable electronic keyboard which plays high, reedy drones. The voice alternates between recitation and folksong-like refrains as the subject transitions from land to water. It’s a difficult piece to pull off, with its strange construction, loose seams and surface naivety, requiring confidence in the resilience of the slight materials to hold the listener in suspense as it wanders from one passage to another. Fraser and Knoop laregly succeed by maintaining seriousness without demonstrative earnestness, investing faith in the tangible phenomena depicted in words and on tape while refraining from introspection as a poor substitute. In this approach as much as the slightly awkward, almost apologetic candour that prevails throughout, it comes across as a distinctly English work.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Alvin Lucier, Juliet Fraser, Laurence Crane, Newton Armstrong
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Dominic Coles has been working on music that skirts along the edges of speech for some time, but on Alphabets he also skirts along the edges of music. As with his earlier Wandelweiser release everyone thinks their dreams are interesting, dreams are once again the material but not the subject. While that set of pieces transformed speech into short bursts of electronic noise, Alphabets presents itself as a lesson in translation. Most of the album is taken up by the fifty-odd minute alphabet 1: p-u-s-h, which takes snippets of speech from a recollection of a dream and juxtaposes the phonemes with a parallel context of associated electronic sounds. The sounds are thin and astringent, functioning as symbols instead of sensory allusions. The words are repeated, clipped short or cut long. “Repeat any word over and over and listen as it gradually loses its meaning in the mouth.” The electronic sounds may substitute words by repeated association, while simultaneously occluding any semantic connection between word, sound or reference. Silences are frequent, often seeming longer than the sounds.

Is it music? Yeah. With its pedagogical structure, somewhere between rote-learning and indoctrination, meagre sound resources and emphasis on language, Coles teases that he’s testing the boundaries of what might be considered musical while retaining the essential form and content. What really confounds the listener’s appreciation of this music is that it is impossible to ignore. It’s too alienating and intrusive to leave as a background, but almost too exhausting to listen to it closely. To take the piece’s apparent expectation seriously at face value, is to buy into a deeper conundrum that Coles is implicitly raising in his music, skewering the bien-pensant notions of music and language sharing some ineffable bond. As with any diligent pursuit of the idea, the more doggedly one pursues the supposed connection the further it recedes – this thwarting of assumptions may be the most challenging part. The album ends with two shorter pieces, each presented as applied learning from the first work: two more dream fragments with more verbal context yet also with greater periods of sound alone, perversely rendering both more disorientating that what has gone before.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Dominic Coles
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