Boring Like A Drill.

What little I’ve heard of Nomi Epstein’s music has been made from apparently simple structures that define certain parameters of the sounds to be used at any given time, but otherwise leaving the means of realising those sounds and placing them in a larger structure up to the performers. It requires trust in the musicians to be open and creative when interpreting the sometimes paradoxical requirements of a score that is both specifically restrictive and unspecifically permissive. The common effect I’ve heard in her compositions to date is the way they direct the musicians towards producing complex, composite sounds in ways that are utterly unfamiliar and leave you uncertain as to how they were produced. You could say that extended techniques are being employed, but in this case it’s a bit beyond that and beside the point: the instruments and how they are being used are not the issue, as the nature of the sound is suffciently strange to remove the question of its production from speculation. Paradoxically, this method makes the instrument an invisible means to a audible end, just as in ‘conventional’ music.

The new Epstein album on Sawyer Editions features just one work, an hour-long duet for violin and percussion titled cubes. Composed in 2020 for violinist Erik Carlson and percussionist Greg Stuart, it expands upon those compositional concerns into extremes; of commitment, timbral uncertainty, audibility and durations. The opening sound, a partly-voiced drone that sounds half-organic and half-mechanical, takes up the first five minutes of the piece. Epstein describes the score as twenty-four “building blocks of sound” and that primary focus on timbre together with the elemental structure of the piece are nakedly evident throughout the sixty minutes. The juxtaposition of one slab of faint but dense sound after another appear to be the result of collage, with the sounds seemingly made from very small activities blown up by close amplification – this isn’t exactly stated but is alluded to in the brief sleeve notes. Carlson and Stuart’s sonic discoveries in this piece are extraordinary, having sought out and pursued the most quiet, unobtrusive sounds to bring out an inner life and character to each one. In general, the two of them work to create complex unpitched sounds redolent of woodgrain and small interior spaces. Listened to once, it seems dry and austere. Playing it again in the background, it keeps catching you out with some striking detail you hadn’t noticed before. Repeated listenings sound different each time as some other small thing suddenly grabs your attention. Whether you consider it to be a tape collage or a violin-percussion duet is a moot point. “I wouldn’t have made this piece for anyone else,” Epstein writes, and I can’t imagine anyone else would have realised the score in this way.

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Tags: Nomi Epstein
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The sleeve notes for Jack Sheen’s Solo for Cello recommend you to listen with the speakers “placed as far away as possible”, as if the music itself wasn’t alienated enough. For thirty-five minutes, cellist Anton Lukoszevieze (he of Apartment House) grinds a dogged path through an uncanny valley of cello music, all fluttered harmonics and slow rasps, smothered by a heavy, metallic mute. The same sonic intrigue created by the effects of the ‘whispering cadenza’ from Ligeti’s Cello Concerto are regimented here into erratically cycled patterns and dynamically compressed to allow only occasional random stray outbursts to leak from the seams. It’s also not exactly a solo: an electronic component is present from time to time, but only to add to the uncanny effect that you’re not quite hearing a cello, or otherwise to coat the pristine background with a layer of schmutz. At certain interludes Lukoszevieze’s industrious labouring on his instrument drops away to a prolonged, sullen drone before the sawing resumes, producing a texture both thin in range and thick in detail. An even more stark and nervy companion piece to Sheen’s Sub released last year, Lukoszevieze makes Sheen’s solo a tour de force of suppressed ferocity. It’s been released as a CD by cassette label Trilogy Tapes but it may not be in quite as anomalous company as it first appears.

Almost missed the Insub release of Bryan Eubanks’ for four double basses a year ago; which was pretty stupid of me as it’s a weirdly beguiling piece quite unlike his other electronicky stuff I’ve heard. It’s all harmonics again, real soft when backed by the incipient sonority of the large wooden instruments, playing in a staggered canon of repeating patterns. All you need to know is printed right there on the front cover. It should be looping but there’s just enough fuzziness in the setup to create a dreamlike gauzy sound that seems almost too insubstantial to persist in your consciousness, yet only seems to move when you let it slip from your attention. Jonathan Heilbron, Mike Majkowski, Andrew Lafkas and Koen Nutters man the contrabass viols with a feathery touch.

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Tags: Bryan Eubanks, Jack Sheen
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Stupidly, I missed the Friday night concert of Music We’d Like to Hear dedicated to pieces by Tim Parkinson, but I did get to the Saturday’s Amber Priestley gig. Pretty sure this is the first time I’ve experienced her work performed live; everything else so far had been heard over the radio. It’s not exactly like you’re missing out when you don’t see it, but the visual, or theatrical element to her compositions are intrinsic to what makes them work in their own way as music. Yes, it’s playful, and the theatrical elements are reminiscent of the jokey aspect present in work by other contemporary British composers, only without as much of the defensiveness or the regulated fun. More importantly, Priestley takes these stage antics beyond their usual sideshow role and deploys them as compositional techniques. The performance of her string quartet Ev’ry evening, ev’ry day demonstrated this most fully on the night. It was the most conspicuously active piece played – individual musicians sent in turn foraging around the room for additional score materials, crawling away to play in isolation on the floor, engaging audience members in square dance calls or just peacing out with a Tunnock’s Caramel Wafer – and so nominally the most distracting for the aural component, but this was part of the point. The inspiration for the piece was the disruptions encountered in everyday life, where simple tasks are thwarted by complications introduced by someone else. The ensemble never had a moment of coherence for long before someone got up, turned a fellow musician’s score to a different page and affixed an overlay or instructions that sent her on a digression. It resembled some of Luc Ferrari’s chamber pieces, in that musical progress is replaced by obligatory deviations: the clash of disparate textures and idioms suddenly changing or disappearing produced a kind of clotted antiphony through inadvertent accumulation of consequences. Moreover, these interruptions and obligations made you question whether any of this was in fact ‘fun’. At least you felt the audience were enjoying it more than the performers, which is as things should be.

The quartet themselves were game and able, both in running, walking, dancing and crouching with Priestley’s ideas, and in bringing out notable characteristics in material that might easily have been obscured. That substance was more evident in the other string quartet played that evening, And Yet Something Shines, Something Sings in that Silence: two pages of quasi-canonic passages which the musicians are required to interpret in a different tempo and loudness in each new iteration. At the end of each pass they pause, rotate the page 180 degrees and start over; repeat. This piece offered a loosely similar interplay of voices, but with greater consistency. The musicians were a mix of experienced players on the new music scene (Mira Benjamin on violin, Chihiro Ono on viola) and performance postgrads at Goldsmiths (Amalia Young on other violin; Kirke Gross on cello). After the interval they were joined by clarinettist Pete Furniss, Clare Spollen on piano (plus accordion) and James Creed on electric guitar to play Repeat yourself until friends are embarrassed…, a 41-minute work where the material is pre-pulverised. Goldsmiths’ students left musical doodles and sketches on large sheets of paper in the University corridors; these were then collaged by Priestley and the collages filmed and transformed to produce a video containing the resulting collages and other structures divided into quadrants on screen. The video may also function as a distraction, although the lack of spectacle to it diminishes that possibility. Musicians were scattered around the room, making music that on this occasion felt pretty low-key and sedate, at times more resembling an AMM-type group improvisation. The lack of a focal point may have been the issue, with all of the alienating factors of Priestley’s process fixed on tape in advance, with musical activity dissipated by the deliberately thinned-out density of musicians playing at any given time. Priestley herself was making occasional contributions here and there on various novelty handbells, having earlier been ushered into a brief impromptu violin part in Ev’ry evening, ev’ry day.

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You don’t have to be original to be good, but the experimental allows a certain leeway while anything that tends to the conventional in substance runs the risk of setting down its foundations on the shifting sands of taste. I’ve been listening to field studies, a collection of pieces by composer Emilie Cecilia LeBel, and while much of the writing is admirably spare (in evaporation, blue the pianist adds notes on a harmonica in lieu of detail to fill out the bare structure of the piece) or impressively sonorous (even if nothing but shapes and light reflected in the glass conjures up a moody horn section from solo alto flute and baritone sax, aided by tranducers attached to drums), I kept hearing moments where the music tripped over itself. It sounds like LeBel wants her music to be expressive, but then feels obliged to justify that impulse with dramatic flourishes to rationalise the seriousness of her intentions. These flourishes follow popular taste and so resemble moments of movie music, probably meant to be stirring but serving more as distracting lapses in the work’s solidity.

Or I’m just not a very sophisticated listener and I need novelty as a hook on which to hang my perceptions. At the All That Dust launch concert a few weeks back I heard Mark Knoop performing a realisation of Rósa Lind’s piano cycle Trente, completed (or at least last added to) early this year. Trente is itself part of a larger cycle of four compositions (so far?) collectively titled Kandinsky Kunstwerke, three of which are recorded on Lind’s new All That Dust CD. I’d listened to Knoop’s recording of Trente once before the concert and several times since, and I’m only just starting to hear what’s in it. Made from thirty short movements taking up a little under forty minutes, their number, brevity and variability of ordering imply a kaleidoscopic array of highly changeable moments without a focal point; yet there’s a fixity in the overall composition, attributable jointly to Lind’s conceptual framework and Knoop’s holistic comprehension of the forces in play. I read the sleeve notes and came away bamboozled by the invocation of Kandinsky and the immediate association with Galilean astronomy throughout each piece. My understanding was of little more than the music having been produced through extensive labours on a conspiracy board of themes, with what we hear being a manifestation of a highly concentrated tangle of allusions oversaturated with meaning to the point that comprehension becomes extremely difficult, or perhaps impossible. Lind manages to subsume the ontological stress of her subject with a musical language that appears relatively untroubled, even as it is highly charged: not as jarringly discrete as Messiaen’s piano cycles, nor as outlandish as Georges Lentz’s cosmological divinations; which is another way of saying, surprisingly tasteful.

The other two pieces from the Kandinsky Kunstwerke cycle presented here were recorded in Australia about ten years ago. They are also solos, but with additional electronics. Cellist Geoffrey Gartner gives a lean but ominous tone to Extrema: A Galilean Sarabande and Laura Chislett gives what resembles a character piece in the tightly virtuosic flute solo Courbe dominante. I’ve focused more on Trente here as it provides a key to interpreting the other works, but the two shorter works are more immediately accessible, conveying urgency through a compressed lyricism. The electronic and other elements are inaudible for the most part, with both pieces experiencing a sudden, anomalous disruption. Each piece makes a self-evident case for requiring repeated listening; having earned my respect I’ve started to become intrigued and may even be warming to them.

Over the last few years Adrián Demoč has been building up an impressive body of work on record. It’s entirely deserved, with each newly-heard work revealing more facets and shades of an individual, consistently beautiful compositional voice. There’s that appeal to taste again; Demoč appears to follow a muse of highly cultivated simplicity, in the manner of Howard Skempton or Morton Feldman but mimicking neither. Neha is his third CD on Another Timbre and presents two works for orchestra, allowing us to hear how he handles larger forces. As may be expected, it’s with a light touch. In both works the sound is soft and translucent, reducing the number of instruments wherever possible and still sounding intimate in the moments when playing tutti. The title of the 2018 work Neha in fact means ‘tenderness’. It holds a single moment and lingers over it for us to appreciate, seemingly in repose yet sustained by as little movement as necessitated by breathing. The unisons between instruments as they play simple chords gain a faint complexity by Demoč employing the differing timbres and means of producing notes to makes the edges of the pitches fuzz and leach out as the differing overtones mingle; a kind of micro-microtonality. The Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra (Marián Lejava conducting) respect the composer’s urge for delicacy and calm in this live recording. The later work is Popínavá hudba, composed for the Ostrava New Music Days 2022 and heard here in a live recording with Petr Kotík conducting the Ostrava New Orchestra. It begins with a short, rising melodic fragment, particularly reminiscent of late Feldman, but follows its own path by quietly asserting its presence in a more organic than structured fashion, using subtle changes in colouration to motivate the nascent melody through almost imperceptible transformations. The orchestra maintains the same presence as a chamber ensemble would, but with much greater complexity below the surface. Towards the end there is a turn, and although it’s unexpected it still feels like it’s part of the larger design at work.

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Tags: Adrián Demoč, Emilie Cecilia LeBel, Rósa Lind
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The problem with droney organ music is that it’s both easy to do and difficult to do well. The organ can be a rich and vital source of timbral variety, but all that timbre needs to be controlled in some way to convery a musical experience to the listener. The three compositions on Mia Windsor’s album this is place where i can sit with clarity are droney organ pieces, except that they’re not always exactly organ, or organ at all, also they’re not too droney when you think about it. Windsor doesn’t make drone pieces; she makes pieces out of drones. It’s an important distinction, using Robert Ashley’s idea of the drone as ‘non-timeline music’. Where other musicians may produce finely honed harmonic content and timbral intricacy through an excess of care in the details, Windsor prefers to work smarter. Ensembletje! pairs organ and electronics as expected, but the church organ performance by Catherine Harris is accentuated by home recordings on violin and cello, cross-cutting between keening whistle-like harmonics, bowed overtones and close-miked scrambling against the instrument’s belly (there’s also a cameo by the West Yorkshire Police). The material remains thin while the substance of the music compounds. Harris plays solo on the title work, which alternates between short phrases in elongated strophes, making a kind of questioning call-and-response conducted in monologue before putting itself at rest. Guitar and Cowbell is apparently just that, although you would think it was more electronically processed organ with the cowbell offered up as a ruse. The piece is a composite image of watery organ pipes, Leslie speakers and whistling until the layers fall away to expose a rumbling of strings below, only for this to break up into soft distortion and then start over again. This piece was also recorded by Windsor in her home in Leeds. The album’s part of a batch put out by Sawyer Editions which I’m working through now.

I do like a funny sounding piano. The peculiar American label Whited Sepulchre recently put out a trilogy of pieces by Jason Doell in which the humble instrument is transformed by various (electronic) digital means into a mutant, neither hyper-piano nor meta-piano, just strange. becoming in shadows ~ of being touched started with Doell improvising on a piano as more of a “limbering up” excercise than a conscious performance: it is not his preferred axe. The original loose, almost naïve musings set the tone for the album, even as the computerised interventions are pervasive. Much of the playing was done on a dilapidated piano left buried in the snow until the strings and hammers started to work loose, so the jangling, ramshackle sounds persist even as the structure threatens to become more sophisticated. (Mauro Zannoli is credited with the ‘frozen piano’ parts.) Doell has written computer scripts to select, sample and alter material from the source tapes to create a free-form ramble where competing parts of the piano’s anatomy crowd each other out in the first part, then get into heavier processing in the second. The second piece works as an atmospheric interlude, effective in mood even though the computerised smearing of sounds into a blur is a more familiar technique than what is heard on the other tracks. The long final piece ‘of being touched’ is the most effective as it moves beyond obvious methods of sampling and collaging to produce blunted, decaying iterations of itself. The flow gets interrupted by loops of degrading fidelity, shedding the illusion of continuity and wiping a layer of grime over the pristine digital ruins to produce an effect of computer-generated autonomic indifference more genuine then most, emphasising the messiness of acoustic objects even as the genuine and intact pianos are never quite real.

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Tags: Jason Doell, Mia Windsor
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Fresh from hearing Juliet Fraser and Mark Knoop together on record in Laurence Crane’s Natural World, on Friday I heard them again, live this time, at the first Music We’d Like to Hear concert for the year. They performed the soprano and piano reduction of Satie’s Socrate, a piece which, despite the decades of belated praise and reassessment, must still be described as unfairly overlooked. Certainly, opportunities to hear it in any form are all too rare, even though by now Satie’s magnum opus must surely hold more sway over contemporary music practice than, say, Pierrot Lunaire. Fraser and Knoop gave the first part a disarmingly clean, alert character before making ‘Les bords de l’Ilissus’ soft and lingering, only in the final part reaching towards the “whiteness” of expression Satie desired even as word and music might be expected to reach an emotional peak, letting subject and manner taper off into stillness.

The concert had already begun with the lulling effect of Bea Redweik’s Songs as Process, a “pre-concert event” in which Redweik strummed and plucked an acoustic guitar while half singing, half murmuring to herself while accompanied by video of herself doing the same thing at home. The two echoed and circled around each other, blurring into the effect of having heard a song without registering or retaining its details, partway between performance and installation. There were parallels to be found with Walter Zimmermann’s Abgeschiedenheit, which began Knoop’s solo recital after the interval. If the deconstructed folklorism associated with Zimmermann’s music is present in this piece, then it is in a highly abstracted form: a labyrinth of long, straight corridors and empty rooms where refrains appear haphazardly. Knoop played through it with suitable directness, eschewing mystery to present a disorientating experience as a disturbing presence that refuses to reveal any secrets. The concert concluded with Galina Ustvolskaya’s fourth and sixth sonatas. (This might be the first time two pianists have tackled the sixth in different venues in the same town on consecutive nights, Siwan Rhys having thrown herself into it at Southbank on Thursday.) Knoop made the most of distinguishing fine grades of dynamics in these notoriously forceful, single-minded compositions and threw himself straight into the sixth without without waiting for applause after the fourth. The massed clusters and stamped out single notes are a punishing experience, even as their tangled sonorities both reveal and allude to larger orchestral details within their stark outlines. Even so, Knoop held something in reserve to make the forearm clusters towards the end hammer home with even greater force. It was a Haessler piano and it held up very well.

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Tags: Bea Redweik, Erik Satie, Galina Ustvolskaya, Walter Zimmermann
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The Spitalfields Music Festival doubles as a way of visiting some of the historic churches of London, and so last I evening I sat in a pew beside the reposing effigy of Tubby Clayton in All Hallows-by-the-Tower, a church with remaining parts dated back to Anglo-Saxon times, to hear the Explore Ensemble give two premieres by Catherine Lamb and Klaus Lang. (A few streets away is St Mary At Hill, home of next weekend’s Music We’d Like To Hear concerts.) The concert began with a 2021 composition by Lara Agar, titled Ham after the chimpanzee fired into space. It’s a curious piece, with cello, piano, synth and electric guitar dispersed around the nave and side-aisles, musicians bedecked in fairy lights and/or tinfoil hats. With its opinion-column subject matter, abstracted narrative and harmless eccentricities in musical language and presentation, it reminded me of that generation of ‘modern’ Australian composers who felt defensive enough to answer to their audience by using their work primarliy to justify their existence, while also sugaring the pill.

For Catherine Lamb’s color residua, the string players of Explore were joined by three voices from EXAUDI, soprano, mezzo and baritone. It’s a concise work, in comparison to recent pieces I’ve heard by her, but I would have been happy for it to continue beyond its ten minutes. The voices, wordless, non-vibrato, soft even when in registers above or below what you would usually expect, interact with the strings in ways that produce unexpected tones recalling other instruments and pitches, using these effects as a third group of instruments that blends in amongst those present in the hall. It’s a warmer, more tender piece than Lamb’s usual work; she has developed her use of just intonation and harmonic tuning to a point where the psychoacoustic phenomena decisively colours the music without drawing attention to itself, allowing the sounds to flow without an apparent need to direct them to any specific end.

Composer Klaus Lang’s long work march (william morris) was composed for the Explore Ensemble, whose musicians have a talent for taking the most distant and cold material on the page and imbuing it with colour and breath, however faint it may be – a kind of interpreter’s empathy for their subject, no matter how forbidding. Lang himself was there to play the church’s organ for the premiere, with Explore forming a group of piano, flute and clarinet with string trio. I don’t think I’ve been to a live performance of Lang’s music before, but this was not the experience of hearing him in an ancient church that I had imagined. With so much of his music predicated on the inaudible (whether implied or actual), march (william morris) is a multi-movement work filled with sound and activity. Seven parts arranged symmetrically, the piece begins with a steady flurry of high piano arpeggios blurred and reverberated by sustained notes on strings and organ, aided by sporadic flourishes on piccolo and E-flat clarinet. Three slow chorales for ensemble make up the inner movements, interleaved by two interludes for solo piano. The ensemble plays staggered chords that rock and lilt, but never lull the listener into relaxation; the organ renders the instruments amorphous and strange while the piano interjects with pedal points. In each iteration, the tone is lower and darker, with the winds playing bass flute and bass clarinet by the penultimate movement, but the pace is not as ‘glacial’ as the programme notes suggest. The piano interludes, however, are extremely sparse and reticent, pastorales slowed to the point of gaps opening up in the music, pricking the anxiety that some further detail needs to be filled in.

Has Lang gone Hollywood? That would be an overstatement, but in his programme notes he writes about William Morris being the impetus for this new piece, using the stanzas of his poem “March” to guide each of the inner ensemble movements. Lang relates Morris to his own thoughts in his essay “The Return of Craft”, finding parallels between the Victorian era and our own, making art a refutation of the increasing use of cheaply automated manufacturing and digitalisation and the concomitant effect of diminishing our abilities in concentration, patience and skill. While Lang’s own compositional skills are more overtly evident than before in his new piece, it’s strange how his previous music has embodied this refutation of short-term materialism, while march (william morris) is less an exemplar and more an expression of anxiety of his own situation, shifting from object to subject.

All Hallows-by-the-Tower sits just above the old Circle and District tube lines and so their periodic rumble provided an accompaniment throughout the concert, functioning as an extra bourdon stop to the organ in a way that never really seemed out of place with the music.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Catherine Lamb, Klaus Lang, Lara Agar
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