Anouck Genthon & Mathias Forge: Notice (Insub). Since my last post, I’ve been wondering about the use of external factors as a source of inspiration for music; even more so since hearing a new album which cites the musician’s collaboration with biological researchers and study of bacterial mycelia, all to produce an aspartame-laced package of anodyne, arpeggiated burbling. This is not that album. Notice purports to be a 30-minute duet by violinist Anouck Genthon and trombonist Mathias Forge drawn “from different walking experiences” and it starts out prosaically enough: the usual droney joint improvs start to veer into strange territory bordering the obsessive and the irreverent, then something crashes to the floor. Odd pauses, delays, disruptions and percussive interjections intrude on the two musicians as they doggedly persist, even as a sine tone gets stuck in the system and buzzes away while they keep playing. Genthon and Forge have hit on a self-critical aspect so often missing from works with a conceptually pure basis, letting their initial motivations curdle like the protagonists in a Godard dérive.
Ryoko Akama & d’incise: No register No declare (Insub). Shorter and slighter than Notice, this duet between Akama and d’incise “made in Huddersfield + Bruxelles” presents no specific idea, collaging together a selection of unobtrusive clicks and hums from analog synthesiser and feedback set amongst “domestic recordings”. It’s hard to present this material coherently in a way that rises above triviality, but they almost manage it with their use of a close recording of an electric kettle. It’s a sound at once immediately recognisable and familiar, yet also sounds complex and alien in a way that both confounds and reinforces the feeling of being alone in a kitchen or hotel room. It’s the standout element (no pun intended) so when I relisten to this I just end up waiting for the bits with the kettle.
Lise Morrison: No grief without joy (Sawyer Editions). Speaking of ideas, Lise Morrison’s five compositions here offer themselves up more as suggestions for possible pieces of music, only to withdraw before really making their case. Their self-effacing modesty, with the requisite soft dynamics, suggest a wish to focus on craft over attention-seeking (cf. her Study for marimba and thunder sheets), but most of the pieces stuggle to assert their presence and seem insubstantial, feeling smaller than they really are. The exception is Five Times Recycled, with Sara Constant re-recording her bass flute on cassettes until they break up into a grotty fug of kazoos.
Clinton Green/Ian Andrews: False Currency (tsss tapes), Ross Manning: Some Technical Drawings (Shame File Music), Tarab: Rooms (Ferns Recordings). I imagine the Australian sound sculpture scene is pretty close-knit, as other enthusiasts in minority activities often find themselves out of necessity. Clinton Green (Shame File Music founder) has made a collection of “automatic/aleatory systems” collaborations with Ian Andrews on False Currency, which for the most part sounds like much kinetic sculpture sonic art. There’s one track where the sounds are digitally stretched and smeared to produce a shimmering ambient haze, but otherwise it’s the usual small percussion sounds stumbling over each other that have come to characterize the genre. It combines a fascination with small sounds and processes that act as an end in themselves, which precludes any interest beyond the momentary and the trivial. Ross Manning’s Some Technical Drawings adds a welcome advance to the kinetic constructions by incorporating electronics, or at least audible electricity. It nips in the bud the Gilligan’s Island connotations to the contraptions and adds more intrigue to the sounds produced beyond the usual clunk and thunk. Only trouble is about half of the album is given over to the vagaries of an electronic buzz that squarely sets you back in the obsession with processes and small differences. Tarab’s Rooms is more different still, and all the better for it. The objects used are located in definite spaces, recorded either close up or situated in a wider ambience, then processed through the distorting filters of natural acoustics and technological reproduction. Object and space are edited together in ways which evoke documentary, narrative and mise-en-scène and the messy way they interact when ostensibly presenting a straight representation of what happened, far from the complacent belief that capturing the process on tape (or digital file or whatever) is the most honest policy.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Anouck Genthon, Clinton Green, d'incise, Ian Andrews, Lise Morrison, Mathias Forge, Ross Manning, Ryoko Akama, Tarab
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Summer Shorts (1)
Sunday 20 August 2023
John Eagle: erosion and growth (Sawyer Editions). A long, sombre work for piano and percussion that falls into unmarked sections, each containing a specific texture. At first it’s just Eagle scraping stones and tiles, later succeeded by pianist Jack Yarbrough playing high, staccato chords. From there on the piano plays tentatively through a succession of slow, reflective near-patterns, with some interludes of grey noise percussion. Somehow it all relates to recordings Eagle made of a waterfall and then electronically processed, filtered and analysed to render up pitch data. We’re told “the resultant composition contains only acoustic sounds” but soon after piano and percussion are finally united an electric-sounding drone fills the background for the remainder of the piece. The means and the ends seem incongruous to each other, which leads you into the extra-musical game of reconciling what you’re told about the emotional context of the initial recording with the comparatively unemotional music. The results as yet are inconclusive.
Andrey Guryanov: Anthems (Abstand). Guryanov digitally torments the opening chords of multiple archival recordings of the various national anthems that have served the Soviet Union and Russia since 1917, claiming to build each track out of a microscopic analysis of the opening’s incidental details and technological flaws. He claims personal and international history as the grounding for his research, yet the music resembles Eagle’s composition insofar as it seeks to make a factual element into an external jusitfication for the music’s existence in its final state. Eagle takes this old idea onto a new tangent, while Guryanov uses it to produce gloomy dark ambient electronica complete with what sounds like occasional drum pads amongst the glitchy greyness, weighed down with a need for political relevance. Inevitably, the last track draws upon Ukraine.
Hunter Brown: Stoppages Vol. 1 [∞] (Party Perfect!!! PP-03). While some computer-assisted composition uses code as a form of inspiration (sup.), Hunter Brown’s Stoppages series means to interrogate the electronic guts of the computer process itself. Brown picks up David Tudor’s ideas on the generation and transmission of electronic sound and runs with them into new digital territory, pushing the idea of synthesis and glitching further than most. The set of pieces here were created by a digital feedback circuit designed to overload the computer’s CPU, maxing out its physical limits in attempting to reproduce sound. The results are alarming, particularly when the system flatlines and your hi-fi’s level meters are pegged by silence. Apparently unedited, each piece is defined by the amount of time it took before the programme crashed, creating inexplicably arbitrary structures of sound and silence. When the frequency spectrum looks like this, you know it’s uncompromising:
Scott Solter & Rohner Segnitz: The Murals (Bathysphere). Don’t let the J-card fool you; this is slick. Solter and Segnitz work up a mélange of techniques from ambient and glitchcore without ever lapsing into a particular genre. When I replay it in my head I remember it as the professionalism in execution and tastefulness in arrangement as somehow cancelling out their respective shortcomings, creating the world’s wildest library music. As to why this would be a bad thing, it’s probably because people with this much skill could create something more ambitious to challenge the listener (this is not the same as confrontation). Then I play it again and decide I’m thinking too much: it’s saved by the sureness of approach, building each piece from an initial sound and developing it in creative ways, without recourse to any big ideas.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Andrey Guryanov, Hunter Brown, John Eagle, Rohner Segnitz, Scott Solter
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Sarah Saviet, solo violin: Spun and Every Strand of Thread and Rope
Friday 4 August 2023
I was treated to a live performance by violinist Sarah Saviet at the All That Dust launch, playing Soosan Lolavar’s solo suite Every Strand of Thread and Rope. It’s a rough and hairy piece, even in its most delicate sections. The four movements were added over the last few years, as part of an exchange between Lolavar and Saviet, with Lolavar applying her experience of Iranian santūr music and tuning to new ideas, and Saviet responding by retuning her violin down a minor sixth, slackening the strings and altering the timbre and intonation. Saviet uses Lolavar’s score to dive into the textural potential of the looser strings, the softer tone of the lowered pitch modulated by guttural buzzing, thickened timbre and faint rattles. The presence of unpitched sounds get cranked to 11 in the final movement (‘Chainmail’), made out of repeated, hacking patterns of double-stops, to the point it dominated my memory of the piece until I heard the recording and rediscovered how lightly the effects are used in the gentle (but still hairy) ‘Fibres’ that precedes it. The All That Dust release is a binaural recording, a stand-alone download.
Every Strand of Thread and Rope turns out to be a suitable entree for Saviet’s full album of solo works, Spun, just released on Coviello Classics. Exotic timbres abound throughout, beginning with Liza Lim’s 2018 piece The Su Song Star Map. It’s also a piece written for retuned violin and exploits the possibilities of colouration, albeit in a less obsessive way. Saviet moves easily between the light and bright melodic passages and the thornier timbral shadings Lim calls for, sometimes only for fleeting moments or in transition from one tone to another. It’s a lovely sample of Lim’s more recent style, embracing directly florid melody but grounding it in denser and darker patches of complex sounds to cast the solo in a more sophisticated perspective; Saviet fuses both of these tendencies in her interpretation, with one highlight being the blaze of contrapunctual harmonics near the work’s centre.
The sleeve notes make repeated references to ‘throaty’ and ‘digging in’, reinforcing Saviet’s relish for the lower strings. Even Lisa Streich’s Falter, made out of feathery apreggios, is occasionally anchored by a barking low note. The most aggravated case is Evan Johnson’s Wolke über Bäumen, a piece from 2016 which shows this composer’s use of extremes to particularly stark effect. The piece demands gut strings, played with a baroque bow, but the idiom is blasted and barren, using techniques that eke out the strange and sour in the organic inconsistencies of the physical materials. To hear the intricacies in each of the faint wisps of sound, you must also accept being battered by the sudden outbursts of violent noise; as a pastoral, it depicts nature in its harshest light. Arne Gieshoff’s spun is also discontinuous, but in a more capricious way, flitting from pizzicato glissandi to double-stops, trills to smeared and heavy bowing. The final work, Lawrence Dunn’s Habitual from 2017, works here as a kind of bookend to Lim’s piece. A deceptively simple patchwork of brief melodies, Habitual creates a formalised unselfconsciousness. Dunn stipulates just intonation be used, making the tunes sound both natural and personal, as though played without an audience. Patterns never quite settle into a regular grid, or even settle at all, and the structure you anticipated hearing at the outset unspools into an unhurried soliloquy of thoughts not yet fully formed. Saviet maintains a warm but contemplative mood throughout, even when the music turns unexpectedly sprightly.
