Boring Like A Drill.

There are a few composers and musicians I’ve always enjoyed and reviewed a number of times here before, so I tried to pause for a bit before writing about them yet again. Two of the recent-ish releases by Eventless Plot show how their group compositions have developed into a widely varied set of works. Birds’ singing reminds of freedom dates back to the Covid lockdowns of 2020 and takes a different tack from their usual complex but delicate textures of acoustic and electronic sounds, commemorating the event with collages of the sounds of flocks of birds that dominate much of the work. Too pervasive to be a backdrop, birdsong marks how the times of a few years ago were marked by human withdrawal from the urban world and hopes for a quick return to liberty. The trio (Vasilis Liolios, Aris Giatas, Yiannis Tsirikoglou) play mostly with small ringing percussion, augmented by the warm electronics of modular synth and tape manipulations. Towards the end, the birds start to recede, suggesting both a passing and a loss, notable by their absence left largely unfilled. Distance Between Us was composed over 2021-22 and reunites the group with clarinettist Chris Cundy on bass instrument, adding Margarita Kapagiannidou on a second clarinet. As a contrast to their usual work, this piece makes more use of silence throughout, with a sparser texture anchored by the two clarinets using their rich textures to spare but indelible effect. It’s a slower, contemplative piece that opens up space for reflection more than a surface to dwell upon.

Magnus Granberg has continued to refine his method of composing for ensemble, working with sympathetic groups of musicians to create music that is gentle but not necessarily soothing. His writing gives room for flexibility in the finer details while directing and shaping the overall course of the piece, building thoughtful expanses of complex but subtle counterpoint. Evening Star, Vesper Bell is a near-hourlong piece recorded late last year with Apartment House, Granberg’s signature prepared piano supported by clarinet, string trio and percussion (no electronics this time). This may be his most restrained, even subdued, work that I’ve heard, with slower and more isolated contributions between the six musicians leaving the textures more open than usual, eschewing anything too discordant or spiky. It’s a ruminative piece but it doesn’t ramble, with Granberg exercising his typical command over how the group’s forces channel the leeway given to them, while Apartment House embody his desired balance between spontaneity and self-control.

Lance Austin Olsen, who I believe recently turned eighty, has been steadily turning out his evocative musical collages. These occupy a conceptual space somewhere between improvised bricolage and open-form composition, with the way in which they permit found materials imparting alternative interpretations to their structural logic. The sonic space they occupy is somewhere in the back of your mind, with seemingly unrelated events merging into a hazy, dreamlike continuity. Lakeside Blues – Nachtmusik is another of his collaborations with Gil Sansón, a long-distance of exchange of ideas that overlap and jostle each other to create an aural image akin to the seamier aspects of pop art. 2021’s Sure Is A Good Hamburger is a little different, with Oslen confining himself to playing on (or in) a guitar and amplified objects against a backdrop of casual conversations that drift in and out of focus.

The analogues with Olsen’s paintings (used on some of the cover art) are discernible without being explicit. Most of these pieces are relatively large, with ruminative pacing, dynamic contrasts are never stark except on the occasions when a work fades into silence, effectively dividing a work into multiple panels. From the same year, Fukushima Rising displays the essence of his recent music, the graphic artwork acting as a score for musical interpretation, made here with a typically evocative mixture of found sounds and objects, musical improvisations on simple instruments, amplified sounds with unspecified origins. The eerie atmosphere does not make any directly observable reference to the events which inspired the piece, and is all the stronger for building up complex responses without trying to offer any explanation, either rational or emotional. The Pit, released earlier this year, presents two pieces with each pursuing the implications of Fukushima Rising in different ways. The title work reduces the sonic palette to sparse, more isolated sounds, with silence permeating the whole work like a black background that seeps through. It’s followed by a short work titled Quasimodo’s Dream, a denser piece a little over ten minutes long that presents an examplar of Olsen’s montage techniques and materials in a concise form.

I’m really glad that Anthony Pateras‘ A Dread Of Voids has finally made it out to the public, having been fortunate enough to hear a private recording a couple of years ago. It’s a ravishing piece, grave and wistful all at once, mixing low instruments with soprano and an exquisite use of silence and stillness that lets you dwell on its small details, even as the writing itself is shorn of all excessive ornamentation. I was getting over “lockdown” pieces but this one reminded me of the sub-genre at its finest, drawing inspiration from its circumstances without seeking to use them as a justification. In the accompanying interview, Pateras mentions his interest in Morton Feldman’s use of rhythm and repetition, but feels “I’m much more receptive to my own instincts now.” That individual voice can be heard here, echoing Feldman inasmuch as it tries not to push the sounds around too much and let the music breathe, but in his own distinctive way, more open and forthright while still being pensive. The crack ensemble of performers/composers includes Rebecca Lane (bass flute), Sam Dunscombe (bass clarinet) and Jon Heilbron (double bass) with soprano Jess Aszodi, creating a sound both full and soft from such redued instrumentation. The accompanying work Patterned Language blends violins, double bass and guitar with Pateras on piano, celeste and some faint sine tones. It’s a complimentary composition from a year later, making greater use of unisons and overtones to colour the air and slow down time.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Anthony Pateras, Eventless Plot, Gil Sansón, Lance Austin Olsen, Magnus Granberg
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Just before, I was talking about distinctions between the process and the piece when musicians get together. “The ensemble Les Certitudes was created in 2021 as a means for developing acoustic music focusing on justly tuned tones and harmonies, taking as a starting point the physicality of the instruments –resonating wood and metal– in a long musical form.” They’re a trio: on this occasion, consisting of Léo Dupleix on harpsichord, Juliette Adam on clarinet and Félicie Bazelaire on cello. The long musical form is a composition by Dupleix, titled Construire sur les ruines d’un passé encore fumant, made up from five movements together lasting nearly an hour. The emphasis on just intonation is almost too demonstrative, proceeding in a slow, deliberate way to let the beautifully constructed harmonies linger. The beginning and ending sections are dronelike without actually being motionless, the opening letting real and implied overtones rise over immobile cello, the closing determinedly cycling through a small set of chords on keyboard while clarinet and cello tentatively seek out more esoteric harmonics. The central movement omits keyboard, giving space for the more directly human instruments to find an intonation that flexes and breathes a little as they slowly circle around each other. The trio’s playing throughout is controlled; unhurried but insistent (it should be noted here that it was recorded in sections over a couple of venues and dates). The trio refuse to succumb to an easy, soft ambience and let their instruments speak full and clear; it’s an admirable commitment to keep the music in focus but I did begin to find it wearying by the end. That might be down to the musicians getting caught up in the process.

Piotr Kurek’s album Smartwoods is definitely a finished object, the end product of process and assembly, incorporating performance. A set of seven instrumental tracks which seem pleasant enough if you don’t listen too close, but then it’s hard not to listen close because the quiet strangeness that permeates each little piece draws you in. Everything’s a little bit off, never quite right. That queasy uncanny valley effect hits you straight off as you think you’re hearing a slightly old-fashioned potted MIDI orchestra plinking and tooting away, but then it’s too organic for that, nothing seems to be running by clockwork. It’s not a reasuring thought as it raises the possibility that things could run off track and turn ugly at any moment. It never does, even while it keeps implying all is not well – at least not on our terms. The small ensemble on harp, winds and bass play very neatly throughout, with the finesse of deadpan comedians pretending to be automata, never quite bumping into each other. Kurek plays keyboards, guitar and (oh jeez) MIDI wind controller, both to insert digital impostors and transform the live instruments into hi-sheen simulacra of themselves. It doesn’t stay around long enough to impose its oddness on you, which makes the oddness the subject as you wonder afterwards what it all means, with each piece a small, unsolveable puzzle.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Léo Dupleix, Piotr Kurek
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There’s a difference between the process and the piece. Even when the two are conflated in practice, a conceptual distinction is made by the artist to allow both to coexist on their relative merits. Sometimes, however, the former is mistakenly assumed to be the same as the latter: this happens too often when musicians improvise together and err on the side of leniency when judging whether the outcomes should be published, to say that “good enough” is the same as “good”. This solipsism is a cultural marker of the anxiety over music’s status vis-à-vis art. The collaboration between Michiko Ogawa and Lucy Railton on their album fragments of reincarnation exemplifies the two composer/performers’ advanced understanding of these ideas and aversion to self-indulgence. It’s a single piece, 45 minutes long, based on a first-take improvisation with Ogawa on shō and Railton on cello. There’s a solid structure underlying their performance, taking the shō’s tuning as the foundation to build a piece out of pitches from a chord cycle used in traditional Gagaku. All perfectly pleasant so far, but what lifts it into something much stronger is that Ogawa then went and dubbed in a part for Hammond organ. The organ blends with the two other instruments in an insidious way, its mellow tone complementing the thin reeds of the shō and the variability of the cello, yet weaving in and out of the duet as never quite foreground, nor background. (Being old and a bit wonky, the organ has a fallibility in tone to match the human element in the acoustic instruments.) Each voice reinforces the others while always maintaining its own distinct character, with the relationship between them made more complex by the small incompatabilities in pitch, the shō’s Pythagorean tuning at odds with the organ’s modern equal temperament. The cello, of course, has greater flexibility even as it leans towards the shō’s intonation, but even there Ogawa and Railton observed moments of overlap and incongruence and worked it into the cyclic structure of the piece; the organ’s role thus phases between thickening and resolving these differences. It all lands on the ear simply enough, but as it does so it opens up new spaces for listening into moments that cannot be easily explained. That’s the difference between working on your craft and working up a piece to show for it.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Lucy Railton, Michiko Ogawa
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Presque rien could be the watchword for Aaron Einbond’s compositional method. Each of the four pieces on his All That Dust album Cosmologies lurk in the background almost imperceptibly, to the point you just about forget they’re there, catching you unaware when they remind you of their presence. Never exactly silent, each piece maintains constant activity that may or may not produce sound. Beginning the album with Xylography, cellist Séverine Ballon is kept occupied with various techniques that appear to take place around her instrument as much as upon it, with stray, accidental sounds slowly coalescing into a frail, fragmented substance. The role of electronics in this piece is kept obscure, using close amplification to make each miniscule movement just about audible. Ballon’s intense concentration is matched by her accompanying ensemble in Graphology, where solo cello is joined by bass flute and clarinet, violin and percussion to produce a piece with no immediate difference in texture from the solo work. Aaron Holloway-Nahum leads the Riot Ensemble in an essay of supreme restraint, producing the smallest possible swatches of attenuated sounds in their most muted colours to build up a piece that exists without ever quite substantiating into a definable form. In retrospect, the most curious part is the way the musicians hold everything in poise without discenible momentum, yet never lapsing into torpor. The techniques here resemble Lachenmann in extremis, but the usual strained effect heard in music of this type is largely absent. That point becomes clearer in the following two pieces, Cosmologies and Cosmologies III. The latter piece is a Ferrari-like soundscape of collaged field recordings, occasionally punctuated without warning by string piano; the former takes the same recorded material and overlays live amplified piano by Alvise Sinivia. Again, the instrument is used less as a trope for foreground material layered over the tape, but mostly as a way of complicating the timbres, recasting naturally observable sounds into something indefinable. It all offers a disturbing perspective on the last of listening. Incidentally, the CD version of the album merges each of the paired works into compound compositions.

Luis Fernando Amaya has some related musical concerns to Einbond, inasmuch as he is seeking out new ways of creating new sonic materials for his art. The emphasis here is more on that process of finding those sounds and the contexts in which to apply them, placing the material more conspicuously on display. His album Cortahojas (released on Protomaterial) contains six compositions which apply a variety of means – extended techniques, additional devices, electronic processing – to ends that test the limits of what is considered acceptable in polite chamber music discourse. The title work, a duet for prepared violin and bassoon, is perhaps the most conventional work here, which should tip you off to how unusual some of the other pieces get. William Overcash makes his muted strings pair with Ben Roidl-Ward’s multiphonics to fit together a piece made out of fractured harmonics in lieu of pitch material. Pianist Jonathan Hannau uses e-bows to add ominous harmonic auras to the delicately spiky Pregunta no.2: Cóndor. Rubén Bañuelos and Mikołaj Rytowski perform the percussion duet guerrilla de dientes entre los árboles, in which Amaya accretes splayed clusters of pitched and half-pitched sounds into a tense standoff between the two musicians. Enjoyable percussion pieces for multiple performers are more rare than you’d think, so this is a wise choice to lead off a long album. Into the stranger terrain, comentarios inaudibles for solo cello features Isidora Nojkovic, augmented by electronics that add a blurred shadow to her playing, at once following and commenting while also threatening to merge into a composite whole. At the most extreme, Bestiario: cuatro takes a solo violinist (Theo Espy) and attaches speakers to him to confuse the localisation of sound, then agressively filters and gates the playing to produce distempered noise that reduces the playing of the violin to pure gesture, with pitch and decay crushed to the minimum. The shadowy aspects of Amaya’s reappear in the suite que del mar saliste for guitar and electronics. For this piece, Amaya feeds Ruben Mattia Santorsa’s acoustic guitar through transducers to produce a remote, watery sound. Santorsa’s gentle, reflective playing is alternately drowned in sustained overtones, worn smooth by rolling off the attacks, or has its frequency range smothered to create different perspectives of a still, submmerged world.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Aaron Einbond, Luis Fernando Amaya
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