Marja Ahti and Niko-Matti Ahti created this piece for radio in 2020. Nokivesi (it means ‘soot-water’) is a musique concrète montage of domestic and natural sounds, deftly treated with electronics and some synth work, threaded through with fragments of spoken dialogue. It tells a fragmented story of some sort, which is lost on me as I don’t speak Finnish. Even though deprived of a clear meaning, it’s effective in the way it conveyed an impression of rural isolation without me needing to look that up in the sleeve notes. Even though sober tales of the ruminative and bucolic kind aren’t really my thing, I – wait, is that an electric kettle boiling near the beginning? The same kind of sound I was admiring in Ryoko Akama & d’incise’s No register No declare? Maybe they heard Nokivesi on the radio and made an homage, or it’s a happy coincidence, but for the record the Ahtis got there first.
I’ve probably ranted enough about my hangups with field recordings (tl;dr you gotta be good) so it’s nice that Dissipatio has found a novel twist on the genre. Marta Zapparoli’s field recordings are of magnetic fields, specifially those produced by the Aurora Borealis. Her Interdimensional Generated Space is a half-hour composition made from these electromagnetic emanations, captured by her on a variety of devices, including a homebrew crystal radio. It’s evidently the result of a lengthy period of field research, notable for the variety found in the thin but densely detailed sounds collected here. Zapparoli has produced something just stable enough to present a coherent listening session, yet filled with disruptions and breaks that underline the mercurial nature of the phenomenon, reflecting that their aesthetic delights (visual and aural) can be captured but not controlled. Further details emerge on re-listening. Also, props for releasing a digital download in original one-track mono instead of a dump of the CD master.
This is close to miraculous. Michael Pisaro-Liu’s A room outdoors is a 2006 composition lightly scored for harmonium, any sustaining instrument and field recordings. In this piece, the field recordings bring the outdoors, indoors, to create a imagined space for the musicians to play. These two substantial realisations published by elsewhere feature Guy Vandromme and Adriaan Severins on keyboards and synthesizer, recorded in Brussels in April 2020 (lockdown time) and a version from Cremona this summer, played by Luciana Elizondo on viola da gamba with Vandromme on Indian harmonium; Fabio Gionfrida mixes the field recordings here. The playing is sublime, recalling the subdued simplicity of Ferrari’s Presque rien, but given deeper colouring and shade by Vandromme and Severins, neither musician intruding to comment but only augment the sound into an evocative pastoral without a narrative. The Cremona realisation, with Vandromme switching to a rougher instrument and Elizondo’s string playing, adds a sharper relief of acoustic sounds to the mix, with more to direct the listener’s attention without either musician being so crass as to demand it. Each is notably different in their intepretation while staying true to the piece, with the musicians both offering a richly satisfying evocation and contemplation of landscape, much in the same way that landscape itself presents form and subject as one.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Ahti & Ahti, Marta Zapparoli, Michael Pisaro-Liu
1 Comment »
Eva Zöllner: voces, señales
Sunday 26 November 2023
To use a British euphemism, making an album of solo accordion music by Colombian composers is “a bold decision”. It’s a shared fate of colonial nations that their culture will persistently be regarded as partly borrowed and derivative; as for the accordion, it’s an instrument that has had the case made for it by many talented musicians over several decades without ever fully shedding the popular impression that its full depths are yet to be proved. Eva Zöllner has previously shown that she is a virtuoso accordionist in ability and in the audacity of her repertoire, so her album voces, señales on Genuin succeeds in the aim of pushing back the boundaries of music a little further. The collection here reflects Zöllner’s close connections to the composers and affection for the country she first visited in 2015, with all the presented compositions produced with her consultation.
There seem to be no “Old Masters” present here, with all musicians involved apparently in their mid-40s. An overarching theme emerges of a culture in transition, still wrestling with questions of how to see (and hear) itself; as such, strengths and weaknesses abound. The use of accordion as a traditional instrument in Colombian music is tested, with none of the works resting on appeals to folklore or nature. When these aspects do appear, they are contextualised in pop-art style quotation and collage, most overtly in Carlos Andrés Rico’s Nacido en el Valle, el Río y la Montaña, an attention deficit mashup of accordion tunes and samples that feels a little too self-conscious. It’s one of the drawbacks of working in a place and time where your art needs to make a statement. The use of pre-recorded sounds appear in three of the six pieces, with the album opening with the brash audio diary of Ana María Romano G.’s posdomingo 02.10.2016. The disparate elements, threaded together by Zöllner’s accordion, scored to produce evocative timbres as much as musical accompaniment, present a compelling narrative, but the specifics are lost in translation. The subject matter is the failed peace agreement with the guerrilla movement FARC, an event of great importance to Colombia, but the significance does not transmit to those of us ignorant of Columbian history. It’s necessary for a country’s artists to speak to its own people, yet in the most urgent cases this art will always remain to some degree opaque to an outside audience. A similar fate befalls Jorge Gregorio García Moncada’s Un amor, puro e incondicional, another work of remembrance for an historic event which I can only begin to contemplate after reading the sleeve notes. This last piece also uses electronics and pre-recorded voices, merging with Zöllner to create a heavy atmosphere, unlike the other two collages.
It’s notable that the three pieces with electronics are the ones most dependent on explication, as though they must rely on support from additional media to contain all that they are trying to say. Throughout the album, with and without the samples, Zöllner demonstrates her strength in the volatile and changing character of her playing, making abrupt and startling switches in temperament between the sweet and the harsh, giving the lie to the perceived uniformity of the accordion’s sound. None of the pieces settle to be a mere showcase for her versatility, but they do display her virtuosity, most demonstrably in Carolina Noguera Palau’s Canto del ave negra, a dark piece that escalates into frenzied explorations of pitch and tone without breaking its overall moodiness. Daniel Leguizamón’s signo a cambio is a more substantial work that hews to dark ambience throughout, staying low and slow but keeping enough tension in its materials to prevent things getting dreary. Brother, by Natalia Valencia Zuluaga, presents a contrast with folk materials refracted through her own experience and memory into something uniquely personal, its surface simplicity partly rarefied and partly unkempt, making it strangely relatable.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Ana María Romano G., Carlos Andrés Rico, Carolina Noguera Palau, Daniel Leguizamón, Eva Zöllner, Jorge Gregorio García Moncada, Natalia Valencia Zuluaga
No Comments »
Frey; Frey; Frey?
Sunday 19 November 2023
I’m back from vacation and so can’t justify travelling to Huddersfield this year, where a day is being given over to celebrate Jürg Frey’s 70th birthday. Having heard plenty of his music, I still wish I could be there for the day’s worth of concerts as I’m sure it would add further complications to my understanding of an artist whose body of work conceals ever greater complexities beneath its quiet surface. His music has evolved, but in a way that branches out into exploring the many aspects and implications of his overall style, rather than being lead by a single overriding tendency. As he once described in an interview, his interest lies in mixing together competing impulses and resisting any ideal of asethetic purity. From the austerity of his earlier and somewhat notorious works, he has developed his method to combine elements of the lyrical and the severe in a way that avoids muddled ambiguity, evoking both at once to different degrees. The String Trio recently issued by Another Timbre is an exemplar of his recent work: a single movement some 45 minutes in length, composed in 2017 and revised last year, it blends stasis and narrative in its slow but steady progress. The slowness and quietness reminds the listener of similar composers, yet it never, for example, retreats into the claustrophobia of Morton Feldman’s diminished harmonic language or resort to the directness of Howard Skempton’s melodic clarity. Traces of other voices may also come to mind, but the work is unmistakeably unique to Frey. The trio here is from Apartment House (Mira Benjamin, violin; Bridget Carey, viola; Anton Lukoszevieze, cello) who bring the journey-like structure to life, making full use of changes in dynamics (another Frey trait, even when restricted to the soft end of the spectrum) and giving character to each scene, particularly when the ensemble changes to focus on solos or duets.
Those references to other composers and names were made intentionally to draw attention to the way that Frey’s recent work has increasingly revealed him to be something of a chameleon. His 2021 suite for fortepiano Les signes passagers has just been recorded by Keiko Shichijo for elsewhere and its seven movements covertly blend the severe and the quirky in a most congenial manner, with near-subliminal hints of other composers flitting past faintly in the background. Frey was drawn to the instability of the fortepiano’s finely delineated timbre across registers and dynamics to make pieces that bring out those subtle variations in colour; the work was composed for Shichijo, who performs it lovingly. Composer and performer work in tandem to produce a suite of keyboard pieces where clarity of materials is tempered by that slight fuzziness around the edges of the instrument’s sound. The interpretive markings for each movement are evocative: “Avec sonorité, mais très doux,” “Lumineux et calme”, delighting in the small contrasts between block chords and pedal tones, or in the individual character of each note in slow, unaccompanied melodies. Again, the atmosphere hovers between the early British school of minimalism and the Rosicrucian Satie, only with neither the naivety nor the piety. In the last two sections, Frey shows how he has learned to give warmth to his earlier austere style, in the lengthy “Tendre et monotone” and the near inaudible “Discrète et loin”.
The uncooperatively-titled Circular Music (Ext.n°1/-n°2/-Ext.n°2) released by Insub is credited to Frey, which is at least a generous acknowledgement of his influence on the musicians involved here. Insub mainstay d’incise is joined by an ensemble of seven musicians to play “adaptations” of three of his compositions: Circular Music No. 2 and Extended Circular Musics Nos. 1 and 2. No sleeve notes here so we’re in the dark as to whether these three tracks are a tribute or a reimagining, but the expansion of Frey’s three pretty brief compositions for solo piano or small ensemble into works involving voices, accordion and theremin, amongst other instruments, makes for an exasperating listening experience. Whatever the conceptual merits may have been, the homogeneity of tone and approach across all three pieces ends up making each one sound kind of the same; more critically, they don’t sound like Frey. If you’re familiar with this stuff, a blind listening would have you guessing half a dozen other composers, all of whom would most likely already have something released on Insub. If you’re not familiar with this stuff, you’d come away thinking Frey’s music was a bit undistinctive and really lugubrious, particularly after the thirty-plus minutes of Circular Music No. 2, a piece which doesn’t normally need half that time. Following that with a fifteen-minute ensemble take on the piano miniature Extended Circular Music No. 2 just makes the entire exercise feel bloated and obnoxious, with listening through the entire album becoming a tedious chore.
