Boring Like A Drill.

The latest Music We’d Like To Hear this weekend was a de facto launch for Scott McLaughlin’s album we are environments for each other, with the second half of the programme being a live performance of we are environments for each other [trio] by violinist Mira Benjamin and pianist Zubin Kanga. I’ve discussed the piece before, but experiencing it live reminds you that music heard purely as sound is a separate phenomenon from witnessing it being played. Benjamin, with a five-string electric violin, picks out tones to bow softly which either enhance or interfere with the pitch of the piano strings picked out by Kanga with a magnetic resonator. Kanga shifts the electromagnetic pickup to another string in response, leaving Benjamin to choose whether or not to stay on her pitch or move to another note. Heard live, the delicate exchange between the two musicians becomes clearer – in particular, their good humour as they trade pitches and plot their next counter-move against each other. It also shows how the piece depends on each musician knowing their instrument inside-out: literally, in Kanga’s case, as the keyboard is never touched, all activity focused on the selection of strings. With amplified violin, Benjamin’s own physical input is also minimal. Conversely, the audience’s attention becomes so captivated by the performers that it becomes harder to notice the subtle changes in pitch and timbre that make the musical substance of the piece (I may be speaking for myself here as I happened to be seated close to the action). The performance was considerably longer than the recorded version, partly as the live setting supports the slower unfolding of events, but it also helped in allowing me to settle in and start properly hearing what was being played.

The first half was a new composition by Rie Nakajima titled indecisive and perhaps, although she qualified this by saying it was “not really a composition, rather a situation”. Nakajima was working with a group of musicians with highly developed skills in improvisation – Billy Steiger, Marie Roux, Pierre Berthet and Angharad Davies – and allowed them to do pretty much as they pleased on the tacit understanding that they each shared a fine sense of responsibility and wouldn’t step all over each other. In a way, the piece was a social system like McLaughlin’s, only without set coordinates but with collective anonymisation. Nakajima is also a sculptor, with the concert coinciding with a solo exhibition of her work. Violins were present, but heard only occasionally and faintly: most sounds came from small objects or lightweight kinetic devices made by Nakajima, whose electric motors caused erratic soft noise. There was a lot of high-level craft on display in the use of sounds by the musicians as they moved around the space for the performance. It’s not because the sounds were all gentle, or the machines were clever in an almost whimsical way (an open umbrella with motorised wires irregularly tapping on the canopy), but this isn’t the first time I’ve come away from a Nakajima wishing for something more besides pleasant sounds. Perhaps I’m misinterpreting agnosticism over whether or not a piece should have a point and mistaking it for complacency.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Rie Nakajima, Scott McLaughlin
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The second release under Greyfade’s new Folio book/music imprint continues in the same vein as last month’s treatment of Kenneth Kirschner’s July 8, 2017. Joseph Branciforte has made an acoustic transcription of another electronic work, this time an arrangement of Taylor Deupree’s 2003 album Sti.ll. I have not heard the original, but the four pieces here display incredible craft and ingenuity in embodying the uncanny sheen of electronic sounds while also adding the depth and microcosmic details that distinguish acoustic music. Taking Branciforte’s transmutation as the stand-alone work without wider reference, it’s a fascinating set of four compositions that both mesmerise and stimulate, working with intriguing sounds outside the usual expectations of chamber music.

Branciforte and Deupree themselves play percussion, with cellist Christopher Gross returning from the Kirschner album. For the opening piece, Snow/Sand, Madison Greenstone overdubs clarinets (B-flat, bass and contrabass) on top of cello, vibraphone, bells, snare drums and paper. The compositions dwell on small gestures, finding a particular sonority and feeling their way deeper inside, drifting as needed but moving as little as possible besides where the initial sound leads them. The smooth, rich sound of the combined clarinets are filled out with background tones from the tuned percussion and cello, with small flickering disturbances and articulations provided by faint snaps and clicks, plosive reed notes and struck cello strings mimicking the crackles and glitches used to embellish the surface of modern electronica. Recur changes to a busier texture, more overt in its evocation of skipping, glitching samples, filled with small percussion sounds over stuttering phrases on Gross’s cello, Laura Cocks playing flute and Sam Minaie double bass, with Ben Monder’s acoustic guitar adding an equal mix of pitched sounds and chattering strings. Amazingly, the last two pieces use even simpler instrumentation. Temper features Greenstone alone, overdubbing clarinets into overlapping irregular loops that never quite resolve, upset by recurring guttural tutting and underlined by faint, gritty static from a shaker. There are multiple tensions to propel this music beyond simple ambience: between the smooth sounds and the ruffled surface, the placid stasis and the restless reiterations and, in this version, between organically acoustic sounds and those which duplicate electronic circuitry, such as the steady ECG bleeps heard faintly in the background. In the final piece, Stil., Branciforte performs trills and rolls on vibraphone and bass drum to produce deep but transparent layers of sound that seem greater than the sum of their parts. As I can’t make comparisons I’ll spare you a disquisition on the implications of originals and simulacra, just to reiterate that it lulls and disturbs at once. The accompanying book promises to give analysis of the composition process and re-composition for acoustic purposes, much in the manner of the previous Kirschner book. The details should be interesting, given that this appears to be a more complex job of arrangement, blending acoustic instruments to mirror electronics sounds apart from the typical MIDI samples from the previous release. It’s evidently the outcome of years of collaboration.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Joseph Branciforte, Taylor Deupree
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It took me ages to hear these two albums. I mean, I’d listened to them, repeatedly, but I’d never latched on to a true idea about what was going on. It all seemed too simple: each piece seemed alike, an homogeneous chorale for strings, each presented as a monadic block of sound with fairly uncluttered tonality. What’s the big deal? I couldn’t get past this initial impression. Marco Baldini’s background is in improvisation; he’s recently turned to composition. Everything here was written between 2021 and 2023. Inspiration was found in 16th Century Italian music, which tracks with the approach to polyphony, although Baldini slows it all down and smooths it out as though taking a small excerpt and time-stretching it for close examination. He has thus produced a series of tableaux, or panels, each self-contained yet interchangeable, which may be presented singly or in groups to varying effect. It’s not a fair or accurate comparison, but hearing them is a little like seeing Morandi’s still lifes at first: the apparent undifferentiated simplicity of surfaces invites an initially dismissive response, yet each piece begins to compel closer attention merely by its presence. As with other small things blown up large, they may be perceived as little more than background and largely ignored, or draw one into a labyrinth of subtle details. Heard in different situations, these same pieces have sounded emotive at one time and cold another, at times obvious, at others inscrutable. The two albums here each feature seven pieces and from this basis it seems Baldini prefers darker-hued sounds. Vesperi, recorded in Florence, combines cellos and double basses, sometimes with added low marimba for an added bass hum. The ensemble (Niccolò Curradi, Michele Lanzini, Maurizio Constantini, Amedeo Verniani, Francesco Toninelli, conducted by Luisa Santacesaria) produce tidal sounds, surging with calm but implacable movement. Maniera, recorded in England with members of Apartment House, is lighter, shifting register to violins and viola with cello, but even here a few pieces also feature bass. Apartment House’s approach is a little different, making the sustained chords a little more friable, presumably as the higher pitches would come across as too strident. It’s all starting to fascinate me, even though I still can’t identify one piece from another. Just checking, Corteccia – a quartet for cellos and basses – does indeed break into short phrases over its brief duration. Malkosh is an outlier, with pizzicato double bass over low cello and marimba tremolo. Others reveal their characters over time, hinting at stoicism, turbulence, muted confessional.

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Tags: Marco Baldini
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There’s a paradoxical tension at work in the best of slow, quiet music. While appearing faint and fragile, it maintains resilience through the integrity of its structure, each element supporting the others without reliance on a mass of sonorous substance. The progress made through such a piece from beginning to end may be surefooted even if it appears to be intuitive, or it may be more precarious. The three pieces collected on Nomi Epstein’s album shades suggest a turn in her compositional ideas from the use of pre-mapped patterns which are less heard than felt to plans which are less certain and subject to change. The oldest piece here is Sextet from 2011, which bears the marks of its making most clearly. Epstein’s collaboration with the musicians from whom she wrote the piece resulted in a series of drawings, each made of short lines hastily drawn on top of each other; these were transcribed into sound, producing a seemingly endless succession of short phrases, each consisting of a single sound produced by multiple instruments. Base pitch, harmonisation and instrumentation may vary from one to the next, with the acts of writing, performing and listening each becoming a resource for contemplation. The musicians of the Apartment House ensemble take up the role of interpreters for this recording, bringing an equally fine level of sensitivity to each sound, in part and whole. The 2019 piece sounds (for Berlin) takes a more flexible approach to organising materials and greatly expands the timbral and textural range, even as the number of musicians heard here is reduced to four. The recording, made in Berlin with Christian Kesten (voice), Michiko Ogawa (clarinet), Miako Klein (violin) and Joseph Houston (piano), was the result of a lengthy period of Epstein working and rehearsing with the musicians. The generous time in development can be heard in the exquisitely colourful playing, balanced by exceptional responsiveness and judicious timing between each player. At times, it seems almost as though field recordings are being used, when scrabbling over the violin body, rattling on muted piano keys, whistling and rasping breath sounds are introduced, each appearing suddenly, sounding like natural phenomena far removed from those of the instruments. Kesten sings wordlessly, providing timbral colour at first before unexpectedly emerging into the foreground for some brief moments. The new piece here is shades, a string quartet written for Apartment House last year for this recording. Epstein has used a more open structure here, with the musicians engaged in mutual listening in a way that determines timing as much as timbral balance. It makes the piece more volatile than her earlier works, with less certainty for the listener about where it may ultimately lead. Glissandi are used frequently in some places, eschewed in others, with movement from one to the other never regularly defined. It makes the overall form of the piece more differentiated and changeable than the earlier work, producing greater complexity in the shape and opening up variety in expressiveness which would normally be achieved through resorting to romanticism or other allusions to literature or the theatre.

There is indeed a piece called Distant Music on the new Paul Paccione album Distant Musics, but the title carries an alternate meaning. The five pieces here have much in common with those by other composers working with the slow and quiet these days. What sets them apart on initial hearing is that Paccione is aware of how tenuous the presence of the slow and quiet can be. The opening piece, Exit Music, is a string trio in which single notes are layered over each other in plaintive harmonies until everything recedes to just one pitch whose prolonged persistence implies the piece is ready to peter out before finally regaining some momentum. The trio here (Mira Benjamin, Bridget Carey, Anton Lukoszevieze) play without vibrato in a way that manages to suggest the purest of tones in places while still imparting subtle coloration from moment to moment. While listening to other small ensemble pieces like Gridwork and the aforesaid Distant Music I started to wonder if it would be lazy of me to say it resembled Morton Feldman’s music from the mid 1960s, but then I remembered just when Paccione wrote this stuff. The earliest piece here is from 1980, the latest from 1990: truly music from another world. In fact Paccione has cited Feldman pieces from the mid-60s as an important influence, but this is a rare example of music that is now being heard as new today where making a Feldman reference is directly pertinent. While the style is familiar to us now, Paccione’s compositions were made at a time where he was required to create a context largely on his own. Influences can be observed: Paccione studied with Harley Gaber (apparently his only student) and listening to Benjamin, Chihiro Ono, Amalia Young and Angharad Davies play Violin it’s hard not to hear Gaber in the striated keening of bowed strings with metal mutes. Subsequent work with Kenneth Gaburo and William Hibbard are cited as formational experiences behind the compositions heard here. Lest you get the impression he’s some West Coast Feldman, minimalism via denatured Zen, I’ll remind you there’s more overt rigor in Paccione’s work: Gridwork has similar brooding, introverted harmonies but precision in timing and clear-cut phrasing, while Distant Music employs a broader palette and cleaner counterpoint. Finally, Nancy Ruffer and Emma Williams play the 1983 flute duet Still Life, hovering between playful and pedantic as they dip in and out of an underlying regular pulse to ring the changes on a gamut of notes, until you suspect they aren’t permutations at all, then suspect it’s a permutation too complex for you to grasp. Or it’s an endless compound melody.

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Tags: Nomi Epstein, Paul Paccione
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Do not try to think too much about what you’re hearing when listening to El Jardín de las Matemáticas (The Garden of Mathematics); you’ll end up tying yourself into intellectual knots while trying to rationalise why you’re digging it, which is part of the point. The album is a collaboration between Alvaro Daguer, Pablo Picco, Tomás Salvatierra and Mark Harwood, making a loose alliance between Chile, Argentina, Australia and Germany with no stated motivation or justification, leaving the implication that they just wanted to make music together, of some kind. It starts off sounding crude, like amateurish outsider art, but the types of sounds being used in the thudding processional are incongruously sophisticated. The instrumentation is a wilfully eclectic mix of South American, Oriental and Western with electronics added to the folklore, ensuring that from whichever viewpoint the music may be considered as Exotica. The sound of unfamiliar instruments triggers the reflexive thought that we should approach this at least partially as anthropology, which sits uneasily with the perception that the cultural references here are being made up on the fly (it could be heard as psychedelia, but not as Tropicália). It doesn’t take long for it to stop sounding crude, but it reserves the right to regress whenever the mood takes. Some of the tracks are downright lyrical, with added prettiness of nature recordings, while others verge on the ritualistic (a good covering term when you don’t understand the purpose). In all this effortless confusion, the music carries on the work left off by Kagel, an Argentinian composer all too aware of the slipperiness between centre and periphery, wrestling with unknown instruments and asking difficult questions about authenticity and cultural transmission, realising the two are fundamentally incompatible. Reading the fine print, the album appears to have been created in stages, being recorded in one country then forwarded to the next for reworking, further complicating any lurking agenda. As I suggested, it’s only difficult if you start thinking about it, otherwise you can just enjoy the cruise.

Jardín de las Matemáticas has been released by Penultimate Press, who have also put out C​.​D., the new album by Ralf Wehowsky under his RLW alias. It’s a pair of large works (40 and 50 minutes) dealing with the subject of Colonia Dignidad, a German evangelical cult settled in Chile in the 1960s. In their remote compound, cut off from the wider world, the inevitable squalid crimes and atrocities took place, with the added twist of the knife coming from their collaboration with the Pinochet regime and the German diplomatic officials reluctant to probe beyond the idyllic German facade the cult leaders portrayed. RLW’s collages are never dense in texture but he heavily works the materials and approach for his subject, making each sprawling soundscape an indirect picking over of the colony’s legacy (victims still seeking justice, the compound itself now a tourist resort). When speech is audible, it’s heavily processed to push it past intelligibility, regardless of your language comprehension. Much of the material appears in the form of overlaid improvised melodies realised on MIDI instrument patches, adding another distancing layer. The first piece (Reue?) draws inspiration from the contradictory testimonies of those involved in the colony, the second (Knochenstückchen) focuses on the repressive and paranoid atmosphere of the place. Both are indistinct in their treatment of the matter, shifting focus away from the sensational and exploitative to brood upon the collapse of values and what this may mean in terms of music. While much collage is geared towards the didactic, C​.​D. stays unresolved, turning over fragments of bad memories that many would rather had been forgotten.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: El Jardín de las Matemáticas, Ralf Wehowsky, RLW
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It’s great that art doesn’t have to come from or go to any specific place, much as we’d sometimes like to forget that when we try to put our enthusiasm for it into words. Two months ago I saw John Wall and Michael Speers playing a live electronic duet at Cafe Oto, using a mixture of pre-recorded and real-time generated sounds in a way where you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. Under the old rules, it would be classed as “absolute” music, a purity of self-reliance on form, structure and material that all relate to each other, even as all three attributes were constructed on the fly. If it referenced any tradition, it was to the relentless pursuit of the new. There was a similar, searching purity in the opening set by Lee Fraser, with a hyperfocus on dynamic and timbre. In contrast, Eye Measure’s curious work with “live coding and algorithmic composition” (partly in visible evidence during the set) referenced genres of popular music, taking loops associated with the clubs and then sublimating them into abstraction. The cross-cultural context implies the presence of a wider meaning to be drawn from the work, at least as a commentary on craft or at most as the basis of a disquisition of socioeconomic demographics. Of course we have the capability to do this for any medium but need to remain mindful that any pattern we determine will likely have been shaped by whatever analytical tool fell most readily to hand.

Seán Clancy: Four Sections of Music Unequally Divided (Birmingham Record Company). I dunno what any of the above has to do with Seán Clancy’s piece, except that its system of organisation draws inspiration from the past, utilising an open form of the type made famous by In C and adopting other American characteristics of the period. Bright pianos and warm synthesisers with added gamelan-type instruments start with what promises to be a rhythmic free-for-all before transitioning to the larger sections that form the substance of the work, with extended passages of dense alternating tremolos reminiscent of Charlemagne Palestine. Clancy’s liner notes reference Sol Le Witt and James Tenney. The latter may be inferred from his (checks note) “sheer joy of the plasticity of sound” but also, more pertinently, through his thinking on musical form and cognitive analysis of structure which is applied here to make a piece more complex than a simple tribute to minimalism.

Devid Ciampalini: Eterna (Dissipatio). Speaking of retro, Ciampalini is harking back to the past more self-consciously retro here, evoking earlier models of electronic music both in their surface and their style. Affectionate parody is the prevailing mood, beginning with a lo-fi imitation of the THX Deep Note before presenting ten ‘chapters’ which swing on a spectrum between electronic library music from the 1970s and crunchier DIY synthesis; at times achieving both at once. Ciampalini’s nostalgia is omnivorous: one track sounds like it was made in Coagula, so it’s not all analogue-adjacent, even while attempting to capture the look and feel.

Tewksbury: Floes: Volumes I​-​IV (self-released). Douglas Tewksbury’s four volumes of electronic drones consists of sixteen pieces of roughly equal length for a total of about three hours of music. I hate making such a glib and unoriginal comment but this really does sound like it could be edited down. Up until the latter half of Volume II everything is safely diatonic and simple, making for little more than inoffensive ambience. Things get a more interesting when some, but not all, of the pieces introduce more complex and ambiguous harmonic progressions, but then this makes the remaining pieces superfluous and you wonder if a selection would sound more compelling than the whole.

Technical Reserve: Cheap Heat (Party Perfect!!!). I guess this is retro because it immediately reminded me in a good way of those old Jon Rose LPs where he pits his 19-string cello against whatever was the latest in digital sampling and processing technology. TJ Borden’s cello is supposedly normal, but the improvisations with Hunter Brown and Dominic Coles and their computers as just as explosively anarchic. There’s a lot here: 19 tracks seventy-something minutes but it stays fresh because nobody ever seems to really know what they’re doing. This is harder than it sounds in free improv, supposedly reliant on technique yet really in need of desperation as the spur to invention. Technical Reserve takes us back to a simpler time when the gear doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, albeit now captured with pornographic clarity. It’s rude and it’s noisy but, to pursue the wrestling analogies that crop up in the sleeve notes, for this audience that’s a cheap pop.

Hunter Brown + Eric Wong: Si Distributions (Party Perfect!!!). Brown again, gigging in Wong’s bedroom. You wouldn’t know it was a bedroom recording even as the room shapes what you hear (this is also how you don’t realise how much science has improved your life). The two of them cook up a pair of severe, spatialised noise studies that keep turning aggressive, but the harshness is tamed and sculpted by responding to the acoustic dynamics of the apartment, using the placement of their bluetooth monitors as EQ to exert stern but fair authority over brittle electronic sounds. Side one takes static and white noise, introducing some low sounds later for contrast. Side two is all about rumbling low frequencies to set the speakers juddering about the room until the distortion creates its own white noise, taking us part of the way back to where we started but still ending up somewhere else.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Devid Ciampalini, Dominic Coles, Eric Wong, Eye Measure, Hunter Brown, John Wall, Lee Fraser, Michael Speers, Seán Clancy, Technical Reserve, Tewksbury, TJ Borden
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Elsewhere has released two albums of very spare, refined music. Samuel Reinhard’s For Piano and Shō presents a pigeon pair of like-titled works which find inspiration in John Cage’s late works without imitating his style. Reinhard first heard the gagaku mouth organ in a recording of Cage’s Two4 for violin and shō and the very slow, open structure of that piece, making use of the shō’s capacity for tones of extended duration is reflected in Reinhard’s two pieces. They also seem to draw upon Cage’s earlier Two for flute and piano, in which the typical sonata-duet form is subverted by Cage restricting the flute to single, isolated notes played softly, tinting the backdrop of silence. Likewise, in For Piano and Shō pianist Paul Jacob Fossum creates figures in the foreground, while Haruna Higashida plays shō with incredible delicacy, using fine tones with the same elusive prominence as a watermark. For Piano and Shō I in fact overlays three recordings of each instrument: single piano notes with sustain pedal held down drop onto the surface and resonate in irregular patterns, threaded through with harmonising from the shō. The use of sustain keeps everything as slow as possible, to let each moment speak. It seems busy in comparison to For Piano and Shō II, now reduced to single performers, Fossum alternating between two chords, one arpeggiated and the other unbroken, while Higashida plays even more faintly than before, on single notes bridging one piano element to the next. Each musician makes full use of the freeness of tempo, allowing reflective moments of silence to emerge and, with the reiterated piano elements, seem to make time almost stop.

The three solo pieces that make up Adrián Demoč’s album Piano are also restrained – a little too much so for my taste when I first heard it. Miroslav Beinhauer plays these piano interpretations of Demoč’s chamber compositions with solemn dignity, avoiding trying to do too much to fill out the sound while not erring the other direction into enervated preciousness. The pieces Ma fin est mon commencement (from 2019) and Gebrechlichkeit (2023) were composed with small ensembles in mind, but Demoč also imagined hearing them as piano works, stripped of additional colouring. The earliest piece, 2018’s A Luca Marenzio II, is a spin-off of the original, given that it was originally composed for a scale of natural harmonics. Heard here as the first track, in equal temperament and in monochrome, it struck me on first listen as a fairly bland chorale, a little disappointing after his more exciting recent works. The second hearing changed my mind as the homogeneity in timbre and pulse was offset by the firmness of composer’s and pianist’s grasp on the material, making a piece that changes perspective from one chord to the next from sounding predominantly as harmony or as first species counterpoint, capturing a moment’s hesitation between movement and stillness. Each successive work feels more assured in this method. Ma fin est mon commencement restricts pitch range but adds introspective variations in phrasing, calm but never quite settled. The longer Gebrechlichkeit obsesses over soft, small clusters in the middle register that are each repeated a few times over on each appearance. Beinhauer’s solo interpretation makes this a study in touch, with the clearer chords of the preceding pieces replaced by smudged, muted attacks where some tones linger while others are swiftly damped, building up a bleak but compelling landscape in dabs of grey.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Adrián Demoč, Samuel Reinhard
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