Boring Like A Drill.

Where is the “new” in new music? Some composers work in a style that seems to present something modern, at least on the surface. To what extent is this based on an understanding of the ideas and means of living that are distinct from previous times, and how much of it simply reflects an ear (or an eye) for fashion? Some composers actively try to advance beyond the received idea of concert music, such as Rafał Zapała and his electroacoustic pieces recorded on Futility (Kairos). The blurb describes it as “a provocative album that reimagines the concert experience, fusing music with technology to challenge the traditional performer-audience dynamic”, but then concedes that “this album presents music without interactive layers…. experiencing the full versions is only possible in a live performance”. Neither this nor the “!!! ReadME” file that came with the download push the suggestion that these recordings are alternative versions and thus read more like a disclaimer that we’re not going to hear what this music is really like. No doubt it’s a frustrating situation for Zapała, possibly one that would make a meatier subject for his next project than the gently used concepts presented here. The listener has carte blanche to dismiss the music, as does the composer to dismiss our criticism of it. Members of the Hashtag Ensemble (they’re real) challenge themselves to tricky playing, typically commented on, or guided by, a synthesised voice. Violinist Kamil Staniczek adroitly mimics the intonation of the computer voice in Ablinger-like manner on No Meaning Detected. The voice in these pieces is disappointingly typical of its genre, detached and cynical, superior yet glitched, familiar to everyone through HAL 9000, Max Headroom et al. It rises above the second-remove cyberpunk in certain places with some neat twists in the narrative, such as the title work for the ensemble until the musicians are pressed into some self-conscious acting, and in the final solo (duet?) Scrolling to Zero, where Lilianna Krych plays out a sampler keyboard to fatalistic reductiveness, albeit marred by smug irony. By contrast, Judge Me Again featuring Ania Karpowicz on solo flute with live electronics plays out as a relatively straight and impressively rendered instrumental take-off with deep and crunchy digital processing. The most impressive work is Introverts’ Collective, a piece for ensemble and mobile digital controllers that eschews verbal justifications and presents its cultural dilemma directly, through leading the group into ever-decreasing circles of degenerating loops from which they can only temporarily escape. This one really does seem to touch upon something lurking in today’s polite society, rather than simply assert a received idea. What gives me pause here is that there’s nothing I can hear which suggests how these pieces may come across differently if I heard them live, as intended.

Šalter Ensemble operates on the border between free improvisation and composition (it sez here), so it’s either good or bad that you can guess this from listening to each of the three pieces on their album Tri dela (Bruit Editions). There’s something very much of its time in the way they use a collective approach to composition, in combination with other observed cultural signifiers such as amplification, noise (acoustic and electronic), purported spontaneity and a choppy, quasi-linear approach to time. That last aspect is the main feature of Tomaž Grom’s My Wish Your Command, where rapid changes in texture and material at erratic intervals create the impression of something more controlled than the other two pieces, which each appear to allow a single process to unfold. It’s a late 20th Century conception of modernity – fast, noisy, knowingly irritating, with an increasingly insistent snare drum that steps all over the rest of the group. Interstices / Interferences is jointly credited to Jonas Kocher and Gaudenz Badrutt, both of whom I’ve previously encountered individually (see index). It’s a pointed contrast, with a slow, open texture and varied dynamics. The broad palette of sounds and uncrowded pacing work together to create something ambiguous, if not downright vague, but Šalter maintain a level of energy to sustain momentum and dodge the “listless” tag I’ve used on Kocher’s earlier work, while also perversely working as a composition. The final piece, Elisabeth Harnik’s šum II, is the one that seems most like an improvisation and as such works more as a performance than as a musical statement, with vocalist Irena Z. Tomažin leading the group in a slow crescendo into a loud, impassioned whatever.

Just played Brian Baumbusch’s Polytempo Music (Other Minds) a couple of times and, like with Zapała’s Futility, I’m struggling to hear in the music what’s in the sleeve notes. This is a large, ambitious work for chamber ensemble, ably played by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, which like Futility appears intended to be heard live. Besides the stereo audio version here, there’s also a “virtual reality application” and a phone app (natch) for appreciating the work – it’s immersive, see? I don’t think being immersed would help me as the music rubbed me the wrong way. On the page, it’s technically impressive, with Baumbusch mapping out different tempos and rates for each of the instruments to play through the same material to create multiple polyphonic (and polyrhythmic) textures. Nancarrow and Gamelan are namechecked as expected, as well as minimalism, in its present-day meaning as a synonym for Hollywood. Much of the material is made of simple diatonic arpeggios and ostinati, which makes the performance at least theoretically possible for the ensemble but, even if they nail it as well as they do here (the recording dates imply it’s multitracked), makes for textures with rather threadbare harmony and polyphony, without the rhythmic drive that makes both Nancarrow and repetitive minimal music compelling. The music segues through a dozen movements of different moods, which I assume is the main expressive objective, with the technique a means to an end. If you read the notes and hoped you’d found something to tide over your John McGuire cravings, you’ll be disappointed. Some affecting moments, which seem to be Baumbusch’s true strength, are swamped in reams of aimless roiling for the sake of it. To my ears he’s taken a complex, roundabout route to produce something akin to either John Adams, as a soundtrack for a Virtual Reality app.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Brian Baumbusch, Elisabeth Harnik, Gaudenz Badrutt, Jonas Kocher, Rafał Zapała, Tomaž Grom
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Paolo Griffin’s not as easy to pin down as he first seems. The three pieces on his debut album Supports & Surfaces were recorded in England, Canada and Finland. Each piece shares a common approach to composition, but it’s not the one you immediately think it is. The Purpose of an Empty Room seems simple enough: David Zucchi plays his alto saxophone into a delay loop system, playing two notes slowly in succession, repeating and moving to the next pair, as the texture quickly builds up to a thick but smooth layering of see-sawing harmonies. The inexorable logic of the delay loop is exploited to introduce some more esoteric harmonisation at times, threatening dissonance without hoping to achieve it, or more intriguingly to settle into an uneasy monotony. It all seems pretty familiar, right down to the fade-out. The second piece redirects your attention: Alone, Together is a duet for violin and percussion, sans electronics, played by Aysel Taghi-Zada and Michael Murphy who perform together as Duo Holz. Any logic present in this piece is undetectable, as Taghi-Zada bows isolated phrases of sundry durations in white-key modes with an unsteady but even tread, accented by occasional harmonics. Murphy plays in a slower and looser style on bells and small gongs, not quite precise in pitch, creating a quasi-accidental counterpoint to the melody. The two create intrigue simply by their presence together, then entrench that mystification by wending back and forth in no particular direction in no particular hurry to achieve nothing more than take up over half an hour of your time. Having lifted the album sequence above the ordinary, the final piece Madrigal redoubles by returning to the solo-plus-delay loop method, but this time around creating a completely different impression. Countertenor David Hackston sings a sombre melody that evolves through a series of transformations, with occasional pitch-bends up or down which render the piece more strange and affecting, while also tempting the listener to latch onto them as reference points while Hackston’s voice expands through an ever-growing hall of mirrors. The sax piece used loops as a means of establishing stability, but in Madrigal the loops create uncertainty, with no neat patterning to the uncanny voice. Also, Madrigal ends, suddenly. The three are united by Griffin’s conception of musical slack (pace Ivan Stang) as music “that doesn’t really go anywhere but doesn’t necessarily stay in one place” may therefore ensure it never achieves a definitive state of completion. If you get this on CD the first and last tracks are abbreviated: presumably the first fades out early and the third fades in late. Alone, Together must be heard in full.

The new Sawyer Editions release of Eden Lonsdale’s music shows marked differences from his earlier collection on Another Timbre, even though the pieces heard here were all written around the same time. The common element to the three compositions on ricercari for rainy days is the harp, played by Cara Dawson and accompanied by the ensemble red panel. The use of electronics and reverberation heard on the previous album are here restricted to the opening piece, falling asleep on an airplane, in which lever harp, cello, percussion and electronics are gradually sublimated into a hazy wash of evocative ambience. For the title work, the role of electronics is effectively substituted by harmonium, which binds together the fragile playing of the other instruments into a cohesive, denser sound, yet also suddenly swells into loud drones that drown out the smaller details to create thick, roiling textures. The process seems to invert itself in cycles/emptiness: a slow melody on the harp repeats itself, with harmonic colouration from cello and harmonium evoking low brass and high winds. The piece slows down and breaks apart into isolated sounds, with the increasing presence of silence, before gradually rebuilding itself into a quietly flowing continuum. It seems to function as a counterpart to Alone, Together.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Eden Lonsdale, Paolo Griffin
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There’s a counterpart to those composed drones I was talking about last week, in improvisation when musicians make a piece out of sounds that remain mostly static, where development or progress is more a function of entropy than of a chosen direction. The success or failure of such music hinges upon the musician being aware of the difference between making a sound and digging deeper into it to uncover and identify unique details in the complex that makes up what on first appearance was a simple sonic unit. It can often resemble a process of following your nose, all the better to understand where you already are. Adam Pultz’s two bass pieces on his album Wade (Carrier) seem to take this approach, but he cleverly uses an external impetus to force his hand in a series of small but regular adjustments. In the title piece he bows amplified double-bass in long, regular drones which are further activated through a feedback mechanism; the substance changes more than it develops or accumulates. Some digital processing comes into play and field recordings gradually intrude, opening up the claustrophobic space with sounds that first resemble further electroacoustic enhancements before emerging as a distinct entity. In the second, shorter work the feedback-driven bass sounds more like an outright electric instrument, with a denser texture and higher level of energy. Analyzing each element, Pultz’s obstinate playing could be expected to bog everything down but his adept use of technology makes the whole more than the sum of its parts.

I’ve been listening repeatedly to Explore Ensemble’s superb album from last year, Perfect Offering (Huddersfield Contemporary), with works by Cassandra Miller, Lisa Illean, Lawrence Dunn and Rebecca Saunders. The last name seems like the odd one out, but Explore’s performance of murmurs is freighted with a similar sense of fragile repose, at once relaxed and coiled for action. I did not expect to get that same feeling from a set of improv duets on contrabass clarinet and percussion recorded one day in 2020 with a Spooky Scary Skeleton on the cover, but here we are: pianissimo etc (Tripticks Tapes) pairs John McCowen (former) and Carlo Costa (latter) on three untitled tracks, with McCowen staying still as possible while releasing a iridescent tide of overtones and harmonics while Costa underlines the clarinet’s fundamentals with bass drum. With each piece the clarinet recedes a little further, the low pulses from the first track becoming smoother harmonics seasoned with small gongs and high friction sounds, before finally being subsumed into a complex but still transparent texture of breaths, buzzing and reverberations. I wish more compositions were as lucid as these three tracks.

Phicus is a trio of Ferran Fages on electric guitar, Àlex Reviriego, double bass and Vasco Trilla on drums and percussion. Their album Ni (Tripticks again) is, uh, kind of an improvisation – it depends on how you look at it, but really it all keeps coming back to improvisation. To break it down: Phicus play live improvisations, Covid puts a crimp in their practice, the group gets a recording date, they’re conscious they lack time to get their intuitive chops back together, Reviriego writes a composition “trying to recontextualize and develop further” their musical vocabulary as a counter-intuitive way of stimulating their creativity, the trio take it away in other directions to move beyond consolidation of what they have already achieved. It worked. In Ni they improvise with elevated economy of action and telepathic coordination, making an extended piece which never loses momentum even as it appears to stay still. Reflective silences mark changes in approach and signal structural divisions. Its effect as a composition comes from the absence of any spare moments when you hear a process working itself out, as each new detail arrives as though fully integrated into the overall form. A long strange journey which leaves a strong overall impression, the incidents along the way still catch by surprise after repeated hearings.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Adam Pultz, Carlo Costa, John McCowen, Phicus
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Do we even know what we mean anymore when we talk about drones? I seem to remember a definition given by Robert Ashley many years ago which turned away from descriptions of surface appearance to consider the internal mechanism; the exact details have slipped my mind and I’m not going to look them up now but the idea that stuck in my mind is that drone is a form of music in which the passage of time is experienced on its own terms. In popular and artsy genres, working with the awareness of this concept appear to be broadly assimilated into most modern musical thinking – you can work with it or against it, but it’s there.

Does it make sense to call the three pieces in Mara Winter’s The Ear And The Eye: Music For Four Renaissance Flutes (self-released) drones? Heard casually, each of the three rebuffs the ear with long tones held in apparent stasis. Winter and her colleagues in the Phaedrus quartet make the most of the thickened tones of their Renaissance flutes. She has done a similar thing before with Rise, follow, her duet for contrabass Renaissance flutes, but where the earlier work made use of resonant space and more overt interactions between the performers, the three new pieces use a more thoroughly research and composed approach. Closer listening reveals each piece to be a complex essay in timbre related to pitch and dynamics: Hyacinth harmonises its way through consonances and microtonal dissonances through overlapping pitches which highlight the difference in timbre between each instrument. Incarnadine moves the emphasis away from change in pitch to change in dynamics, exploiting the variations in colouration available without needing to move between registers. Smaragd focuses on sonority, expanding and contracting the pitch space between the instruments to reveal variances in intonation and clarity or complexity of tone. What may be taken for drones are really being used as a vehicle to express the flutes’ relationship between pitch and timbre, a concept made audible. Winter composed her pieces based on “historical sources which described color proportions analogous to the ratios of tonal musical intervals” and created a notation that used watercolours to convey variances in intonation. The colour analogy is studied here and applied to practice to produce ever more sophisticated manifestations of the initially observed phenomenon.

There’s a similar approach to material in Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard’s Colliding Bubbles (surface tension and release), a composition for string and harmonica quartet. Again, a drone, but in service of a more elaborate conceit. Løkkegaard draws upon the behaviours of bubbles in collision, how the forces at work may cause fluctuations in surface tension, or ruptures in which tension is released. That sounds like a principle behind a Xenakis piece, but Løkkegaard’s method and material are very different. It may not even be a method as such, more of a philosophical or poetic guide without seeking a direct analogy in what or how the musicians play; despite this, however, the piece expresses its principle through fundamental activity rather than through interpretation. String quartet and harmonica quartet are to be, one and the same: here, Quatuor Bozzini follow the composer’s instructions to play their usual instruments while also playing harmonicas. Both involve slow, constant tones, simultaneous throughout, presenting a challenge for the musicians. The Bozzinis can maintain diaphanous harmonies indefinitely, sure, but those even tones become more fraught when they’re also required to blow with a similar lightness. Despite the references to bursting bubbles, there’s nothing explosive here, just the constant unsteady and fragile balance between pitch and timbre as the colouration of the two sets of instruments clash and the pitch and force of each note wavers minutely. The piece begins in the high register, slowly descending somewhat lower before finding a sort of resolution, with the transition to a lower register bringing its own challenges in maintaining tone, even as the pitch seems to settle. Both here and with the Winter album, there’s a tension at work which drives the music, with a seemingly implacable surface that reveals itself to be made up of many softer strokes in combination.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Mara Winter, Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard
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