I don’t like writing bad reviews, not least because it seems too easy and feels like I’m trying to pander to readers. The stuff I write about is typically worth considering and engaging with, even if the outcome proves to be negative. The writing’s slowed down a bit in the past year so there’s a backlog of worthy music, plus a bunch of stuff that I need to take off the listening pile so I can stop kidding myself I’m going to be motivated to think about it seriously. Here’s some mental housekeeping.
Yan Jun; cut-off; FJE Trio: The Brunt; Kieran Daly: Two pieces for fixed media pitched instruments voice zero build; Takuma Kuragaki: cleave [Party Perfect!!!]. Party Perfect, why have you forsaken me with this string of clunkers? These albums annoy because they sound like audio documentation of performance art, where the sound is one of several essential components or entirely incidental. Yan Jun gives a great personal history of clandestine pop music CD distribution in communist China, as context for him rolling CDs across the floor. You don’t need to hear this. The FJE Trio is an electroacoustic improv gig by Joe Foster, Bryan Eubanks and Jean Paul Jennkins which we have to assume seemed cool if you were in the audience. Kieran Daly has put a lot of research into his pieces for intoning voice and guitar: it takes a lot of academic rigour to make music simultaneously grating and tedious, with any residual humour firmly beaten flat. Takuma Kuragaki’s casual scattering of occasional electronic clicks might be the exception here, as a second listening to individual tracks suggests a subversive artfulness behind the sterility.
Neil Luck: Eden Box [Accidental]. I was sent this last year and meant to write about it, as Luck is part of this curious school of British composition which presumes to question the cultural and social underpinnings of contemporary music by taking an approach that continually flirts with mistaking demystification with self-deprecation. As concepts go, it’s a refreshingly tangled one, but then I lost my copy in a hard drive crash and hadn’t backed it up. Sorry, Mr Luck.
Mary Kouyoumdjian: Witness [Phenotypic Recordings]. I’m old enough to remember when the Kronos Quartet were content to play music without having to make everything into A Project. Also old enough to be over the collecting of worthy and earnest recordings of authentic testimony and ethnography mixed in with movie music so we know how to feel about it. More documentary than art, and all the less powerful for it, as emotional depth is sacrified for appeals to veracity, with an emoting string quartet acting as a surrogate for our empathy.
Teodora Stepančić: O A | F G [Another Timbre]. I’ve been waiting for the moment when Another Timbre releases some music that flies a little too close to the cold, distant sun – where the silences, hushed tones, reverential playing and exquisite delicacy finally lapse into something than can be summed up in a word as precious. This is an ideal candidate: two works for small ensembles played by Ordinary Affects with just enough extended pauses and repetitions to appear arch, mixed with just enough inconsitency in pacing and phrasing to appear indecisive.
Giuliano d’Angiolini: )))((( [elsewhere]. Speaking of Another Timbre, I meant to write about Giuliano d’Angiolini’s 2020 album Antifona, a set of curious concert hall pieces for everything from piano to orchestra, but evidently I did not. Elsewhere has since put out the helpfully titled )))(((, a collection of three pieces for a combined total of forty-seven multitracked flutes plus six clarinets. Manuel Zurria is the flautist, assisted by Paolo Ravaglia on the reeds. I’ve wanted to make good for Antifona but I’ve listened to these flute pieces half a dozen times and I still can’t remember a thing about them. Mi dispiace, signiore d’Angiolini.
Antoine Läng: Lâcher les chiens tant qu’on y est [Insub]. Every generation or so someone brings up with the idea of making an entire album with nothing but Jew’s harps and it always works out about the same.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Antoine Läng, Bryan Eubanks, FJE Trio, Giuliano d’Angiolini, Jean Paul Jennkins, Joe Foster, Kieran Daly, Mary Kouyoumdjian, Neil Luck, Takuma Kuragaki, Teodora Stepančić, Yan Jun
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Exhaustion, and more
Sunday 22 June 2025
Insub Meta Orchestra: Exhaustion / Proliferation [Sawyer Editions]. It’s literally called Exhaustion: the first of two compositions by Cyril Bondi and d’incise composed for the Insub Meta Orchestra is superbly evocative. Like their other collabs with the Meta Orchestra, these pieces use systems for group organisation, building a diverse but strongly controlled array of potential events out of simple basic principles. As a description, that sounds dry as; in practice it defies and frustrates your expectations of tension and release as the two become confused, imbuing each piece with genuine emotional depth and complexity. Exhaustion provides an absolute minimum of action, operating in the manner of a late Beckett text where the words become more eloquent and poignant as their range becomes ever more constricted. Proliferation perversely creeps and crawls its way through a blind alley of minimal options. In their way, both pose conundrums for students of information theory, as while entropy seems to be the driving force behind each piece there is no perceptible transformation in the distortion, other than a sense of unease. A lot of these effects are down to the Orchestra, here an all-star grouping of 29 musicians who have developed an eloquent palette of small sounds, including some esoteric percussion, which add a surprising amount of colour and freshness so you can wallow in melancholy if you need to.
d’incise: Incendies [Insub]. d’incise’s solo album is purely electronic and in its way is another meditation on entropy. The four pieces here are apparently made from analogue electronic signals repeatedly passed through various filters and effects until they have degraded into unstable, flickering blocks of sound. Each piece seems to resemble the others and each piece seems to carry a pulse, but the pulse is never steady or even apparent and the points of resemblance can never quite be pinned down. In each track, the framework and basic methodology are the same but once the process takes hold the material strays outside of any clearly defined bounds, creating curious aural phenomena as a kind of wild overgrowth. It recalls the better examples of glitchcore from the late Nineties, not in sound but in approach, where dogged inquisitiveness could lead you into labyrinths.
Kory Reeder: Homestead [Another Timbre]. The strings of Apartment House play this new Reeder quartet, a very different beast from his 2021 piece Everywhere The Truth Rushes In. In four movements with an interlude, Homestead stretches out for nearly an hour: I’ve had issues with Reeder’s longer stuff before and this one half-confirms and half-refutes my prejudices. I described the previous quartet as “deceptively uniform” and this new one keeps up that approach by rubbing your nose in it. Long passages of homogeneity pass by like a bus journey across the prairie, or cornfields. Simplicity and directness are presented as a fact to be dealt with, neither reverentially beautified nor alienated into negative dialectics. At the same time, Reeder has advanced the more difficult aspects of his low-contrast aesthetics and made them the subject matter, as you consider the musical material as either too benign to be provocative or too persistent to be beguiling. Apartment House’s unvarnished rendering is appropriate for the edifice Reeder has constructed, as impassive as a small town: if you live in one it can be a peaceful haven or hell on earth. From here, it becomes a matter of asking the right questions.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Cyril Bondi, d'incise, Kory Reeder
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Pianos, etc.
Sunday 1 June 2025
Timothy McCormack: mine but for its sublimation [Another Timbre]. (Don’t say Feldman don’t say Feldman don’t say Feldman) it’s an hour-long piece for piano with subdued dynamics that opens by obsessively interrogating a unresolved, ambiguous chord through changes in voicing and register and at first it seems a well-crafted study in tone and shading at least influenced, but more properly to say informed by… you know, that guy. As the piece progresses it takes on a greater character – independent, larger and more complex; perversely so as the musical continuity starts to break up. Pauses open up and resonances are allowed to linger until they start to become the material McCormack is working with. He understands that it’s not enough to preserve a mood through a piece’s entirety, but to sustain it in the listener’s mind by thwarting it, keeping things precarious. At several moments the music threatens to develop into something else, only to do so by falling away into near-silence. Chords are reduced to single harmonics, with sparse notes beating against the overtones. McCormack describes the work in terms of resonance, and in stages these resonances become more focused and sustained. The pianist is Jack Yarbrough, for whom the piece was written: he has a gift for coaxing prolonged sounds out of his instrument, with a pacing and a use of tonal colour that are deliberate without being calculating. Having achieved this state of otherworldliness, the piece goes further by stretching out resonance indefinitely, through the use of ebows on the strings; harmony condensed into an ominous, persistent hum. It all ends with a slow but brutal finality and I’m still knocked about by the way McCormack and Yarbrough have created a transformative piece out of chin-stroking acoustical considerations while also delivering an emotional thump.
Bryn Harrison: Towards a slowing of the past [Another Timbre]. Harrison’s latest musical labyrinth comes with a twist. This forty-minute piece is for two pianos and comes out of the gate like a doubled version of his solo piece Vessels from way back when, but all too soon it suddenly rebounds on you in a psychedelic tape reversal. As if the unadulterated form wasn’t trippy enough. Each passage starts off afresh in what seems a call-and-response of pianos and backwards-pianos, but gradually the contributions from the electronics become more pervasive and insidious. The reversed resonances wash in from beneath the live pianists, always a bit lower and a bit slower, and then they start to take a shape of their own. By the second half, the reversed passages are calling the shots, leading the pianists into darker registers, slowed to a trancelike dirge. It’s a disturbing development, making explicit the seductive danger that has been implicit in Harrison’s previous works. The pianists here are Mark Knoop and Roderick Chadwick, both veterans at Harrison’s music and adept at pulling off the nimble counterpoint needed to make it work; for this piece they convey the image of two workers industriously tackling the job at hand, only to be sobered as the technical demands give way to something more oppressive.
Ashlee Mack: green [Sawyer Editions]. I’ve been meaning to get around to the Sawyer Edition releases from early this year. Pianist Ashlee Mack plays four works by four composers, all of the quiescent school: each piece feels about the same in scope, regardless of length. Mack’s approach here highlights her interest in touch, using attentive dynamics and phrasing to say a lot, even where there could perhaps be more colour (might be down to the piano or the recording). Jeff Herriott’s piece green is passing seems made for such an interpretation, with its palette-dabs of single tones and small chords given substance as an abstraction, belying its relatively brief length. Eva-Maria Houben’s snow from 2023 is on the cusp between her just-enough and not-enough compositions, with a slow succession of single notes gaining a degree of momentum through each overlapping decay: Mack gives a nice sense of timing to lift the dry material off the page. Heard in this company, Marti Epstein’s Haven seems to owe too much to those preceding works; while it starts to add more to the mix to produce a certain expressive weight and dramatic shape, the effort is undermined by carrying on too long. The non-conformist in the pack is Ian Mikyska’s Distant bells; mist; stopping, which gets some slightly more robust dynamics and acts strangely by lapsing into periods of various ostinati. It could come across as fey if those gently reassuring moments didn’t come and go with such indifferent abruptness.
Morton Feldman and Tobias Hume: Intermissions [Sawyer Editions]. I got instinctive prejudice against anything overtly “curated” so when I see an album that proposes a “dialogue” between Feldman’s early piano pieces and Hume’s pieces for viol circa 1600 I reflexively start cueing up individual tracks. The album begins with a silent track (30 seconds) and ends with one (60 seconds), with several other silent tracks in between. There are other pauses, at the start and end of tracks, too. Guy Vandromme’s interpretations of Feldman are nicely modern while still trying to be as small as possible; not timid, just not making a big deal of it, while keeping enough of the old capital-M modernist brittleness. Luciana Elizondo plays Hume on a viola da gamba and it all sounds fine to a rube like me. I don’t think we need to hear repeat performances of certain pieces, which are presumably sequenced in for the sake of continuity. As a whole, it passes along as a series of sporadic but consistent objections to the silence, which seems too mild an objective.
