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.
