At a time when just getting two people into a room to play together is a dimly-remembered luxury, it’s nice to hear again the strange interactions that happen during an improvised duet. The three recordings here all took place before 2020’s pandemic and the attendant lockdowns and general curtailment of simple pleasures. It’s also nice to remember that austere doesn’t have to be synonymous with meagre. The Interstices Of These Epidemics is the result of 18 months’ preparation by Clinton Green and Barnaby Oliver, in which the two of them worked with “a restricted palette of gestures and sound sources” until they created this mesmerising pair of improvisations. Green plays bowed metal bowls, producing distinctively complex, friable drones that teem with ambiguous harmonics. It’s a sound that can easily be overused but Green plays with steadfast restraint, letting inadvertent variations come of their own accord. In the first track, he’s joined by Oliver on violin, the two of them merging into what sounds like a prepared string quartet playing a blurred, nebulous chorale. For the second, Oliver switches to piano and Green’s drones become a backdrop for a plaintive series of ostinatos. The wistful sentimentality of the chords and halting rhythm is tempered by Oliver’s refusal to be led into anything beyond the most minute expressive gestures. This is released on Green’s Shame File Music, a long-running Melbourne label that mixes up new music with reissues of historic recordings of the Australian avant-garde.
This came out a while back and I didn’t pay close attention because it seemed like more lowkey improvisation which is all just swell but after a while you’ve heard too much of it. Turns out it’s way better than that. The two tracks on Iteration were improvisations at a live gig by Lucio Capece and Werner Dafeldecker, the former on reeds and battery-powered feedback, the latter on double bass. As with Green and Oliver, the two musicians do not play as one instrument but nevertheless play with a single mind in a shared, multicoloured voice. In the first track, Capece’s bass clarinet forms the focus, with Dafeldecker’s bass adding colouration and echoes, each instrument seeking out a common register. For the second, the string instrument’s more complex textures become figuration against higher, more pure tones traded between slide saxophone and feedback until the bass harmonics threaten to engulf them. Both works are unhurried, with a clean conception of form and pacing that slows down time while still feeling like a worked-out composition.
David Grubbs and Ryley Walker first played together as a duet on “a broiling night at a neighborhood bar” in New York in summer 2019. The gig is now released as Fight or Flight Simulator on Cafe Oto’s Takuroku download label. The two electric guitars intertwine around some gently paced but steady chords and picking patterns, then gradually lead each other into more fraught terrain. Even as there is some Sturm und Drang during the 25-minute piece, a regular pulse is heard or implied throughout, which both Grubbs and Walker use to pull back and foreground the subtle complexity found in the interplay of their instruments, rather than try to dazzle the punters with histrionics. It’s hard to be objective listening to this because I can’t but feel sad about it. It makes me wish I was in another place, or another time; somewhere it isn’t still winter, where there are bars and gigs, somewhere that isn’t London, or even Europe, somewhere that electric guitars still matter, a place where I’m not so old.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Barnaby Oliver, Clinton Green, David Grubbs, Lucio Capece, Ryley Walker, Werner Dafeldecker
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Music versus material (2): Lucio Capece
Tuesday 9 August 2016
When is a field recording no longer a field recording? I originally started to phrase this question “where is the line between field recording and…” but stopped when I couldn’t think of anything to put for the counter-example except “music”. As previously mentioned, field recordings in music tend to walk a fine line between being sufficiently dull to qualify as “sound art” or sufficiently rich to leave one “wallowing in timbre” (cf. Feldman, contrasting sound with music).
Do some of Alvin Lucier’s pieces count as field recordings? Considered as phenomena observed in a specific acoustic location, the line of distinction with field recordings gets blurred. I was thinking about this again when listening to Lucio Capece’s CD Awareness about. Similar considerations appear, of spatial location of sound as an acoustic characteristic, of the resonance of spaces. The last piece on the disc is a long recording made at the Halle des Expositions, Évreux, France, or rather of the Halle des Expositions. It’s part of a series titled Space Tuning – Conditional Music:
Performances involve the playback of recordings made in the space by placing a microphone inside cardboard tubes of differing dimensions. These recordings are analysed for their spectral characteristics and then edited into an assembled soundfile. The soundfile is played back live within the space via a PA, and is combined with three other sound sources: selected sine tones based on the harmonic spectrum and formants of the recordings, electronically produced white noise (both of which are amplified through mobile wireless speakers hanging from helium balloons), and some live sounds which I play on soprano saxophone.
Listeners familiar with Lucier would recognise features from some of his better-known works here. The resonance of the space (I Am Sitting In A Room), the cardboard tubes (Vessels), the movement of the sound image (Bird And Person Dyning). I’m not saying that the music is derivative, but that it consolidates and builds upon a legacy. Like many other pioneers in music, Lucier has often been described as a “one-off” – a term used more in hope than in admiration by musicians uncomfortable with the prospect of having to question their assumptions. It’s heartening to hear music so informed by a new tradition.
The soundworld of Space Tuning – Eiffel’s Halle des Expositions is satisfyingly cavernous without being overly ornamented. In two smaller pieces, Capece plays solo in his practice room then plays recordings of the sounds back into the room while binaural microphones attached to a helium balloon float around in circles. The resulting music stays clear but with a complexity of subtle details that never becomes dense.
The other long work, Groupings, is an entirely acoustic quartet but doesn’t sound like it. The slowly unfolding webs of sound are built out of auditory illusions, using white noise (air through an accordion, rasp on bow against string) as a filter for other sounds, playing off small differences in intonation of tones to emphasise or subtract from certain parts of the harmonic spectrum.
It’s a fascinating collection of pieces that focus on the most elemental but often neglected aspects of sound. Without being didactic, the musical beauty of the pieces allows the listener to explore for themselves how these sounds came about and consider how these phenomena appear in daily life.
