“Where’s the music?” is just the sort of thing you should be saying at a contemporary music festival. LCMF was back for 2024 with a programme promising plenty of tricksters and musical shitposting, a prospect which threatened enforced jollity and pre-baked disappointment. At first, it delivered on that promise very nicely with acts heavy on the shenanigans; these are always awkward in an art context, uprooted from the more fertile soil of low culture. A large part of the first evening was given over to Adam de la Cour’s deliberately ham-fisted panto pastiche Groyne ‘n’ Goosed, with an all-star cast. De la Cour is one of a group of British composers who humourously interrogate and deconstruct the cultural mores of music-making in a clever way that has remarkably little pay-off for anyone who chooses to listen to it rather than contemplate it as an intellectual exercise. The mode is comedic, but draws its inspiration from Monty Python at their most obtuse, and leaned heavily on the very limited schtick of Only Pretending To Be Crap. Groyne ‘n’ Goosed‘s muddled premise and extended antics wore thin very quickly; as with Laurie Tompkins’ The Feelmouth Greeny earlier that night, the attempt to play it off as ‘modernist shitposting’ was torpedoed by the amount of visible exertion put into wasting our time and a persistent eagerness to please, so that both works lost confidence in themselves.
A complete contrast in approach, Russell Haswell’s opera the truth is as elusive as ever took an apparently earnest approach to produce something trivial: diverse narrations and narrators suggesting some implied narrative out of a random-association text, strung together with chunks of Haswell’s typical live electronic noise. Musarc was the chorus for this piece, and were required to dress in bin bags and mill about amongst the audience for a bit of minimum-viable-product drama, matching how the work’s ambitions didn’t live up to its aspirations. The night ended with aya reminding us that she’s a girl two or three times while talking about herself more than playing music. I assume I’ll want to know who she is one day but the opportunity to find out why will have to wait, apparently.
These were all world premieres, commisioned by the Festival. Everything was a premiere, if only for the UK, which was admirable. Also on that first night was a new viola duet by Viola Torros, with Catherine Lamb and Johnny Chang sticking out like a sore thumb with their quiet, focused and attentive playing, leading each other through a piece that elusively slipped back and forth between slow contrapunctal melodies and passages of near harmonic stasis, kept on edge by their microtonal intonation. A similar square-peg-in-round-hole effect was created on the second night by Explore Ensemble giving the UK premiere of James Clarke’s 2016-E, eight years after the British composer wrote it. Clarke’s presence on the bill was justified by the power his music has to frighten off most concert programmers in his native country: complex, virtuosic methods to produce sounds that can verge on brutalism. 2016-E is a particularly astrigent piece, juxtaposing violent but controlled bursts of action against a flat frieze of extended, dirty chords. On Friday, Apartment House also played Clarke’s String Quartet No. 7, composed just last year before getting its first airing here. It’s a concise single movement that boils down its expressivity to the most rudimentary gestures, each instrument playing solo descending lines in turn against compressed, flattened chords, yet still articulating turns of texture and mood as though it were a work from the Romantic era, shorn of all extraneous ornamentation to reveal the defiantly melancholic core.
Explore also premiered Laila Arafah’s Sibelius Studies 2: [keeping expectations to the absolute minimum so the disappointment will reciprocate], a title in keeping with LCMF’s premise but whose music in fact delivered much more. Arafah has used the music notation programme Sibelius and its automated playback system to make doodles, filling pages with rapid clusters of notes at impossibly high or low extremes, which the computer’s synth renders as oddly textured buzzing sounds. These scores were projected on screens while Explore added scraps of sound for added colour and eccentric rhythm, with unusual percussive effects adding to the strangeness. Each piece is very short, fleeting like a Webern bagatelle with electronic interference, while really being entirely dependent on computer scribble. Amongst this was more antics and shenanigans, the low point being hypnogirl 24 in which Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster took a pointless story and told it badly. (“It is difficult for me to explain,” she said. We had noticed.) There were some excerpts from Jon Rafman’s COUNTERFEIT POAST videos, made out of cultural trash and debris, much like punk aesthetics from the 80s and 90s but with the ideology inverted: immersing oneself in garbage in search of the uncanny and attempting to make it relatable. An improvised duet by Maggie Nicols and Steve Beresford showed the influence that the 60s/70s school of British free improv still has on contemporary musicians: their stiff, formal japery appeared to capture the spirit of denuded panto at the source.
Around this time it had occurred to me that the LCMF curators Igor Toronyi-Lalic and Jack Sheen might have put together an enormous four-night prank to confront us with the great con we tell ourselves that the reason we all come to these sorts of things is to enjoy music. It’s true that I was feeling a bit jaded by that stage, but I unexpectedly cheered up with the closing set from ∈Y∋ + C.O.L.O. Usually LCMF nights end with a loud set of demotic dance music but Tetsuo Yamatsuka and Yasumichi Miura infused their stage bit with so much harsh-edged, rigourous noise (accompanied by suitably eye-splitting rectilinear projections in stark black and white) that even when the dance beats kicked in they seemed to be an extension of the noise. Better still, they didn’t end it there but just kept moving on to one thing after another until you genuinely wondered where you were all going to end up – something that rarely happens with electronic gigs.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: ∈Y∋, Adam de la Cour, aya, C.O.L.O., Catherine Lamb, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, James Clarke, Johnny Chang, Jon Rafman, Laila Arafah, Laurie Tompkins, Maggie Nicols, Russell Haswell, Steve Beresford, Viola Torros
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Block Rockin’ Summer Slam, Part 2
Monday 15 August 2022
Getting back to Germaine Sijstermans’ Betula: each of the compositions is written for a small minimum of pitched instruments, mostly without getting too fussy about type or number. Only one seems to specify that the instruments should sustain. All the instruments used here, can (Rasten plays guitar with an ebow). The musicans here produce a tour de force of ensemble playing, making each of Sijstermans’ intensely focused studies on small variations reveal a unique character while never deviating from a central principle. They embody stillness at its most alert, alive to incipient motion, when so much of this style of playing heard elsewhere can seem merely inert.
By comparison, two other discs I’d heard earlier, Hope Lies Fallow by Johnny Chang & Keir GoGwilt and Landmarks by Katelyn Clark & Isaiah Ceccarelli, now seem almost extroverted. Having previously been one half of Illogical Harmonies and Viola Torros, Chang teams up with GoGwilt to create violin duos that seem modern and ancient at once. Each piece is a solo composition, three each for the two string players. Their references are Hildegard von Bingen and Orlando di Lasso. In making something new they excavate something old, adding to it by creative subtraction, as though details have been effaced by time. Their slow, attenuated counterpoint is bowed raw but soft. Performed in a church in Auckland (Aotearoa), Chang even has his pieces recorded from further away, making them more frail and remote. For the last three pieces they are joined by Celeste Oram’s voice, haunting the music wordlessly as another layer of echo. Ceccarelli and Clark have previously presented some duos with organetto, but Landmarks gives an entire album to their work with various organs and percussion, this time credited as joint compositions. The church atmosphere prevails, with deep cowbells and bell plates complementing the keyboards, but the duet here brings out the more ancient, ritualistic aspects of European religion. The set begins dramatically with rich chords, gongs and rumbling deep bass drum, but each of the longer works becomes slower, turning into almost drone-like processionals. There’s an improvisation on ‘Kyrie Eleison’ that is more about sublimation than augmentation. It all ends with two brief, gnomic episodes respectively on organ and percussion alone, with no synthetic resolution.
I ventured outdoors again last week to see the rather odd improv trio of John Wall, Mark Sanders and John Edwards at Cafe Oto. Edwards on bass, Sanders on percussion, Wall on laptop working digital synthesis and processing of live sounds (tech permitting). I’m calling them odd because they don’t run the usual gamut of extended licks and technical obligations that dominate the genre. With your eyes shut it can be hard to tell who’s doing what at times, as they each turn their instruments into means of exploring boundaries between attack and decay, pitch and noise. As a group, they seem most interested in ways of ferreting in between the others’ sounds, settling down into them before breaking them apart. There was a focus on computer music and electronics on the night, with the other acts being Tom Mudd demonstrating a semi-chaotic synthesiser using feedback resonators to elide from detuned chorales to coloured bursts of static, and a too-rare chance to hear some of James Clarke’s compositions for manipulated orchestral samples. In some ways, these pieces resemble drawings of his works for live musicians, stretching and extending gestures and sonorities as a way of opening up microcosmic structures.
I’ve worked my way back from purity to newness, so I need to briefly mention a new release on Tripticks Tapes by guitarist/composer Matteo Liberatore. Lacquer strongly draws on noise rock, to the point that I’m not sure if there isn’t an electric guitar involved somewhere at some stage of this album described as “analog synthesis”. The riffs and the aggression are there, as are the attacks in the sudden injection and withdrawal of heterogeneous layers of noise. Some of the off-kilter patterns strongly resemble stomp boxes left to their own devices in a closed circuit, which gives the racket a youthful exuberance. The noise may be cheap but it’s the sophistication with which Liberatore cuts and pastes it all together that prevents anything outstaying its welcome or, more importantly, gives each piece the substance to be taken seriously and not as just a throwaway goof.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Germaine Sijstermans, Isaiah Ceccarelli, James Clarke, John Edwards, John Wall, Johnny Chang, Katelyn Clark, Keir GoGwilt, Mark Sanders, Matteo Liberatore, Tom Mudd
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Catherine Lamb and Johnny Chang with or without Viola Torros
Monday 4 February 2019
When I got back to town, people told me I’d missed a great gig, with Johnny Chang and Catherine Lamb playing at St Mary at Hill. At the end of the year, I received a new batch of CDs from Another Timbre, including a double album of works by Chang and Lamb. I’ve been spending a lot of time with these discs over the past month.
The gig and the album centred on the music of Viola Torros. Interviews with Chang and Lamb and other promotional material offer up all sorts of details about Torros as an historical figure, all of which may be safely disregarded without any impediment to appreciating the fine music to be heard here*. The background reading doesn’t prepare the listener or shed any additional light on the music as such, which is all the better for being heard on its own merits outside of a putative back story. Viola Torros, mediated through these ‘augmentations’ is at most a strong example of the Third Mind at work, producing music that owes something to both and neither creator simultaneously. On the first CD, we hear the second and third of these interpretations, effectively creating a diptych that invites comparisons and contrasts.
The focus is on the two violas of Chang and Lamb playing in tandem. Their playing is expressive, employing a range of gestures, but highly restrained in pitch range, to the point where only microtonal adjustments in intonation are audible. The music recalls Cage’s description of the sound he wanted in his last, microtonal works, “melisma, florid song”. The listener’s attention focuses on the grain of the violas’ sound, the rasp of bow on string made sonorous by emphasising the lower registers of the instrument. It takes longer to tune in on the resonances used to enhance the violas, electronics that add subtle but indelible colours. Then the voices come in and the small, new world the violas have created is transformed again.
As with V.T. Augmentations II, so is V.T. Augmentations III. The approach is the same but the methods employed take on a different attitude. The viola playing is starker, with a range that is greater but lower, often singling out one player at a time. The exposed playing, without its resonant halo, creates a more sombre mood. When electronics do appear, the aded reverberation is more prominent, like a shadow. The voices, when they appear, are now exclusively female, giving the shape of the piece its own distinct turn.
The second disc presents two more pieces, each a solo work by one of the collaborators. Chang’s Citaric Melodies III forgoes electronics for a larger ensemble. With greater instrumental colouration, winds and electric guitar to supplement violin and viola to construct a varied but translucent web of overlapping sounds. The piece is brighter and more varied than the preceding works. As a stand-alone, it can feel more superficial in comparison with the other pieces, but in context it provides a pleasing contrast.
Finally, Lamb’s Prisma Interius VI (for v.t.) continues the series of works she has made from mixing live musicians with synthesized processing of external ambient sound. The initial theme of the album is resumed, with only the two violas and a cello playing within an ambient space of harmonised environmental sounds. It’s an urban environment, which can sometimes intrude harshly. The grey, unstable drone of city sounds and reduced instrumental colours create a piece that feels like the Viola Torros pieces with further layers stripped away. It’s never quite ‘nearly nothing’; the musicianship throughout is almost folkloric at times, but it’s folklore removed to a distant, half-remembered time and place. I’d have loved to have heard it live, but the CDs will do nicely.
* Fictional artists are a bugbear of mine, along with imaginary movie soundtracks. Both make me reflexively anticipate a conceptual smokescreen to mask an artistic deficiency.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Catherine Lamb, Johnny Chang
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Serious Listening Weekend
Monday 3 October 2016
Are you playing an instrument or playing music? I’m old-fashioned enough to be leery of improvisation. Spent the weekend listening to new(ish) CDs of music that was not strictly composed; not in the authorial sense. For most of them I could make the argument that these are compositions, not improvisations.
There’s a growing, interesting genre of music that defines, develops and interprets compositional parameters as a joint process between musicians. These pieces aren’t an a priori realisation of a composer’s indeterminate score, nor are they spontaneously improvised. This seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon. Off the top of my head I can’t think of examples of these methods going back as far as “free improvisation” in the 1960s. There was “group composition” but that was just a term for improv musos who had to play art galleries instead of jazz clubs. It’s a sign that the genre is evolving, maturing.
I’ve been working through a rich vein of discs sent from the Another Timbre, Intonema and Immediata labels. Violinist Angharad Davies and pianist Tisha Mukarji recorded a set of improvisations over two days this February, released under the title ffansïon | fancies. In an interview on the website it mentions that the second day of recording was forced by “circumstances”, but this helped the album immensely. Material from the first day was evidently reworked, developed and refined for takes used on the final release. (“It struck me that this is a particularly fruitful way of using improvisation.”) The results show the benefit of additional time for reflection. Each piece reveals a focus on detail without losing sight of an overall direction or shape. Sounds are allowed to develop and change over time without rambling, giving each piece a character that can range from spiky pointillism to deconstructed folk music.
The St Petersburg-based Intonema label finds plenty of room to wander within what appears at first to be a pretty narrow range of music. The wandering is both musical and geographical. Tri presents a state-of-the-art improvisation in electroacoustic music with venerable electric guitarist Keith Rowe and Ilia Belorukov and Kurt Liedwart on various instruments, objects, computer processing and electronics. It documents a live performance and listening at home it’s hard to get too excited about all the technique on display. Sympathy to the guy in track one with the cough.
In contrast, Belorukov’s collaboration with Gaudenz Badrutt on electronics and “objects” and Jonas Kocher on accordion makes for fascinating listening. Rotonda is a live performance inside the Mayakovsky Library in St Petersburg. The musicians note that the space of the rotunda and its specific acoustics makes it “the fourth collaborator” in the piece. A compositional constraint is introduced: “acute attention to silences and extremely careful work with sound”. A slow, deliberately-paced music unfolds over nearly 50 minutes, each performer knowing that the resonance of the space will fill and colour their inactivity. A welcome relief from the horror vacui that affects so many musicians, without ever becoming a dry, didactic exercise in silence.
Tooth Car features Canadians Anne-F Jacques and Tim Olive playing live in the US: two fairly short extracts, which may be all that is needed for audio only. The limitations here are mechanical. Jacques constructs rotating surfaces that are played and amplified, while Olive amplifies other objects with magnetic pickups. The rotating devices provide regular ostinati throughout each piece and the various colours of metallic scraping suggest something close to sound sculpture.
For real group composition, Polis presents a combine, of intentional sounds and unexpected factors. Electroacoustic composers Vasco Alves, Adam Asnan and Louie Rice collaborated by preparing compositions and then mixed them, playing the mix through a car sound system that drove to various locations around the city of Porto. A complex but not impenetrable blending of sounds emerge, with different tracks overlapping each other, elaborated upon by different locations and live sampling of urban spaces. A neat convergence of pure sound, documentary, field recording and spatialisation.
Perhaps more conventional, Volume by the duo Illogical Harmonies on the Another Timbre label clearly identifies itself as a jointly composed piece. The violinist Johnny Chang and double bass player Mike Majkowski improvised together over several months, transcribing, performing and revising until they had sculpted this hour-long suite of five movements. This painstaking process has produced a beautifully restrained and focused performance, which at first sounds like a concentrated study on intonation and tuning but on closer listening reveals beautiful details of refined ornamentation and subtle relief.
Anthony Pateras has built a career out of being both a composer and an improviser, and his own Immediata label has recently produced a series of limited edition CDs of works that lurk in the grey area between the two domains. (Downloads are also available on Bandcamp.) I was going to discuss a couple of these now but I’ve just been listening again to his collaboration with Erkki Veltheim, Entertainment = Control. We’re back to straight violin and piano here and this bravura performance is part lost minimal epic, part social commentary, part virtuosic tour-de-force and part pisstake. I was going to say this disc is ideal if you think The Necks are too fussy or Charlemagne Palestine is too straightlaced, but then I started reading the extensive sleeve notes again. Pateras and Veltheim discuss fascism and sadomasochism, the Marx brothers, punk cabaret and the plague of El Sistema amongst other things and I can see I need to save all this for a separate post.
