Boring Like A Drill.

Maya Verlaak’s metamorphosis into an English eccentric continues apace. Her new album Trace from Birmingham Record Company comes without text on the cover and without explanations for any of the pieces it contains, save that they’re to do with “personal approaches in the compositional process.” Her previous collection of works, on Another Timbre’s All English Music Is Greensleeves, showed an interest in reviving the values of the British avant-garde from the late 1960s and early 70s, before it was exhausted by Maoism and Minimalism, using the personal and the homespun as the means for experimental practice instead of confirming certitudes. The more recent works and recordings on Trace show Verlaak advancing this line of thinking into new territory; specifically, that territory being the musician’s homes. Each piece was written for the performers heard here, and the act of Verlaak travelling all over between Berlin and Penrith to record them playing her music at home alludes to a wider project in which the goal is not to make a point, but to find out what may be learned. Any thoughts of cosy domesticity are quickly upended by the puzzling tasks the composer sets her musicians: not rebellious but obstinate, in an English manner. For starters, the opening piece Anticipation is the only one requiring a second musician, and thus a cross-Channel overdub of Paul Zaba singing upon Luca Pignata’s accordion, with lulling melodies that gradually tend towards drones, aided by a shruti box that comes and goes. That dreamlike grey zone between melody and stasis recurs in All English music is – with Howard, featuring none other than Howard Skempton on accordion essaying increasingly distracted derivations from the well-known tune, each successive phrase leading further away from the listener’s expectations and towards some unrecognisable form of organisation. An adaptation of this pieces is also played on harmonium by Kate Halsall: All English music is – with Kate begins with the material’s fragmentation and abstraction further advanced, producing a monologue of gruff exhortations.

In the two longer compostions, Whispers finds Kate Ledger at home in York with her piano, but before you hear the keyboard Verlaak’s score first instructs her to gasp a high note and blow into the microphone. It’s the beginning of a meticulous series of exercises requiring Ledger to execute precise moments of extreme pianistic brevity, with mandated singing and breathing on cue, while pitted against electronic bleeps that imply both tuning-fork stringency and smartphone intrusions. Ledger manages it all very cleanly, threading some semblance of melody out of substances that are much drier and more discrete than they first appear. Meanwhile in Antwerp, trombonist Thomas Moore peforms Mutations, a wonderfully baffling work where the notes he plays rise and fall according to some unexplained process that may or may not involve the analog synth bloops that regularly surface throughout the piece and/or the litany of spoken pairs of near-homonyms, alternate pronunciations and false cognates that are rattled off in the background. It’s both simple and dense, the most satisfying yet of her linguistic puzzles to blur word, speech and music. Each piece here, really, functions in the same way as an unsolveable riddle, with a type of intellect that prefers the senses over philosophy. Incidentally, the title track is a brief portrait of Joseph Kudirka at home in Berlin, humming while turning out clotted chords on a music box. It all leaves me looking forward to the next instalment of Verlaak’s music, so long as the Proms commissioners are kept frightened away.

Frank Denyer is English but you couldn’t tell this from listening to his music. He’s created a sound-world so utterly his own that it could plausibly come from any one place or time as another – something frequently said with less accuracy about Xenakis – given how little it seems to rely on any observable cultural tradition. Another Timbre has built up an invaluable edition of Denyer’s music over the years, most recently documenting two major works, the complete Melodies cycle and the immense The Fish that became the Sun. Their new release Screens compiles five more pieces, composed across a span of nearly fifty years. They’re performed by the Octandre Ensemble, who have championed Denyer’s music over the years, including a memorable concert in 2018 which included some of the works presented here. Denyer’s music is intimate and confronting; if it shocks, then it does so through a naked emotional frankness stripped of all rhetorical devices, whether symbolbic or signifying. Another Timbre’s recording emphasises this with a wide dynamic range that still never gets loud except in relation to the extreme tenderness with which Octandre plays. A vast panoply of instruments and objects are used here to create sounds that seem at once natural yet unimaginable. That timbral ingenuity is at the forefront of the two Unison pieces from the early 1970s heard here, with additional voices from Joshua Ballance and Juliet Fraser. Fraser also sings on Screens and 2021’s Five Views of the Path, with a yielding humanity that adds greater poignancy to parts which could easily treated as just another instrument in the ensemble. Fraser and Octandre premiered Screens at that 2018 concert, with Denyer here repeating his spoken interlude. In Five Views of the Path and in 1990s Broken Music, percussive sounds predominate amongst the ensemble, yet Denyer and the Ensemble make the eclectic timbres cohere melodic and harmonious, even when pitch is absent.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Frank Denyer, Maya Verlaak
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Another Timbre continues to advance the noble cause of Frank Denyer: the latest is a double, making his complete Melodies cycle from the mid 1970s available to the public for the first time. Composed over several years, it’s a series of twenty-six short compositions for a multicoloured array of small ensembles and soloists. Listening to the cycle as a whole gives a fascinating insight into Denyer’s conception of sound and composition; he makes the most startling leaps in imagination appear to occur to the musicians naturally and spontaneously. Melodies begins as a series of ‘one-note’ melodies, opening out in range until it reaches an epilogue made up of fifteen pitches. It’s a steady spiral of growth, sound more organic than mathematical. The peculiarity of Denyer’s music is always very human and direct: the ‘one-note’ pieces use flexible intonation and rhythm to create something alive from the most marginal substance. Solo horn is accompanied by clicking stones, added as though the percussion is an incidental, semi-conscious articulation. From there the cycle doesn’t exactly build upon itself, but expands upon its initial driving urge, using instruments that are muted and modified, baroque and exotic, or simple voices including, at one point, the composer’s own. The performances here were compiled over several months, with the Scordatura Ensemble, Luna String Quartet and vocal ensemble Mad Song making each piece feel like inspired improvisation (with some thrilling unison work from the Lunas near the end). In its means and materials, Melodies draws upon and then confounds what was then our emerging understanding of art that had been traditionally labelled ‘primitive’, raising its cumulative effect into a powerful statement.

A new set of solos, duos and trios by Evan Johnson titled L’art de toucher follows on from the set of piano pieces lists, little stars put out on All That Dust in 2021. The title is highly appropriate for Johnson’s music, even as it references the three pieces here titled L’art de toucher le clavecin, none of which include a keyboard. The focal instrument in this triptych is the piccolo, that most friable of instruments, heard solo, with violin, and with both violin and percussion, although not necessarily in that chronological order. The brittle and the ethereal are the two extremes Johnson tries to embrace at once in his highly detailed compositions, eking out a hard-won yet fragile physicality in sound. The music is all about touch, or its absence, where it begins and ends, hovering on that threshhold where physical contact is manifested as sound, leaving you wondering at times if you’ve heard anything at all. The mechanical intervention of the piano in lists, little stars prohbits such subtleties being employed to their full effect, so the pieces here come across as more readily intelligble and less precious in their reticence. Richard Craig and Susanne Peters interpret their piccolo parts with a blessed absence of affectation, accompanied by violinist Sarah Saviet and Rie Watanabe on percussion. The larger piece Plan and section of the same reservoir is performed by the acclaimed Trio Accanto with the rarefied brilliance you would expect. Most haunting is thaes oferode, thisses swa maeg, in which Juliet Fraser and Séverine Ballon play a duet for soprano and cello that blends their sounds in ways that suggest they are being shadowed by a ghostly clarinet.

Sarah Saviet returns for a bravura performance of Bryn Harrison’s violin solo A Coiled Form. Before hearing it, immediate comparisons can be drawn with his earlier piano piece Vessels: both began as short pieces that were then extended to over three times their original length. Both require a tightrope act of calmness and concentration to sustain and preserve a moment to immense duration; in effect, both are small pieces, just very long. The unexpected difference comes in the flow of the music. Whereas Vessels and other pieces by Harrison unroll in a steady, unbroken cascade, A Coiled Form is disrupted by crosscurrents and eddies. Bowed sowftly sul pont throughout, Saviet’s violin flits and skitters like a Sciarrino caprice, negotiating a pathway through a maze of twisting little passages, all different. At times, the music doubles back upon itself, or gets caught in a cul-de-sac and loops for a while before taking up a previously-discarded thread. The quietly obsessive persistence of the piece can be enervating, but Saviet doesn’t let it show. Even heard as background, its sudden conclusion after some fifty minutes leaves a profound absence in its wake.

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Tags: Bryn Harrison, Evan Johnson, Frank Denyer
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I’m not buying into the premise of this year’s London Contemporary Music Festival, back after a Covid-induced hiatus, but after two hot nights beginning in bright light under the skylights at the Woolwich Fireworks Factory the third evening turned grey and rainy and I prepared for the gig by looking out over the bleak lower reaches of the Thames while a cold wet wind blew through me. The first act I caught was Andy Ingamells giving Nam June Paik’s classic Sonata Quasi Una Fantasia a dedicated performance that was still very British in its repressed melancholy. I’m going to focus on the compositions here, as the improvisations, poetry and videos left me wondering if I understand anything about them. (The videos were a mix of “spent an hour too long looking up something on Wikipedia” and a revival of the early 80s New York genre “I’ve been here so long I assume my personal fuckups are generally relatable”.)

I’ve now heard more Evan Johnson, as much as it is possible to hear his music. Richard Craig perfomed his solo bass flute émoi with a confidence that made its faint sounds seem sourceless, a low sighing between a breath and a hum that floated through the large, populated space just audible but undeniably present. A big moment was the premiere of a new Frank Denyer piece, commissioned by LCMF. Five Views of the Path matched soprano Jessica Aszodi with the Octandre Ensemble playing an eclectic mix of instruments ranging from baroque to homemade inventions. With Denyer, the exotic colouration is used as expressive material, sound as evocation. Aszodi had a thankless role sitting among the musicians, picking out high notes in vocalise that mingled with the trio of recorders and struck berimbaus. Strange colours and percussion were a recurrent theme, particularly on the following night. The Explore Ensemble gave the first UK performance of Clara Iannotta’s Eclipse Plumage, a complex woven rope of small sounds that intertwined to produce an ominously indefinite chord that continually transformed its medium and displacement. Percuissionists and normal musicians alike operated a large array of small percussion and amplified objects, backed by a grand piano rigged with an electromagnetic device to induce sinister emanations.

Also receiving its first British performance was Rebecca Saunders’ percussion duo dust II, an extraordinary work quite unlike anything I’ve heard by her before. Caspar Heinemann and Christian Dierstein gave a bravura performance as they moved from the audience to the front of the room, onto and eventually across the stage, managing a dizzying array of instruments. Saunders adopted a more relaxed pace than usual, allowing the intrinsic complexity of the sounds to provide her busier textures. Sounds were combined beautifully, with a strong focus on metallic semi-pitched sounds. The firm grasp on the material and the progression (in sound and movement) from one place to another made the piece work as music and not just a virtuosic exercise, even as the momentary effects were dazzling. To complement this, the evening began with Crystabel Riley‘s requiem of solo drumming, a prolonged study in fusing rhythm into timbre.

The Saturday evening gig began with another revived Fluxus piece, Ben Patterson’s First Symphony getting its first British airing. Someone asked me to sit on the left side of the hall for this piece, but I didn’t trust them and so sat on the right. There were four premieres that night, commissioned for the event. Cerith Wyn Evans’ …)(. finally got its complete airing, long deferred since the preview given in 2019 for its expected debut the following year. At that time, “the hieratic, slow-paced performance on piano and gongs was betrayed by a perfunctory and non-committal ending” and here the pay-off was a listless antiphonal chorale from the orchestra. Not the orchestra’s fault, given the heartfelt work they put into Tyshawn Sorey’s tone poem for cello and orchestra, For Roscoe Mitchell. Soloist Deni Teo and the pickup orchestra conducted by Jack Sheen played this beautifully scored and phrased work with rapturous solemnity, reminiscent of Feldman’s Cello and Orchestra but with fuller, less stifled voicing for the cello.

Hard not to roll the eyes at the prospect of an orchestral premiere by Elvin Brandhi aka one half of Yeah You: this kind of crossover almost never works. Except this time it kind of did. Brandhi’s GIFF WRECK took her usual materials of noise and vocal aggression and displaced them onto a video screen of two vocalists sitting at home deploying auto-tuned effects, mimicked and counterposed by dense bursts of orchestral textures. Brandhi herself kept true to her peripatetic style, pacing round the perimeters of the hall occasionally adding her own amplified interventions. Oliver Leith’s
Pearly, goldy, woody, bloody, or, Abundance trended heavily towards the jokey side of his work and probably went too far. That was probably the point but it’s at the expense of the piece’s staying power. An exuberant mish-mash of triumphant fanfares, complete with aural pyrotechnics, its self-conscious humour is good fun but disposable in the manner of Wellington’s Victory, which again is probably the point.

Mariam Rezaei’s frenzied activity on turntables and samplers for her lengthy solo SADTITZZZ was a remarkable achievement, being a virtual skronk solo that had all the singlemindedness of your typical free improv muso while being more inventive and fun than about ninety percent of them. It also worked as a nice teaser for the concluding act of the night, when Roscoe Mitchell himself appeared. He’s eighty-one now, I think. Typically considered to be jazz, which is an all too limited understanding of his musical achievements. Having just subjected people to my jazz-deafness, I prepared for disappointment but didn’t hear it in that way at all. A slight figure but mesmerising on stage, he captures the audience through plain statements that he then eloquently expands upon into detailed arguments, extending motives in different directions and then relating them in ways that are intuitively clear without ever exact repetition. He also knows when to stop, and deploys silence to pointed effect. Solos on soprano and baritone sax were then followed by percussionist Kikanju Baku, who emerged from the back of the hall as a disruptive trickster figure. Once at his drum-kit, his relentless attack acted as harsh colouration with rhtyhmic variance. Mitchell played off and against this barrage, equally unruffled whether he was matching the flow or simply commenting with isolated notes. A captivating ending.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Andy Ingamells, Ben Patterson, Cerith Wyn Evans, Clara Iannotta, Crystabel Riley, Elvin Brandhi, Evan Johnson, Frank Denyer, Kikanju Baku, Mariam Rezaei, Oliver Leith, Rebecca Saunders, Roscoe Mitchell, Tyshawn Sorey
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Frank Denyer’s hour-long work for chorus and large ensemble The Fish that became the Sun received its premiere at a sold-out performance in Huddersfield last week, some twenty-three years after the work was completed. The work was recorded for Another Timbre last year and has just been released to coincide with the concert. I’ve written about Denyer’s music before, but these were all briefer compositions for much smaller forces. The predominant tone in those pieces was of a very close, personal intimacy. What happens when he composes on a broader scale?

Subtitled ‘Songs of the Dispossessed’, The Fish that became the Sun matches voices with diverse groups of musicians; between them, forty musicians play a total of eighty-seven instruments. The family of sounds drawn together is highly eclectic and restricted to small groups and combinations heard at any one time. The most immediately striking thing about the piece is Denyer’s extensive use of found objects and specially-constructed instruments made of broken and discarded items – junk. This alien orchestra is joined by instruments including sitar, crumhorns, dulcimers and modern Western instruments. Different tunings abound. The use of space for the music is an essential component, enhancing the theatrical dimension of the work. Despite the obvious parallels that can be drawn, the theatre is less like that of Harry Partch and more like the music of George Crumb: a set of tableaux that shift from one scene to the next in highly discrete emotional states, each one a contrast – sometimes subtle, sometimes jarring – yet steadily building up a single, complex image. The strangeness comes from less from the surface and more from the substance, and its significance.

The panoply of unusual sounds (I doubt that many of them have been heard by listeners before) are so unfamiliar as to resemble sounds from nature, less refined and thus less knowable. The chorus sings wordlessly; the musicians dispersed through the space also sing and hum. Moments of simple unison playing clash with microtones and non-uniform timbres. The raw, unpolished order of nature culminates when a pair of children sing the only words heard in the piece. Their song has the gnomic simplicity of a nursery rhyme, along with the fraught ambiguity and underlying cruelty.

The word ‘ritual’ seems to get used too freely when describing pieces by modern composers. The Fish that became the Sun is packed with too much music to be considered, at least in recording, a document of a performance: it succeeds as an extended, purely musical statement, immediately rewarding at each moment. It does, however, operate on the level of a myth. From the title to the rhymes and distant fanfare at the end, we are placed in ther realm of transformative myth, the type of transformation that drives an origin story, to explain where we are now and how we got there. Denyer wrote the piece through the early 90s; Michael Turnbull’s sleeve notes describe the work as a response to the times. History supposedly having ended, we entered uncharted territory. The signs are ominous, and seem even more so now, but Denyer’s transformations are equally hopeful, as with the orchestra made from detritus. How much of culture is a constructed paradise and how much of it is a defence against the darkness? The Fish that became the Sun may signal a path to redemption or a fate to which we are condemned, but we don’t know which.

The recording features many of the musicians at the Huddersfield premiere, the Octandre Ensemble conducted by Jon Hargreaves, the New London Chamber Choir and Consortium5, with Benjamin Marquise Gilmore as the solo violinist. The performance and recording is satisfying to the extent that I can’t imagine the work being carried off with greater clarity or force. In conception, execution and presentation, The Fish that became the Sun is an immense achievement.

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This weekend, Frank Denyer’s hourlong work The Fish that became the Sun receives its premeire at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, some twenty-five years after it was composed. It goes a long way to addressing the lack of attention Denyer’s compositions have received, at home and abroad. Another Timbre has already recorded the work and released it to coincide with its live debut; having missed the gig, I intend to write about the disc shortly. The same label has also released a companion disc of shorter works, ranging from the mid-70s to last year, titled The Boundaries of Intimacy.

The title is appropriate, but not as much as the piece from which it is taken, a solo for flute with electronics named Beyond the Boundaries of Intimacy. Back in 2015, writing about Whispers, Another Timbre’s previous release of Denyer’s music, I was struck mostly by that intimate quality of his small-scale muisc. As with true intimacy, it can be confronting, painful, even frightening, especially when given freely as the music is offered here. The opening work Mother, Child and Violin gives us just that: small, private sounds uttered by a woman and a child with equally plain but elusive sounds from a violin. It feels almost voyeuristic; are mother and child making sounds to each other or each to themselves? That ambiguity gives a complexity to that intense relationship and how it may so often change. It’s a much more raw and human portrayal than the conventional, sentimental tableau implied by the title. The sounds are wordless.

All the compositions on this disc share an artlessness in the sounds and gestures; Denyer leaves any phrasing tenderly unformed, like a pre-verbal state of being. In each piece, the musicians seem to be exploring sound, but in a purely private sense as though for themselves – and perhaps immediate others. It is left to the listeners to presume whether they are part of the latter. That wordless state persists, intimacy in speaking through sound instead of through psychological confession. In this music, truth is found on the mythological level, even as it is retold, passed from composer to musician. Who speaks, the composer or the musician? Both and neither.

Talented and sympathetic musicians are needed to give this music its power. Juliet Fraser’s singing makes you think first of its directness and sincerity, with her technical skills evident only in closer analysis. Flautist and longtime Barton Workshop colleague Jos Zwaanenberg performs the title work, the only time Denyer has been persuaded to work with electronics. Zwaanenberg plays at the threshhold of audibility, given near-impossibly fine gradations in emphasis by the composer “between ppppppp and ppppp“. The electronics are almost imperceptible, serving to render the sounds as though without source. The sleeve notes (rare for an Another Timbre release) advise the listener to “imagine them performing intimately, without amplification, and often in an under-voice in order not to disturb the neighbours.”

Violist Elisabeth Smalt revives a solo work Denyer composed for a neglected string instrument he invented in 1980, and Nobutaka Yosjizawa plays both versions of a koto solo composed in 1975. In all of these pieces, the music becomes as dependent on sound as on the state of mind in which musician and listener find themselves. Unlike most compositions, this music cannot live inside one’s head, or on the page. It’s a kind of blessing to be able to hear them at last.

The most recent work, a String Quartet, receives a precarious performance by the Luna String Quartet. Frail sequences of notes rise and fall away, at times like one strange composite instrument very faint and far away, at others like lost, individual voices that never join together in force. Other sounds intrude, the musicians make unpolished vocalisations – wordless again. All four instruments are heavily mutes. This near-silence constrains a great, inner turmoil as the composition constantly strains the boundaries of expression and music. If music is art, how does this artform give voice to voiceless thought? Denyer’s quartet may well be the strangest in the genre, and the most disturbing.

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An all-too-rare chance last weekend to hear live music by Frank Denyer, an English composer treated like a guilty secret in his home country. Not that a gala evening at The Proms would show him to best advantage – the dim, confined theatre of The Print Room at The Coronet in Notting Hill was well suited to his intimate music. It’s heard best when experienced close: that intimacy can be confronting at times, almost painful, in a way that leaves the audience privately exhilarated.

I’m not going back to read what I wrote when first encountering Denyer’s music on a CD released by Another Timbre but I remember it as a raw and challenging experience. In most cases, such descriptions would refer to a music of extremes – whether of volume, pitch or emotions – but not here. If listeners find an emotional power in Denyer’s music, it comes from within themselves in response to the strangeness of the sounds he finds, a strangeness that is yet entirely natural. There is nothing outlandish, after all, in a yearning violin solo played against a rattle of bones and the faint echo of a viola, or in the blowing of ocarinas against the thud of sticks beating canvas. It still leaves an uncanny impression in the memory.

The concert was staged by the Octandre Ensemble, who played Denyer’s After the Rain so baeutifully at Principal Sound a couple of years ago. So good to hear them expand this into a dedicated evening. As composition, Denyer’s music lives by instinct. We heard how secure his instincts are in the early works from the 1970s played at the start of the concert. The focus is on melody, a single line set against silence. Heard offstage in darkness, Unsion I left the audience to wonder how flute, violin, viola and voice were blended into one iridescent colour. In Quick, quick, the Tamberan is coming, the melody is played across four bass flutes, each with elision and elaborations so that the four voices intertwine. The Hanged Fiddler set the soloist against viola and percussion, as described above.

In the late works, melody is dissolved into frail, isolated sounds shared between instruments and voices. In Two Voices with Axe, male and female voices (Juliet Fraser and Denyer himself) vocalise in the same register against flute and string instruments. Percussion consists of small, carefully chosen sounds, and a player splitting wood with an axe. A sound pallette comparable to Morton Feldman in the Sixties is torqued into a fraught tension by the axe’s harsh, uncontrolled sounds (after each blow, the flying fragments of wood ricochet and roll across the floor). The concert ended with the premiere of a new work, Screens. Again, there was theatre in the presence of the musicians, who stepped back and forth behind folding dressing screens as they played. The screens act as subtle mutes, enhancing the sense of remoteness for which the objects were designed. Denyer walked onstage to comment on the music, as written into the score. The words reflect on the music, the stage, his presence and his own commentary; “Some sounds are words”. The piece has an elemental simplicity, which makes its oblique self-reflexiveness all the more enigmatic as an artistic statement. “Occasionally, perhaps, some sounds are gates…. Oddly intermittent.”

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Tags: Frank Denyer
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If only for having the advantage of hindsight, it may be easier to rediscover the past than to discover the present. I got sent some new CDs from Another Timbre, the label that’s been putting out essential recordings of music by Laurence Crane, James Saunders, Bryn Harrison, Catherine Lamb, etc etc. One of these discs is a collection of pieces by Frank Denyer.

I’d been aware of Denyer mostly as a musician, and from his work with The Barton Workshop. It was only on hearing a broadcast of his piece The Colours of Jellyfish for soprano, children’s chorus and orchestra that I realised he was a composer with a unique voice. The pieces on this new disc, Whispers, are a few years older than that orchestral piece, and recorded mostly in 2009: a neat example of rediscovering the present.

This album can be shocking in places. Even more spare and seemingly artless than I expected, the music takes familiar techniques but approaches them from a new angle, creating a paradoxical mood that quietly works on the listener. There’s a tense feeling of expectation, or apprehension; not from the music itself, but from my wariness of what it might all turn out to mean.

The opening piece, Whispers, is about precisely that: Denyer himself whispering, humming, muttering, a halting procession of small vocal sounds. Like a man half-singing, absent-mindedly to himself. Listening in seems almost intrusive, but there are other things going on: small tappings and rustlings from various noisemakers, and at times a viola plays almost inaudibly in the distance. (The entire album is recorded very quietly, suggesting that without careful listening much of it may be lost.) The sounds vacillate between unconscious and self-conscious, the act of producing them at the same level of intensity and restraint over 20 minutes denies any accusation of self-indulgence or even self-expression. The meaning remains as unknowable, or knowable, as any unconscious sound.

The entire album flows seamlessly from one piece to the next. Woman with Jinashi Shakuhachi is, like Whispers, precisely what the title describes. The mouth sounds change to the musician Kiku Day’s voice, alternating with raw shakuhachi sounds until the two lose distinction, and again the tapping sounds. It’s tempting to think of the music as some sort of ritual, but again the ordering of sounds is too organic, too intimate. Again the sounds seem almost unconscious, as though they were the by-product of some other activity that remains unknown.

As an interlude, The Barton Workshop’s performance of Riverine Delusions may be the most conventional piece here – it’s evocative, but the image it paints is almost transparent, with faint gestures suggesting big movements, the indelible remnants of an image faded almost to invisibility. The keening flute stands out in relief, a preparation for the next work. Again, the title Two Voices with Axe explains everything but reveals nothing. A male and female voice blend in a tissue of sounds with muted instruments. The jarring intrusion of the axe comes almost as a release, breaking the tension of expectation that something loud might finally happen. Despite the most private and personal circumstances of the music-making here, the music that emerges from it is like a wild force of nature – it always seems peaceful and benign on the surface, but all along I’ve been conscious that it could turn on me without warning.

The axe-blows sound rich and varied, with no suggestion that they were contrived for aesthetic effect. The late Bob Gilmore, who produced the album, is the axeman.

In the final piece, A Woman Singing, Juliet Fraser’s voice mirrors the opening of the album. Again barely audible when played under normal conditions, the voice is suspended in a stream of unconsciousness, the emotional range suppressed to a nearly internalised expression. By being so withdrawn, the singer’s exposure feels all the more stark, through the lack of mediation, the temptation to listen in closer, like an eavesdropper.

These works are not improvised but fully, meticulously composed. There is a fine, complex understanding of the subtleties of music at work here, of the material of sound, the acting of performing and the relationship of musician to listener. At first the sound world seems close to the very refined sensibility of Martin Iddon’s excellent pneuma, which Another Timbre released last year. Denyer’s approach and musical concerns are different, of course, and so is his music: this is made evident, however, not through any ideological or programmatic pronouncement, but through the very stuff of the music itself, that entices and gnaws at the listener. The reactions this music may provoke are complex and variable, and I would not like to try to define them now.

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Tags: Frank Denyer
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