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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Low Strings: Jack Sheen, Bryan Eubanks
Sunday 30 July 2023
The sleeve notes for Jack Sheen’s Solo for Cello recommend you to listen with the speakers “placed as far away as possible”, as if the music itself wasn’t alienated enough. For thirty-five minutes, cellist Anton Lukoszevieze (he of Apartment House) grinds a dogged path through an uncanny valley of cello music, all fluttered harmonics and slow rasps, smothered by a heavy, metallic mute. The same sonic intrigue created by the effects of the ‘whispering cadenza’ from Ligeti’s Cello Concerto are regimented here into erratically cycled patterns and dynamically compressed to allow only occasional random stray outbursts to leak from the seams. It’s also not exactly a solo: an electronic component is present from time to time, but only to add to the uncanny effect that you’re not quite hearing a cello, or otherwise to coat the pristine background with a layer of schmutz. At certain interludes Lukoszevieze’s industrious labouring on his instrument drops away to a prolonged, sullen drone before the sawing resumes, producing a texture both thin in range and thick in detail. An even more stark and nervy companion piece to Sheen’s Sub released last year, Lukoszevieze makes Sheen’s solo a tour de force of suppressed ferocity. It’s been released as a CD by cassette label Trilogy Tapes but it may not be in quite as anomalous company as it first appears.
Almost missed the Insub release of Bryan Eubanks’ for four double basses a year ago; which was pretty stupid of me as it’s a weirdly beguiling piece quite unlike his other electronicky stuff I’ve heard. It’s all harmonics again, real soft when backed by the incipient sonority of the large wooden instruments, playing in a staggered canon of repeating patterns. All you need to know is printed right there on the front cover. It should be looping but there’s just enough fuzziness in the setup to create a dreamlike gauzy sound that seems almost too insubstantial to persist in your consciousness, yet only seems to move when you let it slip from your attention. Jonathan Heilbron, Mike Majkowski, Andrew Lafkas and Koen Nutters man the contrabass viols with a feathery touch.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Bryan Eubanks, Jack Sheen
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Bryan Eubanks: The Bornholmer Suite
Monday 22 February 2016
Looking very Goth, something else I received in the swag from Nueni Records. I’ve only heard a couple of pieces by Bryan Eubanks before, both at last year’s Cut And Splice festival. Both were kind of reminiscent of Alvin Lucier. This is not.
The Bornholmer Suite is a set of 50 pieces, each one minute long. The music is made from electronic feedback on a circuit board. According to Eubanks, each configuration of the circuit is left alone to sound for one minute, with “slight changes” made between each piece. As a composer who has worked a lot with feedback circuits of different types over the years, the types of sound were immediately familiar. I’m too close to this type of music so I can’t review it dispassionately; it just flags up all sorts of problems I have when working with this medium.
Feedback can produce a wealth of detailed sounds, but it’s hard to figure out what to do with them. It gets too easy to turn out sound and become too absorbed in the process of making it, or just get caught up in a bunch of different timbres without considering them as part of a coherent musical experience for the listener. With The Bornholmer Suite Eubanks seems to be attempting a way out of this dilemma by presenting the set of pieces as an objective, experimental process. Each configuration gets one minute, with no privileging of material. Each piece is presumably a modification of the preceding circuit. It carries a type of logic, but it does feel a bit like Eubanks is dodging the whole question of how the Suite may be considered as music.
Most of the feedback circuits produce a sound that remains fairly constant, with little sense that they would show any greater variation, instability or mutability if left for a longer period of time. This kills any feeling of momentum as the number of pieces rack up. My personal prejudices kicked in a few times when certain sounds cropped up that I’d produced in the past and instinctively rejected. I’d like to know more about how simple the circuit is. The CD really presents a dilemma. Do you hear it as a disconnected catalogue of technical exercises, or as a suite of etudes elaborating on a common theme?
