Raven Chacon: Voiceless Mass [New World]. What I’d heard of Raven Chacon’s music so far had fallen into two camps, either solemn works for small instrumental ensembles or electronically-processed field recordings that were occasionally harsh enough to make me wonder if the file was glitched. Voiceless Mass compiles three pieces which bring resolve those disparate elements into a clearer but still complex single image. The earliest piece, Biyán for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and percussion from 2011, makes use of repeating patterns with small variations but not in a way that you consciously notice. The effect is one of an everchanging stasis, as when observing landscape: evocation of place is an important feature of Chacon’s music, heard directly through field recording, through evocation in acoustic sound and imbued with the cultural elements of his native American heritage. In the case of Biyán the inspiration comes from singing in Navajo ceremonies and it’s tempting but unsatisfactory to describe these pieces as ritualistic, as rite and repetition are only one strand of thought brought to mind in Chacon’s complex reflections on nature and culture. What strikes the ear immediately is the way he is unafraid to harsh, disruptive sounds into what might be otherwise a mesmerising, lulling structure, sounding natural in a way that is beyond human.
In the two more recent works, both from 2021, Owl Song for sinfonietta and voice with electronics shows just how far Chacon has developed the approach from Biyán, with musical pitch and noise, voice and instrument, natural and artificial all merged into a work whose single purpose for itself is clear even as it may disorient and transform the performers. Unidentified percussive sounds have an uncanny effect, the voice verges on speech before finding greater purity, those ritualistic passages seem to emerge only to be subsumed again into a greater whole. It’s a powerful piece that belies its relatively brief fifteen-minute span. The ensemble on these later works is Present Music, conducted by David Bloom, Ariadne Greif providing the voice; they make the technical demands of these pieces such as the constant timbral changes seem normal, placing the listener’s focus on purely acoustic phenomena and how they build the piece’s overall impact. The title work is also for large ensemble, which spends the first half creating a large, dark space of low sounds before a pipe organ breaks through. With the added electronic reverberation and use of drums, you can now hear Chacon’s flair for the dramatic and how he wisely keeps it in check, only occasionally leaving it to simmer and threaten a wilder escalation before it withdraws. If you dig those old Polish recordings of Scelsi you should probably hear this too. Did you know it won a Pulitzer?
Martin Iddon: Hesperides [NMC]. I’ve perviously described Martin Iddon’s music as possessing vegetal qualities, but also noted that there are layers to his work which take time to make themselves known, and that what has been made commercially available to date hasn’t yet told us the whole story. The three works on Hesperides deliver on this promise, in spades. Coincidentally, there’s also one 2012 piece here plus two from the 2020s. The earlier work in’ei appears on paper to be a fairly simple scheme for a variable ensemble to make their way through a set of changes in timbre and pitch; the musicians of Quiet Music Ensemble focus their attention on low sounds to make their performance a brooding, atmospheric piece of disturbing transformations. It opens the album to set the scene for the larger works. Quiet Music also perform Hesperides, a piece for five musicians with a field recording which plays throughout. It forms a memorial for a deceased relative, centred on silent contemplation beside a riverbank where the subject is present through his absence, while life passes by. The sounds are impersonal but also disarmingly immediate, capturing a state where the senses are exposed. The music itself seems unobtrusive, at times even imperceptible, although close attention may reveal elements of liturgical music. Iddon has composed for Quiet Music Ensemble in a way which pitched notes seem to lose precision and soak into the recorded background, each voice set so transparently that there seems scarecely any artifice in the timing and manner by which each sound lands. The ensemble musicians sound remote, as though part of the distant activity caught on tape, colouring this solitary act of listening into a profound musical experience. They do an excellent job of adding a degree of organic uncertainty to their intonation, without sounding timid. All these pieces are written to be extremely quiet: the sleeve notes recommend setting your volume so the quietest moments are barely audible, but the playing can withstand closer scrutiny.
Between the two ensemble works is Λαμπάδες (Lampades), played by tubist Jack Adler-McKean accompanied by a fixed soundtrack. It’s an impressively chthonic piece, all darkness with occasional flashes of light. Again, Iddon has developed his style to the point where the music seems to have evolved by itself, without direct human intervention, a composition where pitch and timbre are indivisible. I’d hesitate before making any definitive statement on what is played by Adler-McKean and what’s on the soundtrack: solid dark clouds of deep, velvety tones echo back and forth throughout the journey, set about by the distant wailing of sirens amidst an ever-present gauntlet of percussive sounds, somewhere between dripping, ticking and rattles. Adler-McKean achieves the feat of turning in a bravura performance even as his presence dissolves into the sound. It’s an astonishing work, adding another layer to any understanding of Iddon’s music. Did you know it won a Novello?
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Martin Iddon, Raven Chacon
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Strange sounds: Martin Iddon, Eden Lonsdale
Sunday 19 February 2023
A couple of albums here that excel at being distant and eerie, but with substance far deeper than just setting a mood. Another Timbre has released a couple of albums of Martin Iddon’s work before, but Naiads adds a new dimension to understanding his music. A cycle of five chamber compositions composed between 2012 and 2017, Naiads foregrounds aspects of Iddon’s style implied in his previously released recordings, combining the gnarled phrasing with subtleties of perception, the complex with the minimal. The five works have a vegetal quality, organic but in a way that slips between the natural and the constructed, as though diligently cultivated then left to run wild. In the sextet crinaeae and the trio limnades, regular pulses appear, rising up at odds through the flowing sounds before subsiding again. In between, the string trio pegaeae dwells on whispered sounds that rise and fall on sliding pitches. The use of soft attacks, harmonics and multiphonics make these cycles and pulsations sound more primal than mechanical, even when layered into a more complex interplay on potameides. The final piece as heard in this album’s sequence, eleionomae reduces the material to unpitched sounds, faint rasps and ominous tapping. The musicians of the Apartment House ensemble play through all of this world of extended techniques as though such rarefied language comes naturally to them. There appear to be more layers at work in these pieces than on the previous Iddon albums, which is strange as all the compositions date from around the same period. It points to a consistent but varied body of work that needs to be considered on a wider scale.
Eden Lonsdale is a new composer to me and presumably to most people: the oldest piece on his album Clear and Hazy Moons was written when he was still a student, in 2021. His music can be described as spectral, as long as you consider the word in both its meanings. He fits in with a group of other modern composers who have assimilated an understanding of electronic processing of sound and applied it to acoustic instruments, using them in combinations that produce alterations to their usual timbre and acoustic phenomena, rather than use them primarily to differentiate between voices. In the “old” piece Oasis, a muted piano plays a reiterated note that is given resonance and colouring by clarinet, violin, cello, electric guitar and percussion, drawing out unusual overtones for as long as possible before opening out into clouded chords. In Billowing, a slowly descending line repeats, accentuated by small flourishes on solo strings while muted trumpet mixes with flute, saxophone and clarinet to produce high notes that shimmer and beat against the slow phrasing. The same instruments combine in Anatomy of Joy, written last September and only played in the studio so far, which immerses a chorale in a simulated reverberation chamber that recalls glass armonica and reed organ. A notable characteristic in these compositions is the way each one seems about to fade away at any moment, as though ready to conclude, pausing and then continuing, always softer in its hamonic language or diminished in force. Each of these is again played by Apartment House, who instigated the first and last pieces here. The exception is the title work, composed for the new ensemble Rothko Collective. The reverb heard in Clear and Hazy Moons owes something more to its surroundings, as it was recorded by the composer on a handheld device during its dress rehearsal in a church. This may explain why it has an uncanny electronic sound to it, even while the instruments remain unadulterated. Lonsdale’s close chords and small clusters here sound not so much muddied as acoustically synthesised as they bounce off the walls, leaving the microphone to mix winds, strings and percussion.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Eden Lonsdale, Martin Iddon
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Quiet endings: Martin Iddon, Andrew McIntosh
Friday 31 December 2021
It’s the quiet end of the year, when it seems everything can wait until later. I’ve got a lot of recordings sitting on my hard drive which I want to discuss, but many of them are new releases by artists I’ve already written about this year: I’ll space them out a bit so readers won’t think I’m trying to push favourites. Before the year ends, I want to get two more albums down. I thought I’d written about Martin Iddon’s last Another Timbre CD, Pneuma, but no; just a passing reference to “the very refined sensibility” of his compositional language while discussing Frank Denyer. His new album Sapindales keeps that softly intense, intimate voice, while speaking more clearly and forthrightly. That may be partly down to Iddon’s own evolution – three of the four pieces here post-date the works on Pneuma – but also to the instrumentation and the performers.
All four feature Heather Roche on various clarinets, with two of them composed for her. The vocal and ensemble works on Pneuma are in contrast to Sapindales‘ focus on the intertwining of three, two, or even one solitary voice. The solo for bass clarinet Ptelea is dervied from Iddon’s vocal quintet hamadryads, itself a reworking of a Josquin motet. The polyphony here is presented as four lines of notes that bend and slide, of which the performer is asked to play as much as possible simultaneously. Roche’s dexterity and studious art in multiphonics turns the piece into a complex, closely argued soliloquy, an introverted character at once measured and impassioned. Iddon’s knack for extracting gnarly details from a reduced musical image comes to the fore here: in contrast to the “new complexity” scholl of composition, his obfucations are perceptual instead of technical. The effect is compounded in Muses, which pairs Roche with soprano Juliet Fraser, creating an involuted braid of clear sounds that ripple over and against each other as they find a path through Iddon’s music. (These pieces all allow for multiple readings of the material and in this case requires a recording of an alternate performance to be played simultaneously.) Tu as navré exchanges material in the bass register between Roche’s bass and contrabass, Anton Lukoszevieze’s cello and James Opstad’s string bass, with soft but heavily-grained playing creating a blurred, buzzy sound that aspires to monody. On the title work, the clarinet’s partner is a field recording Iddon made in a nature reserve early one morning. The material from Ptelea unwinds into slow, spacious phrases that seek out a response from the unassuming environment.
Finally, something quick about a slow piece. Andrew McIntosh’s A Moonbeam Is Just A Filtered Sunbeam is an hour-long work recorded by the composer using violin, viola, piano, bowed piano, bowed wine glasses, slate, field recordings and electronics. There’s no score for it; its composition was made through collage, with a reliance on improvised music. From the opening, the piano sets out as much time as possible between one event and the next. The slowness becomes a framing device to let new material persist, or change without any overt rationale. McIntosh’s use of just intonation in his string playing produces long, droney passages in which either the time is filled with greater complexities of tone and colour, or even less happens than before, depending on the attitude you take while listening. The piece falls into four sections, which aren’t immediately obvious; rather the piece takes unexpected turns into repeated melodic phrases, a slow dance rhythm in percussion, lingers on minor details until they form a shape of their own, creating something naturally immense without straining to be epic.
