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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Voiceless voices: Jason Kahn & Antoine Läng, Biliana Voutchkova
Thursday 13 May 2021
To uncultured ears such as mine, avant-garde vocal performance often falls into a sort of uncanny valley; the moments in which it resembles human expression without reaching verbalisation are when it seems most alien to human experience. I’m listening again to Jason Kahn & Antoine Läng’s Insub release Paratopia, which pairs two improvisations by the duo using their voices as the sound source. The first piece documents a recent performance, made in a forest during lockdown last year. The only technological interventions made to their voices is through the use of megaphones; these amplify small, incidental mouth sounds over vocal content. More importantly, they act as filters which thin out the voice, hollowing out the vocalisations for greater prominence on aspirations and fricatives. For a long time, the voice is not identifiable and the piece sounds like an improvisation for found objects and abraded percussion. Long swatches of varying grain and textures, verging on sound sculpture. This could be detrimental to a recorded percussion performance but the use of voice adds more than novelty, adding different details that would never arise otherwise. The forest ambience adds it own subtle complexity. Once the piece passes twenty minutes more recognisable vocalisations start to emerge, but for me the effect was less transformative and more left me wondering where the track could have been truncated to have kept the sounds in a different realm, outside of human measurement. The second track captures one of the duo’s first performances, with voices weaving in and out of the greay zone between man and nature with that restless urge to make more of a show which has been almost tamed in the later recording.
Last year I reviewed Biliana Voutchkova’s recordings of Ernstalbrecht Stiebler’s violin pieces dedicated to her. Her Takuroku recording Seed of Songs presents her as composer as well as performer. As with many Takuroku releases, it documents her response to forced inactivity in the year of Coronavirus. Unexpectedly, it doesn’t depict the artist at work, or even in a prolonged moment of quiescent contemplation. Seed of Songs was born out of attentiveness, from time without motivation to create. Late in the year she responded to this existential act of listening by recording small sounds – violin, her voice, objects, environmental sounds. Early in the new year she created this collage which is both empty and full, an excercise in receptiveness to what might become. Voutchkova’s voice is present throughout, even if mostly through its absence, as an intermittent thread. In repeated listenings it sounds different each time. One time I was surprised that it was much emptier than I remembered it; this last time I just realised that the violin appears much earlier than I had thought and small sounds teem throughout. Things that Voutchkova might recognise of herself – voice, violin, handmade sounds – remain faintly distinguishable from the surrounding environment. Like Dürer’s Melencolia I, it depicts an impasse which has conditioned the mind to a heightened state of perception, ready to make things new.
