While I get back up to speed, there’s been a whole lot of praise for Another Timbre’s latest Linda Catlin Smith collection. I’ve got no argument with that. Flowers Of Emptiness pulls together eight chamber works spanning nearly forty years – it’s quietly astonishing to think of how she’s created such a substantial body of work. As you would expect, the dimensions of each piece are modest (two exceed ten minutes, another stretches to nearly twenty) but they all establish an immediate presence and profundity through being contemplative without ever settling into passivity, combining seriousness of intent with lightness of touch. The gentleness of harmonies and dynamics in her language initially suggests a superficial resemblance to the current fashion in modern music for the polite and inconsequential, but where the latter typically resolve the tensions of their work into the lulling certainties of melody or vague folklorism, Smith turns those same elements towards abstraction, offering up emotion without interpretation. The musicians of Apartment House play this music with an authority that now imparts interpretative leeway; in the works for string quartet the silences and pithy fragments here resemble John Cage on the cusp of finding Zen.
The batch of three discs released by Another Timbre late last year are all repeat appearances by old favourites of the label, each featuring performances by members of Apartment House. Zamat is their fourth release by Adrián Demoč, a set of three new chamber pieces. Each is an exquisitely worked study in instrumentation, with Demoč reducing the substance of each piece down to the state of almost monody, articulated by subtle differences in colouration and texture with just enough variation to keep up the appearance of forward motion. The title work, for clarinet, bass clarinet, viola and cello, moves back and forth on the spot between a handful of notes, plucked strings hedged amongst the guttural effect of low clarinets, producing a complex, ambiguous tone. Gebrechlichkeit is a pensive string quartet that broods over several frail chords of close clusters, moving from one to another only when the strings’ various methods of attack have been exhausted. “…o protón jasu…” repeats the same instrumentation as Zamat, only with both clarinets in the upper register and evrything played in high treble, a loose gathering of thin harmonics. The sound here is naked and astringent, reminding me that Demoč’s music is not always as comfortable as it first appears.
Eden Lonsdale has had only one previous Another Timbre release from about a year earlier but apparently it’s already sold out. Dawnings is a double-disc of five longer pieces, in which longer durations allow Lonsdale to stretch out into elongated chorales like Cloud Symmetries (four violins played by Mira Benjamin, Chihiro Ono, Amalia Young and Angharad Davies) and Shedding (the seven violas of Ensemble Ipse). Each of the above pieces use strongly constricted pitch ranges to focus on timbre and small changes found within stasis. In my review of last year’s Sawyer Editions release, I talked about “hazy washes” and “thick, roiling textures”; in these works those elements appear more starkly, with less obvious direction point from one state to another. The large ensemble work Constellations, perfomed by Oerknal and conducted by Hardy Li at the 2023 Gaudeamus Muziekwiek, is almost too rich and roiling as it luxuriates in antiphonal layers of instrument groupings threaded through with organ chords. Most remarkable is the title work, in which Heather Roche on clarinet and Kerry Yong on piano seamlessly transform back and forth between figure and ground, always spare and unhurried yet always moving while appearing to be in the same place. There’s no melody as such, nor any particular direction of travel, but somehow you listen and at one moment one is high and the other low, then the other is high and one is low without any apparent intervention.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Adrián Demoč, Eden Lonsdale, Linda Catlin Smith
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Sawyer Editions continued: Eden Lonsdale, Paolo Griffin
Wednesday 21 August 2024
Paolo Griffin’s not as easy to pin down as he first seems. The three pieces on his debut album Supports & Surfaces were recorded in England, Canada and Finland. Each piece shares a common approach to composition, but it’s not the one you immediately think it is. The Purpose of an Empty Room seems simple enough: David Zucchi plays his alto saxophone into a delay loop system, playing two notes slowly in succession, repeating and moving to the next pair, as the texture quickly builds up to a thick but smooth layering of see-sawing harmonies. The inexorable logic of the delay loop is exploited to introduce some more esoteric harmonisation at times, threatening dissonance without hoping to achieve it, or more intriguingly to settle into an uneasy monotony. It all seems pretty familiar, right down to the fade-out. The second piece redirects your attention: Alone, Together is a duet for violin and percussion, sans electronics, played by Aysel Taghi-Zada and Michael Murphy who perform together as Duo Holz. Any logic present in this piece is undetectable, as Taghi-Zada bows isolated phrases of sundry durations in white-key modes with an unsteady but even tread, accented by occasional harmonics. Murphy plays in a slower and looser style on bells and small gongs, not quite precise in pitch, creating a quasi-accidental counterpoint to the melody. The two create intrigue simply by their presence together, then entrench that mystification by wending back and forth in no particular direction in no particular hurry to achieve nothing more than take up over half an hour of your time. Having lifted the album sequence above the ordinary, the final piece Madrigal redoubles by returning to the solo-plus-delay loop method, but this time around creating a completely different impression. Countertenor David Hackston sings a sombre melody that evolves through a series of transformations, with occasional pitch-bends up or down which render the piece more strange and affecting, while also tempting the listener to latch onto them as reference points while Hackston’s voice expands through an ever-growing hall of mirrors. The sax piece used loops as a means of establishing stability, but in Madrigal the loops create uncertainty, with no neat patterning to the uncanny voice. Also, Madrigal ends, suddenly. The three are united by Griffin’s conception of musical slack (pace Ivan Stang) as music “that doesn’t really go anywhere but doesn’t necessarily stay in one place” may therefore ensure it never achieves a definitive state of completion. If you get this on CD the first and last tracks are abbreviated: presumably the first fades out early and the third fades in late. Alone, Together must be heard in full.
The new Sawyer Editions release of Eden Lonsdale’s music shows marked differences from his earlier collection on Another Timbre, even though the pieces heard here were all written around the same time. The common element to the three compositions on ricercari for rainy days is the harp, played by Cara Dawson and accompanied by the ensemble red panel. The use of electronics and reverberation heard on the previous album are here restricted to the opening piece, falling asleep on an airplane, in which lever harp, cello, percussion and electronics are gradually sublimated into a hazy wash of evocative ambience. For the title work, the role of electronics is effectively substituted by harmonium, which binds together the fragile playing of the other instruments into a cohesive, denser sound, yet also suddenly swells into loud drones that drown out the smaller details to create thick, roiling textures. The process seems to invert itself in cycles/emptiness: a slow melody on the harp repeats itself, with harmonic colouration from cello and harmonium evoking low brass and high winds. The piece slows down and breaks apart into isolated sounds, with the increasing presence of silence, before gradually rebuilding itself into a quietly flowing continuum. It seems to function as a counterpart to Alone, Together.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Eden Lonsdale, Paolo Griffin
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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.
