Boring Like A Drill.

John Cage: Chamber Works… 1943-1951 [Another Timbre]. I can remember a gig with Kerry Yong playing a selection of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes on an electronic keyboard, for which he had substituted the original piano preparations with a lurid array of samples. It was blasphemous, it was hilarious, it was godawful, it somehow worked on its own crazy terms. It also strongly reminded me of Messiaen. There’s nothing sacrilegious in this fine selection of pieces from the intriguing transitional phase of Cage’s career, but Yong’s irreverence and dry wit must play a role in him rescuing In A Landscape from the realm of New Age rack jobbers. Treading firmly where others have been fey and floaty, he rediscovers the shocking reductionism of the piece and gives it a simple, big-boned elegance of movement. Similar treatment is given to Dream, which in this version has an added cello part played by Anton Lukoszevieze – the embellishment is understated and not where you expect it would be. Yong also gives us the seldom-heard Haikus from 1950-51, as oblique and elusive in their fleeting gestures as the Six Melodies for Violin and Keyboard, played here with Mira Benjamin. I don’t think it’s possible to have too many recordings of the sublime String Quartet in Four Parts and the version is more than welcome: Benjamin and Lukoszevieze are joined by fellow Apartment House cronies Gordon MacKay and Bridget Carey. They all play without even thinking of vibrato, which makes the muted sounds appear perversely wholesome rather than anaemic. They dance through the deceptively tricky rhythms and make the slow movement seem positively glacial, in a way which makes it all the more compelling.

Weston Olencki: Solo Works [Creative Sources Recordings]. Four pieces for solo brass, each that wears its experimentalism on its sleeve. This is raw, bare-boned music that grapples at length with fundamentals of instrumental sound. From the start, seven stones (parallax) hits like a soprano vacuum cleaner fed through a ring modulator. The album is, however, all-acoustic and the instrument being played is in fact a bass trumpet with preparations, using a snare drum as a resonator. The bass part becomes apparent when the pitch suddenly plumments to the abyssal depths before snapping back into its usual frequency band of noise. On all four pieces, silence used as compositional device, abruptly marking off boundaries for each monolithic aural block. The longest work is the most elaborate, capacity for unadulterated trombone, alternating compound tones with stuttering bursts of percussive sounds, gradually opening up into long braids of buzzing multiphonics, a brutalist sound sculpture in granite. The modified euphonium in bisected mass hisses electronically and builds up into the sound of grinding machinery and a clipping microphone caught in a gale.

Astasie-abasie: Vestigial Gamelan [Shame File Music]. Stupid me overlooked this one, even though I enjoyed Ian Andrews’ previous release Elliptical Gamelan. I guess this is the third in a trilogy, collecting recordings made between 2021 and 2023. The M.O. is as before: amplified small objects motivated by electrical devices, so each pretty short track is made up of layered loops and cycling sounds. As with Elliptical Gamelan (less so on the preceding Molecular Gamelan), the range and quality of sounds that Andrews elicits from his instruments bring the conceptual conceit to life. Each piece is less defined in form, unlike the preceding album, but gains from additional textural and timbral depth. By continuing to work with these devices, he’s moved beyond getting things to simply sound different and reached a level of understanding where the sounds can share similarities but complement each other. This time, the pieces are distinguished by presence of lower-pitched sounds and less-traceable looping patterns, suggesting something more organic than mechanical. The variety of sounds continue to surprise through the album and each track functions as a tableau, working as either background of foreground. The evocation of nature also comes from the way the pieces now succeed in avoiding any obvious human intervention without seeming to run on rails.

Alex Paxton: Happy Music for Orchestra [Delphian]. Really, really did not enjoy Paxton’s Music for Bosch People album a while back, so I was really, really surprised when I braced myself for this follow-up album and ended up loving pretty much the whole thing. It felt like there was something wrong with me, I got into it that much. Everything that Bosch People got wrong Happy Music gets right. Where the old one felt stiff and forced and trying to signal that it’s funny, the new one feels loose and spontaneous and actually is funny without any apparent effort. (Bosch People did seem to improve in the places where the sounds get more free.) It’s rare to hear genuinely funny music but the six pieces on Happy Music pull it off though a lightness of touch and a consistent silliness, where the incongruous instrumentation, styles and levels of competence make no attempt to justify themselves and so remain defiantly, self-assuredly ridiculous. This time around, you don’t have to think about why the music could be considered comedic, you just know it by listening. Instead of sounding obnoxious, Paxton’s goofy trombone soloing comes across as good-natured and well-intentioned, just a little misguided.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Alex Paxton, Astasie-abasie, John Cage, Weston Olencki
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It’s composition, but who composed it? William Walker’s The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion is an anthology of American shape note hymns, published in 1835. In 2022, Cleek Schrey and Weston Olencki performed “readings” of selections from this volume on a pair of old wooden pump organs. At first, their interpretation of The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion [Pagans] seems straightforward enough. The variegated tones of the organs and extraneous mechanical sounds serve to illuminate the austere exoticism to be found in a colonial vernacular form of serious expression. John Cage became fascinated by the subtleties of this simple, supposedly crude formalism in his study of late 18th Century American music and composed a series of works based on similar hymns. It’s impossible to hear Schrey and Olencki here without recalling Cage’s own organ suite Some of “The Harmony of Maine” (Supply Belcher); but while Cage creates something new through erasure and extension, Schrey and Olencki are apparently retaining all the right notes in the right order. The natural variation in the organs’ sounds are exploited to highlight the overtones produced by the material, as first in inconspicuous ways, before taking a sudden turn in the two renditions at the heart of this collection. Each of these much longer pieces is a lingering meditation on the hymn’s substance, elongating each tone to provoke beating frequencies and ghostly timbres. Schrey and Olencki augment these two versions with sine tones, reed organ and bowed and scraped banjo strings, using the additional sounds as reference points for how much the organ sound has transformed into something strange and uncanny.

A new recording of Martin Arnold’s music is always welcome, even when given in somewhat bittersweet circumstances. Flax [Another Timbre] is a solo piano work for Philip Thomas, drawing inspiration from Thomas’ superb interpretations of Arnold’s music and from his insightful survey of Morton Feldman’s complete works for solo piano. Sadly, ill health has prevented Thomas from performing the piece. The task has since fallen to Kerry Yong, a pianist with an overlapping repertoire and a shared inquisitive approach to new music. Yong’s approach finds the double image that often hovers in the background of Arnold’s music: his compositions are made of the slenderest elements, arranged into a light but self-supporting structure which suggests a more fully-fleshed work that will remain a spectral presence in the listener’s imagination. The music is persistently calm and alert – a connection to the jazz pianists Arnold name-checks when discussing his piece. Yong captures this mood by maintaining a relaxed almost-a-groove, taking his time without losing the pulse, yet always gently interrogating whether this attitude is justified by or at odds with the material. As for the material, Arnold has described Flax as an exploration of the higher registers of the piano, and the piece does pursue the fine line between the delicate and the brittle. When the high notes are absent, the work takes a new turn in demeanour and form. Melodies play out in small fragments like slow riffs, with almost accidental chords and occasional brief chromatic runs, the overall shape remaining unclear yet becoming more distinct as the piece progresses. In this recording, Flax clocks in at seventy-nine minutes, so Yong’s pacing becomes critical. As always, Arnold avoids stasis, preciousness, doesn’t ramble; each small part is essential. Like an experienced story-teller, Yong lets each detail fall into place with confidence that you can piece it together.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Cleek Schrey, Martin Arnold, Weston Olencki
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I swear I’m not warming to Matthew Shlomowitz’s music; it’s just that he jerks me around, which is doubtless part of his intention, and that I’ve been fortunate enough to swing in the right direction more often than not. Having been wowed after a few bad trips by his Explorations in Polytonality and Other Musical Wonders, Volume 1, he’s back with some of the threatened sequels to mess with my expectations again. Pleasingly, it both is and is not more of the same. Explorations in Polytonality and Other Musical Wonders, Volumes 2 and 4 presents two suites for small ensembles which extend the hyperkinetic chromaticism-by-association of the original piano set while adding cultural complications that make listening more precarious. These have been a feature in much of Shlomowitz’s music before now, and haven’t always sat well with the material. In these examples, everything is much better integrated. Volume 2 is scored for the forbidding combination of three recorders, ably played here by the Apsara trio who bolt out of the gate like an overclocked calliope in a dazzling contrapunctal frenzy. The dexterity of Shlomowitz’s writing, matched by Apsara’s precision, is placed at odds with the thickened timbre and rough attack of the instruments. The intonation is thus smudged throughout, calling into question the wisdom in attempting this polytonal exercise in the first place. Six formal studies are tooted at you, topped off by a coda labelled “Afternoon Jazz” that is more po-faced than the preceding movements – one of a number of little jokes that all land successfully this time around, highlighting the wit overall. You’re left in a conflicted position akin to viewing a finely detailed finger-painting, admiring the skill while agonising over the validity of the chosen medium.

Volume 4 features Quartet Laboratoire on a combo of synthesisers and percussion. An exacting but erratic drumkit backs xylophone and vibes with keyboards loaded with the daggiest General MIDI patches – more familiar territory for Shlomowitz but put to better use here, mixing funny and grating in its material and its means. The writing is less stiff than I remember from his earlier electroacoustic works, and the incongruities emerge through more subtle means than simple juxtaposition. The Laboratoire musicians nail down the rapid interplay of tuned percussion with the alacrity of Serious Europeans playing Zappa in a concert-hall, undermined by the electronic squeezebox synth parts that evoke, not so much retro computer gaming, as the received idea that old timey video-game music is crude and thin. While some music builds on the tension between low culture and high, Shlomowitz tweaks his sophisticated musical language by playing off the low against the low that aspires to be high. When you work through all the confusion you finally end up with a bundle of fresh, new confusion. Like I said, he jerks you around, but in a good way. The final movement’s title, “LoFi not to study to”, means what it says.

The title of this album is disingenuous. I mean, yes it’s true that Music for Two Flutes by Weston Olencki and Laura Cocks does indeed contain two flutes and nothing but, played by Olencki and Cocks themselves, but it does not prepare you for what is to come. Remember vuvuzelas? Now that you’ve recovered, I’ll clarify that the buzzing drones of Olencki’s ceòl meadhonach in fact draw on Highland bagpipe music for inspiration. The title is accurately but unhelpfully explained as being a type of music that’s neither classical nor popular – not quite an accurate summary but enough to give you the idea. Using what sounds like a trumpet embouchure for the flute is here employed to produce harmonies in a Gaelic mode, slowed to glacial pace. Halfway through the tone suddenly changes to a muted burble before recapitulating. This radical approach to traditional idioms is carried over in another set of pieces Olencki has made with Cleek Schrey, titled The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion, which intend to discuss later this week. Laura Cocks presented the fearless and fearsome recital disc field anatomies a couple of years back, offering some of the most brutal flute music on record. Her composition SLUB pushes her interest in physical limits and the pursuit of extreme and even ugly sounds with elemental directness. The two use their instruments as resonators and filters for an array of partially-voiced mouth noises, alternately squealing, honking, braying, rasping and squelching in a bravura effort to redefine the instrument. Cocks warns that this “reconfiguration” comes with “instabilities”, which is emphatically true. It harks back to a bolder age of experimentation, recalling Kagel’s determination to find a music deprived of cultural and institutional support. Both pieces are monumental slabs of sound and it can all get a bit frightening.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Laura Cocks, Matthew Shlomowitz, Weston Olencki
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