Joseph Branciforte & Jozef Dumoulin: Iterae [Greyfade]. With its slightly fuzzy chimelike sounds and reverb, the electric piano (particularly the Fender Rhodes variety) has always struck me as a dreamlike instrument, always somewhat aloof from its context. It hadn’t occurred to me that there might be musicians who work with mutations of these instruments, but that’s just what Joseph Branciforte and Jozef Dumoulin have been doing independently for some time. Iterae puts the two of them together in a two-day recording session of manipulated improvisations. Their respective Rhodeses are treated electronically, both in their sounds and in how their playing is restructured, with real-time editing guiding how the unfolding music is shaped. With the use of distortion and filtering, the small amplified sounds of a Rhodes piano quickly lose their resemblance to the conventional instrument. The live editing consists of loops and processes that mimic tape delays, with elements repeating while being slowly transformed or effaced. Branciforte and Dumoulin thus make use of short gestures that provide both continuity and change, allowing large-scale developments to emerge out of small elements in near-stasis. The press release mentions “post-glitch” to save critics from having to risk it themselves, and indeed the album has the traits of that genre, including the association with ambient music. The emphasis is always on creating texture and atmosphere, with none on representing the improvisers’ chops, happy to explore one space without ever settling into a comfortable groove, then, little by little, events start to drift away from the familiar. Things start out hinting at melody and then gradually evolve into more complex atmospherics, but even in its crunchiest moments the musicians always retain suggestions of melody inherent in their instruments, without ever breaking into full-blown song or all-out noise. The two of them maintain this tenuous balance throughout, over four extended pieces that each fall into a two-movement form. That dreamlike quality is also present, in a shapeshifting, time-slowed-down way.
The blurb suggests the structure of the album is modular, by which they mean you can play the thing straight through as one large work or as four pairs of tracks. The physical media version emphasises this by packaging the set as five discs: one regular CD and five mini-CDs (remember them?). Vinyl collectors will be relieved to learn that the dust jacket comes with a wall-hanging tab already fixed to the back. It’s not out yet but they’re touring Europe right now.
opt out: Geography_VII [Moonside Tapes]. The premise of this short album seemed intriguing from its brief blurb: pieces synthesised and sequenced in MaxMSP, built on some of Erv Wilson’s microtonal scales. Sadly it’s not so interesting to listen to. It isn’t a dour academic exercise, as many microtonal works can be, but the pieces are fairly rudimentary and don’t seem to particularly benefit from using Wilson’s tuning. Those two factors in tandem work to defeat the apparent purpose, producing a set of pieces with windchime-like repeating patterns with not much accompaniment or development, pleasant enough without demanding attention. The exception is the track “Presence_chamber”, which uses longer, strained notes with almost no melodic movement, making the astringent intervals themselves the musical subject and substance. It also reminded me that you can get Warren Burt’s classic Harmonic Colour Fields on Bandcamp.
