I’m getting Wandelweiser from all over. First Sheffield, then Bilbao and now St Petersburg. Intonema sent me a nice little package and it’s taken me too long to write about it. There’s a Michael Pisaro disc I want to discuss a bit later, but my attention was first taken by a new release of Stefan Thut’s music.
Again, pretty much everything I’ve heard by Thut is from the Wandelweiser und so weiter box set Another Timbre released a few years back. un/even and one is a work Thut first performed and recorded with an ensemble in St Petersburg last June. At first, it seems a type of performance art, a theatrical activity whose fugitive sounds have been caught on tape as with the recent recording of Manfred Werder’s 2015/3. Cardboard boxes are being shifted, manipulated. The effect is reminiscent of some of James Saunders’ scores which call for scripted activities with sheets of paper or found objects, a sonic arte povera. The plot thickens as these sounds are coloured with musical instruments: saxophone, violin, cello, bowed guitar. With no visual cues to reveal the theatrical elements, sounds emerge, accumulate and fade as though produced by a slow but powerful force of nature. This sense of organic process, and the feeling of sourcelessness given to the sounds, evoke a feeling reminiscent of John Cage’s last works.
Thut’s piece takes this musical idea into a weird, ambiguous realm with his use of electronics. The cardboard and other sounds are recorded and played back through a small speaker attached to the largest box. The sounds blur between live and recorded, instrument and object, with an attenuated rumble. Any clear sense of activity, cause and effect is lost, leaving us with a mysterious, unknowable music. It’s one of the richer, dirtier examples I’ve heard from the Wandelweiser school and recommended for those who worry about this music getting too precious and ethereal.
The most delightful surprise so far from this package has been the CD credited to Songs, a Berlin-based quartet of composers and musicians. 1 & 2 features two compositions by the Australian trombonist Rishin Singh, who I haven’t heard before. I have heard and enjoyed the composer Catherine Lamb, who plays viola and sings here, so I put the disc on. The first piece, Six Scenes of Boredom, features a trio playing slow, almost quaint chord changes, occasionally enlightened by a female voice singing brief, pithy phrases. There’s an air of eccentric decay that’s quite English in character. I mean it as a compliment when I say it would fit nicely on a 1970s LP released on the Obscure label.
The real revelation here is Three Lives, a work almost half an hour in length for two female voices, bass clarinet and trombone. Long held tones, very little movement in pitch from one breath to the next. It feels like a single reflective moment, frozen in time. Strangely, any development in melody goes almost unnoticed when I listen, as though it were a lesser concern, until one quiet but significant shift. The two voices, each apparently untrained, sing as though a single voice echoed or multiplied. Clarinet and trombone play beautifully together, the latter almost unnoticeable, perceived only as a soft echo. In contrast to this stillness, the recording makes no attempt to conceal blemishes. The recording is obviously live, with faint background sounds audible, locating the music in a place and time. Against this background, four musicians briefly hold time in suspense.
