Boring Like A Drill.

Jürg Frey’s I Listened to the Wind Again, a 45-minute piece for soprano, clarinet, string trio and percussion, seems to trace the evolution of his compositional voice in microcosm. It was commissioned by the Louth Contemporary Music Society Festival in 2017 and the recording was commercially released late this year. This is the third piece by Frey I’ve heard of similar dimensions for soprano and small ensemble: 2004’s 24 Wörter is made of short movements, each dedicated to a single word accompanied by violin piano, while 2011’s Farblose Wolken, Glück, Wind combines soprano, trumpet, cello, percussion and tape. The latter work unfolds like a procession, a steady state of action that keeps discovering unexpected changes in its sound through its own unhurried movements.

For I Listened to the Wind Again, Frey has constructed his text from quotations from Swiss poets Gustave Roud (also the poet of Farblose Wolken, Glück, Wind) and Pierre Chappuis, adding the Tang dynasty poet Bai Juyi before finally introducing the Lebanese-U.S. poet-painter Etel Adnan. The text emerges gradually, hesitant at first, in single words before tentatively expanding into phrases. The accompanying ensemble swells in tandem with the voice, starting as faint harmonics to the soprano, occasionally little more than an unvoiced breath in moments when she falls silent. The clarinet’s distinctive tone is not heard until about ten minutes in; after twenty minutes the cello bows a slow melody in its lower register. By the halfway point both voice and instruments are sounding fully, with a slow, statuesque lyricism. Soprano Hélène Fauchère’s faint vibrato becomes more pronounced as each section reaches its own modest climax and the ensemble changes the mood from clear to clouded. The ensemble (Carol Robinson, clarinet; Nathalie Chabot, violin; Garth Knox, viola; Agnès Vesterman, cello; Sylvain Lemêtre, percussion) is ideally suited to the voice and the composer, knowing how to play quietly without being soft or frail. For much of the piece they alternate between colouring the vocal line and providing antiphonies for it; in the later stages they intertwine behind the soprano, who now sings without pauses. Frey keeps adding expressivity to his once spare music, gesturing towards but never approaching melodrama.

Cafe Oto’s extended lockdown series of recordings, Takuroku, has come to an end after about 195 releases. Amongst the last is John Tilbury’s Metalessness, his reading of Samuel Beckett’s Lessness with keyboard accompaniment. Besides Tilbury’s vast body of work as pianist in free improvisation and the New York School, he has also gained a reputation over the past decade as an interpreter of Beckett’s dramatic and prose works. Lessness gains its incantatory power through its repeated phrases and the repetition of the entire text, the second time with the order of its sentences permutated by chance. The means of making the text are of less interest than the effect they have, especially as spoken by Tilbury here. The words’ disturbingly neutral descriptions of apparent desolation provide a verbal surface for meditation, mood between elegaic, yearning and resolute. Tilbury’s clavichord provides accompaniment, its faint, thin sound at first evoking a distant memory of tinkly upright piano. (The piece’s dedication is “In memoriam William Thomson, potman, pub pianist who died of TB at 39, the grandfather I never knew.”) The clavichord’s gentle recurrence in the background conjures up new images for the text, at times agitated, at others calm but searching. At one point, the elegaic cuckoo clock from Morton Feldman’s Madame Press Died Last Week At Ninety is recalled. It appears to be a home recording, windows open, with extraneous household sounds adding a subtle discordant clatter to the keyboard; from time to time, a small bird outside chirps brightly.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: John Tilbury, Jürg Frey, Samuel Beckett, Takuroku
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It must be the time of year because I’ve been getting a lot of stuff involving electric guitars and suchlike lately. The Takuroku download project is entering its final stage and they’ve been releasing a lot of interesting albums of music more or less derived from pop, which I won’t talk about much mostly because I fear being exposed to ridicule as a clueless old fart. The various détournements of songforms heard there range from intriguing to charming to perplexing, but I’m going to stick to something safe and review a set of solo guitar improvisations (“Oh boy, another one!”). Mamer’s set of fifteen short tracks Freeze Wizard is a bit better than the usual stuff inasmuch as it has the self-control to stay in one place, even as he plays around. The hype-sheet would like you to think that he ‘explodes’ stuff but the strength comes from each segment complementing the last, building up an identifiable but increasingly complex tone throughout the album. Digital effects are used to create and eerie, hyperreal aura to the instrument, with harmonics or faint loops droning over the strings or pitch-shifting to create the impression of a faulty tape deck. The last four tracks feel out of place with a sudden recourse to hyperactive scrabbling which breaks the mood, but by the end this busyness has been sublimated enough to work as a sort of coda.

Speaking of sublimation, Julia Reidy’s latest release How to spot a rip features four electric guitars playing simultaneously while unplugged. I’m assuming e-bows are used to create the uninterruped tones that sustain throughout the piece’s sixteen minutes. I’ve mentioned Reidy only in passing before, noting how she’s taken steel-string acoustic playing techniques and applied them to larger structures, transcending the boundaries of the instrument’s idiom through duration and through electronic manipulation. That transcendence becomes pure here, in tone and structure. The guitars’ clear drones are tuned to pitches in a 13-limit scale (conventional Western tuning is based on ratios using prime numbers no bigger than 5, so the addition of 7, 11 and 13 to the mix pushes consonance outside of our usual experience) and move further apart from each other during the piece, with attendant overtones and beating frequencies as each of the guitars’ trajectories intersect. Reidy retunes the guitars during the piece and notices how the harmonic space can suddenly ‘break’ while the pitches slowly change. This effect is augmented by the otherwise imperceptible complications of acoustic vibrations, even with the thin timbre of an oscillating steel string. The tension in the piece is underscored at times by the characteristic sound of a string slipping on a tuning peg, reminding you of just what you’re hearing. A remarkable piece for both guitar and tuning nuts, especially for people who need more James Tenney in their music.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Julia Reidy, Mamer, Takuroku
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Electronic music tends to polarise even the individual listener, where the extremes of appreciation and disdain map out like an inverted bell curve. For each piece that realises the potential for new, exciting and unheard sounds and forms, there is at least one that utterly fails to reward your attention. (I blame the formative French tradition of exquisitely crafted snorefests – a fetish of technique and finish.) I’ve got a stack of recent releases of electronic music here which I’ve been meaning to deal with so I’m going to run through them quick, with this jaded attitude in mind.

Familiarity breeds contempt, and once you’ve dabbled with electronics a bit yourself you get surprised by how much music starts to resemble your own preliminary doodlings. That’s not to say that just anyone can fool around with software and be as good as, to pick a name at random, Dumitrescu, but that a lot of it lives or dies upon the question of what to keep and what to discard. Taku Unami’s Takuroku album Stardust is “100% computer programmed music” and it’s fairly pretty but I think you could be just as pleased by downloading a copy of Coagula. Madalyn Merkey’s Crushed Shells, on the other hand, is gentle and playful, while using the fashionable analog Eurorack modules and a Waldorf Blofeld with a capriciousness that never sounds stiff or heavy-handed. Both kind of slip back and forth between being less or more than they seem, with Merkey’s set of pieces having greater resilience.

The synthesiser duo of Richard Stenton and Zach Dawson have put out their debut release 7balcony. It sounds like a lot of effort went into making something both conceptually grating and sonically ingratiating. As such, it falls between two stools and is excessively dependent on the goodwill of the listener. This could go over better with a live audience, where all the activity seems to mean something, especially if the venue is licenced. The last track ‘microphones hanging from tall buildings’ is apparently just that and is the most confident piece here.

Another debut duo is Alex Christie and Ryan Ross Smith’s acres, which carries the sensation of improvised electronic music, both in its strengths and weaknesses. Nice crunchy electronic noises kick in and out with a pleasing arbitrariness but occasionally things come to an impasse and it sounds like the musos are struggling to make the music do something, in the hope that things will stay tastefully harsh. Unlike the two preceding albums, Paul Abbott’s Deorlaf Z (version) for XT Deorlaf X Live sounds like an artistic struggle without pulled punches. An extended live reworking of prerecorded materials using electronic (and real) percussion, excitement builds, then ebbs away only to resurge later, with the longeurs becoming excusable as a necessary part of a larger process. The live situation and the attendant materials of popular music form the substance of this piece, as opposed to simply clothing it.

Simon Balestrazzi (electronics) and Paolo Sanna (percussion) have put out a set of Disrupted Songs made from sonic found objects. They are exercises in serious play, making or taking nicely-defined sounds that would suit an earnest lower-case improv session, but then they repeatedly interrupt each other, creating a more complex structure of continuity and discontinuity. Each piece takes unexpected turns without ever descending into a free-for-all, placing the unfocused into sharp relief.

Finally, I have to mention John Chantler’s Eli Licking Ice, a glorious 25-minute slab of synthesisers spun through mobile speakers in resonant space. It drops us in media res with a wonderfully clear but chaotic mix of electronic sounds that are truly diverse and discrete. At first it seems as though things are about to go out of control but events settle into a wayward flow of their own course. As the piece continues the sound opens up and you hear acoustic events within the room, particularly a snare drum that buzzes along in sympathy. Even as sounds loop and swoop or swing from side to side, both sweet and cutting, or both at once, everything seeks out a harmonious balance, although perhaps in ways that are not readily obvious. Also, it’s a welcome addition to Takuroku’s guest dog series.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: 7balcony, Alex Christie, John Chantler, Madalyn Merkey, Paolo Sanna, Paul Abbott, Ryan Ross Smith, Simon Balestrazzi, Taku Unami, Takuroku
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One year into global pandemic conditions and we’re all getting a bit jaded as lives settle into a routine of reduced dimensions. Cafe Oto’s Takuroku series has become a musical documentation of this prolonged, wearisome event and themes have become apparent. In particular, there is the presence of lockdown conditions as an obstacle to be either confounded (collaborations, typically conducted remotely or by stealth) or accepted (ruminative solos). Sorting through the recent batches on my playlist, I can find in the former category:

Duncan Chapman, Supriya Nagarajan & Rhodri Davies – Slowly Drifting. Carnatic singing with drones will usually end up either taut and compelling, or in a box next to the checkout at the organic shop. There’s plenty of slack between the vocal phrases here, rescued in the mix by Davies’ bowed harp, which hooks into all that free space and gives it a breath and a sense of direction.

Rebecca Wilcox & Hannah Ellul – sweeping, at least. Collaborative free improv as mumblecore. The meaning is obfuscated and any overtly musical content is all but incidental, although they do dress it up a little for our benefit. It gets said that collaboration is a form of conversation, so here we get the act of exchange as the subject itself. As in true conversation, the content doesn’t matter, or is at least none of our business.

Maria Chavez & Jordi Wheeler – The Kitchen Sessions: 1-5, 2020. Prepared instruments and electronic whatnot jostle with each other in a set of miniatures with a restlessness that makes even the longer tracks feel small. Feels like loosening up for something more, preferably outisde a venue that needs an artist credit.

Blanca Regina & Wade Matthews – Shortcuts. I used to get these duos confused with the Chavez & Wheeler set, but these four pieces stay still enough to give you some expectations to subvert, plus a hidden purpose: coming back to them, moments of preciousness in the sound come across like mock field recordings, a documentarian’s precision in capturing a phenomenon that doesn’t exist.

And in the latter:

Bridget Hayden – Transmissions. Descended electric guitar curls up in slow, sulking coils of fuzz, all but smothering the wisps of atmospheric effects that provoke and sustain the stasis. Bleak but alive.

Tina Jander – Ice Cubes. An hour of cello with field recordings that swiftly lures and traps you into something prolonged, nasal and sour, refusing to let you go. Bleak but bracing, striking in an unpleasant way that will compel you either to return to it or to remember to stay away.

Xisco Rojo – Axial Tilt. 12-string guitar played with physical and electrical bows that buzzes as much as the Hayden and sneers as much as the Jander but less bleak, even as the only backdrop for the instrument is clear silence. The sharp contrasts between the friction and the pure tones merge and then separate out as a structural device.

I’m trying to be pithy with these thumbnail impressions but it keeps sounding snarky in my head, so forgive me for continuing to note down some more at the risk of coming across as glib.

Goodiepal – The Pole Imposter & The Databar. The second of his Takuroku audio memoirs documenting the arcana of fin de siècle underground Euroculture, nostalgia qualified by questions of authenticity. As far as I can tell, the fakery here is genuine and honestly presented, except I think he just made me unwittingly listen to a… podcast?

United Bible Studies – The Night Fell Off Its Axis. The goup gets described as a “magickal conglomerate” but thankfully not as a collective. This one, big-ass track further condemns and redeems by opening itself to accusations of being art through sheer refusal to stop, pushing for further consequences to their musical actions that may not be forseen. It’s rare to find magick that questions its certitude.

Josephine Foster – Spellbinder / Experiment. The second track is revisionist weird for the sake of it, rather like that early 80s new wave form of po-faced hedonism. The hedonism throws the first track into context, a tapestry of woozy instruments making something eclectically and eccentrically sumptuous that rebuffs the usual British need for justification, shamanism, ley lines etc.

Pete Um – A British Passport. Speaking of new wave, these songs (don’t be shy) have that same fuzzy, sheltered sound which is dry and dull unless you’re on that same wavelength and then it connects hard. I don’t hear it myself, but on this album I can hear how it might work better than I can when listening to more celebrated post-punk cult figures. This is due to the artist’s insight, as are the synth patches which manage to sound both fresh and comfortable all at once.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Takuroku
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(Previously: Part 1 and Part 2)

These Takuroku writeups got a bit longer than intended and there’s still a few remaining releases I want to mention, the ones which are more or less just musicians playing. Of course it is never that simple. Neil Charles’ LOW and BEYOND is a set of nine tightly-packed studies for solo double bass, each one taking technique as a starting point for invention instead of a crutch. Restless but never hurried, each one demonstrates how craft is elevated to art. By way of comparison, Farida Amadou’s solos for electric bass on Reading eyes and facial expressions take the instrument itself as the subject material. The extended pair of works consist on the one hand of a sculptural essay in open string resonance, and on the other of varying methods of attack upon the strings, both by physical means and through electronic distortion.

Two sets of piano miniatures came out at the same time. Calum Storrie’s Nine Day Score is a set of graphic scores with no specific means of interpretation, played here by Steve Beresford on piano. Storrie’s scores employ a fixed set of elements, deployed in various ways across each two-page composition. Beresford’s realisations are very free, making no direct use of the musical quotations in each score; he transforms the collaged pieces into slow, widely-spaced intervals, a slender framework of notes set against the ambience of his room. It’s a home recording, on a slightly chiming upright piano, captured on a phone, albeit in stereo. The raw, blemished sound adds an immediacy that deflects any charges of preciousness in these keyboard meditations. Tom Scott’s Tattered Angels also run the risk of preciousness, being overtly pretty and delicate, but they are too modest to be guilty of affectation. His piano pieces are more fully voiced, but even briefer, averaging a little over two minutes each. They seem shorter as each one is a thumbnail sketch, stating a theme and elaborating on it a little before falling silent. On rare occasions, he dips into the lower half of the keyboard but otherwise keeps the instrument to a small, wistful voice. As you’re thinking how simple it is you start to notice the times he’s multitracked himself, as phrases echo and cascade softly. You can hear tape wobble and start to wonder how it was made.

I’ve been listening to Anton Lukoszevieze’s Word Origins for a few months, on and off. Well-known as a cellist, less so as a composer, it should be no surprise that his solo improvisations, recorded one per day, convey enough detail and substance for repeated listening. Technique is at the forefront, but at the service of presenting and articulating musical material; most of the pieces use changes in bowing position, attack and pressure to differentiate sound, rather than a reliance on pitch. Harmonics are common. Each piece may set a mood, but, with a few exceptions, there’s less interest in making each piece become a ‘meditation’ fixated on one gesture. After becoming more familiar with the more straightforward pieces that appear later in the set, the more mecurial works start to distinguish themselves in the ear.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Anton Lukoszevieze, Calum Storrie, Farida Amadou, Neil Charles, Steve Beresford, Takuroku, Tom Scott
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In Part 1 I mentioned the substance of Takuroku’s lockdown releases and the climate of discovery they encouraged. A perfect example of this is Leon, by the ensemble Jamaica! The description of Jamaica! (“a free music ensemble comprised of adults with learning disabilities… grew out of efforts to make the music sessions held there as inclusive as possible”) does not prepare you for the experience of hearing Leon, an hour-long still point of red heat, a glowing ember that radiates energy without movement. Their playing has a focus and economy that make AMM sound like dilettantes by comparison. Not quite an hour: the ending yields to dub, which feels all the heavier for what has gone before. The bass player is Leon, who died earlier this year.

I’m listening to everything here, even if it’s a sax and drums duet. This means I didn’t miss Lookbook by @xcrswx, with Crystabel Riley on drums and Seymour Wright on horn, the two of them sustaining the faintest of rolls and overtones for over half an hour. A remarkable feat, if not in technique then in holding the listener in suspense, even as they constantly retreat, dissapating as much momentum from their playing as possible without lapsing into silence. Wright’s solo release (If) I Remember Rites (2020) takes this approach in different directions. Taken from a live-streamed performance at Cafe Oto in August, his Natural Rite [angle] is in memoriam Scratch Orchestra member Carole Finer, who died in March. A single, high harmonic on alto sax is reiterated and gradually succumbs to brittle percussion improvised on fixtures of the cafe. The distillation of essences in these works is reversed in the concluding Knot Rite, where three saxophones are used as a vehicle to produce thick, flat panels of burred, overdriven feedback.

It sounds like there’s lots of feedback at work in amongst the home-made synths, quasi-guitar rigs and miscellaneous electronics in Killers in the Clouds, a pair of works recorded by Aquiles Hadjis and Nerve in Hong Kong (I think?) in 2019. It carries that same wild impression of unbridled electronic noise and anarchic fun that is so often the goal of electronic improvisation, yet too rarely succeeds as it does here. The restless, impulsive changes in sound and texture never feel forced and are often genuinely inexplicable to the more jaded noise fans. This should be in your go-to playlist next time you’re in a music war with the neighbours (you all have this problem, right?)

There’s feedback synthesis in ТЕПЛОТА’s HEAT/WORK too, but in a more mediated way. The duet of Grundik Kasyansky on feedback synthesizer and Tom Wheatley on double bass have worked and reworked live recordings from the previous year into something at once organic and formalised, using compositional processes, loops and the percussive effects of Wheatley’s bass to produce music that shifts between the atmospheric and the rhythmic, with a substratum of deep noise held in restraint.

More duets, where the line between improvisation and composition gets increasingly blurred: The Quiet Club’s Telepathic Lockdown Tapes presents two solo improvisations by Danny McCarthy and Mick O’Shea played back simultaneously without editing. Each allows space for the unheard other, producing a soundscape of tantalisingly obscure details that never becomes dense. Eclectic materials, audio verité and coincidence produce and effect of Cagean impassiveness. Shakeeb Abu Hamdan & Sholto Dobie’s It’s Worse mixes and matches live recordings from various locations, including some guest appearances by Arturas Bumšteinas’ Lithuanian Organ Safari project. Hamdan’s often blunt percussion and Dobie’s vacuum-powered homebrew organs sound better here than they often do live, where the queasy weirdness of the sounds take precedence over the sometimes cumbersome means of producing them. Lia Mazzari & Tom White’s Lettura di un’ onda is more of a collage, I guess. Field recordings of everyday urban sounds get recontextualised in incongruous ways that emphasise the isolation of city life in the past year. The strange disassociation of many people’s lives this past year is captured in an audio diary form, but Mazzari and White’s manipulations have a playfulness about them that adds some low-key absurdist humour. The grey backdrop of city recordings is also livened up by Mazzari’s cello playing and a few sweetly processed whip cracks.

(Continued in Part 3)

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: @xcrswx, Aquiles Hadjis, Crystabel Riley, Danny McCarthy, Grundik Kasyansky, Jamaica!, Lia Mazzari, Mick O'Shea, Nerve, Seymour Wright, Shakeeb Abu Hamdan, Sholto Dobie, Takuroku, The Quiet Club, Tom Wheatley, Tom White, ТЕПЛОТА
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Cafe Oto’s Takuroku imprint has now released over a hundred albums of new music made during this year’s pandemic lockdown, with more promised for 2021. (Presumably it will end sometime next year, as will the pandemic.) Faced with such plenitude, it’s impossible to do them all justice in a substantial review. My occasional brief notes on them run the risk of making these releases seem like minor works or casual throwaways, but in most cases the artists have contributed significant statements or made bold experiments that cast their work in new light.

Along the way, Takuroku has pulled off some firsts such as, incredibly, the first solo album by Maggie Nicols. Her Creative Contradiction release has given me a better view of her work as an artist in the round than any single gig of hers I’ve witnessed. Nicols’ music often falls into the realms of improvisation and song where I feel less inclined or qualified to comment. My reviews here have tended to shy away from Takuroku’s jazz, folk and improv releases, which have made it and Oto’s live programme seem less diverse than they are. The download catalog extends even further, to film (Tori Kudo’s Archive) and their often overlooked coverage of poetry and spoken word.

Phoebe Collings-James’ Can You Move Towards Yourself Without Flinching? and Roy Claire Potter’s Entrance song; last time present us, or rather confront us, with dialogue and monologue respectively that unfolds in ways unlike a narrative and more like a Hörspiel, establishing a state of mind in the listener. Caroline Bergvall’s Sonoscura collages together a set of meditations on poetry, language and place. Michael Speers’ Green Spot Nectar of the Gods takes up language and the speaking voice as a source for music, with electronic processing transforming its sound, rhythm and informational content (instructions on how to make the piece). Nour Mobarak’s 3 Performance Works is a different proposition: stereo documentation of multichannel performance pieces and installations that document and scrutinise idiomatic uses of phonemes and phrasing. The last of these can’t help but lose a little of their impact in this format.

We’ve had previous excursions into psychedelia in this series and I would have said that Kelly Jayne Jones’ the reed flute is fire had capped the lot. In addition to the record, a accompanying limited edition of art boxes is also for sale. They contain a drawing, incense, a small pyramid, shiny stones and gold velvet, which should help give an idea of the music. Jones’s voice and flute are processed and overlaid with melting drones that can make you feel the need to crack a window and let some fresh air in so the walls stop moving. It all pales in comparison to Nakul Krishnamurthy’s Tesserae, a pair of works that draw upon Indian classical music theory and techniques. Anyone expecting patchouli-scented pabulum will quickly have their mind tied in knots by the undulating orchestra of shruti boxes and voices in Anudhatthamudhatthassvaritham, which steadily gains in psychic power through its refusal to make nice, giving the consequences of its theoretical foundations free play. Ten Thousand Dancing Shivas shows that it’s no fluke by forgoing the textural overload and still making a poweful impact on the listener, weaving together vocal phrases and instrumental responses that evoke without ever mimicking traditional practice.

(Continued in Part 2)

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Kelly Jayne Jones, Maggie Nicols, Michael Speers, Nakul Krishnamurthy, Nour Mobarak, Phoebe Collings-James, Roy Claire Potter, Takuroku
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There’s radical amateurism and then there’s amateurism that may happen to be radical. I am listening to some defiantly amateurish music-making from the Far East, which is making it quite clear that this is not some highly refined culture from an exotic land which I Just Don’t Get. Xu Shaoyang’s pair of Live from underpass recordings, made in Beijing and Taipei, greet bemused pedestrians with brief group improvisations in etiolated song structures, described in the blurb as “ramshackle” and “non-dogmatic”. I still don’t get it, and assume that there’s a pointed pointlessness to it as with much Soviet art, where a lot of faff is needed to encrypt stuff a dedadent Westener would take for granted, so that said Westener then complacently assumes there’s nothing more to it. The Beijing gig includes recorders and kazoos, those perennial signifiers of the amateur, while the Tapei gig buzzes with electricity. I would gladly attend either set live, if only to be outside at a gig on a balmy evening again, preferably with access to beer.

Amateurism becomes a curse when it is elevated as a surrogate for authenticity, that most overvalued of artistic qualities. One has to convince the audience that there is no reason to do things any better, lest one be accused, falsely or not, of playing the stumblebum. Firas Khnaisser and Ali Robertson’s Inspiring Capital is so laid-back that with slightly less effort it could disappear altogether. Recorded in an Edinburgh park during a festival time rendered inert by Covid, it presents the two local musicians simply enjoying the unexpecetd peace. Meanwhile in Huddersfield, the new release from Pressure Carcass, titled Yeast Queen, collects one hundred and twenty-something phone recordings made around town. The sound quality is generic mono, the content displays a Duchampian indifference. It presents life as drama with the boring bits left in, leaving you to decide if it’s instructive or a distraction. If there’s something you want to hear again, it’s buried somewhere in those 150 minutes (advance publicity promised us three hours, so I assume some curatorial discernment took place).

On the other hand, there’s Secluded Bronte, the free improv power trio of Adam Bohman, Jonathan Bohman and Richard Thomas. They may seem amateurish and homespun in their noisemaking and slapdash in their execution, but their collection The Horns of Andromeda is an expertly paced collage of finely crafted sounds. Like true sophisticates, their complexity is worn lightly, with a transparency that lands each brief track with an immediate impact on the listener yet sustains repeated exposure as greater depths and connections are revealed. Extracted from various performances, each musician’s experience and finely tuned sensibility comes to the fore. The abundant verbiage carries authority even as it steers into gibberish, the funny bits work through sly self-awareness. Most importantly, the self-indulgent, insider fascination with craft is entirely absent here, as divergent genres and techniques are fully embraced and then dumped again with equal enthusiasm. If there’s irony here, then it is more seductive than alienating. At odds with the vast bulk of free improv, it delivers what is so frequently, misguidedly, incorrectly promised: surprise and delight.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Ali Robertson, Firas Khnaisser, Pressure Carcass, Secluded Bronte, Takuroku, Xu Shaoyang
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Left Hand Cuts off the Right – Worker. Modestly described as ‘sketches’ made while holding down a job during Covid, these start out as pleasant ambient tracks which turn ominous in the latter half, as less tractable sounds start to take up a once-benign language.

Nemeton / Rafael Anton Irisarri – Lot 178. A relic of Cafe Oto’s fundraiser auction earlier in the pandemic, these two tracks pair Nemeton’s sampled and processed orchestrations of Stan Adler’s cello with Irisarri’s remix of Nemeton. Both are monolithic, with Irisarri arcing up the light, the dark and the dynamic range.

Ben Bertrand and Otto Lindholm – Reversion. Bass clarinet and double bass with electronics make something less lugibrious than expected, more like analogue synths with a foggy, exhumed sound. Just noticed that The Sinking of the Titanic was a bonding experience for them, which makes sense.

Li Yilei – Specimen. Stupidly managed to not pay attention to this one first time I listened. The first track’s OK, but each section gets progressively more compelling with an eclectic range of instruments and sound sources deftly treated and combined into an intriguing and highly satisfying sequence. The website implies the whole thing is a realisation from a score consisting of a line of rocks.

Cara Tolmie – Lit by a Car. Hard to pin this one down. Tolmie harmonises and processes her voice in ways that start to lose all resemblance to voice. When she re-emerges from her soundscapes you’re left to contemplate if this is a return or a transformation.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Ben Bertrand, Cara Tolmie, Left Hand Cuts off the Right, Li Yilei, Nemeton, Otto Lindholm, Rafael Anton Irisarri, Takuroku
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I’ve enjoyed cellist Judith Hamann’s music for years now, both in solo live shows and as part of Golden Fur. We’re finally getting more recordings out in public, with more on the way soon, it seems. The upcoming releases from Blank Forms focus on her cello playing, but the new Black Truffle album Peaks is an unexpected deviation into the unknown. It starts normally enough with Hamann playing characteristic sustained tones. There’s faint ambient noise in the background, which by now we recognise as the sounds of a lockdown home recording (it is not). The cello’s strings extend into a softly keening electronic drone; more prominent voices emerge from the echoes. Soon, the cello is lost altogether in hazy montage of locations, events and people, as though half-recalled in reverie. Sounds can be identified but their presence remains elusive as each slips in and out of perception. Hamann’s art has left her travelling the world for the past few years without ever settling down into a place of her own. Peaks is a powerfully evocative and poignant reflection of life in flux, made all the more compelling by never lapsing into the medium’s clichés in content or technique.

Hamann’s collaboration with Marja Ahti on Takuroku, Portals, could be a companion piece to Peaks. Each currently resident in Finland but forced to work remotely, the two musicians fashioned a dialogue of their respective crafts. Ahti’s skill at constructing soundscapes with a strong sense of place is decentred here, with Hamann adding new musical and physical perspectives. With Ahti, the sonic images and narrative are more distinct, but it’s a double image and the narrative becomes a soft but insistent dtory of displacement. These are two of the most haunting works to come out of this year’s isolation, particularly because we know from their circumstances they will continue to speak to our anxieties in other times to come.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Judith Hamann, Marja Ahti, Takuroku
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I’ve ranted about field recordings before, spouting off a poorly-connected set of complaints which can be boiled down to the medium’s general tendency towards complacency. No such thing in Zach Rowden’s piece We were listening to music on his new Takuroku release We were talking about music. The signal intrusions of electronic mediation, duplication and distortion hiss and crackle throughout, mixed with various levels of fidelity. Pipes and bowed strings slowly loop and drone amongst a persistent grey hum of urban open spaces. It is music as a practice, of activity located in space. If the dirgelike playing reminds you of folk music, then it is only because those qualities have been buried, unearthed and denatured to the point that any tenuous claim to authenticity comes from the act of claiming those traditional roots through modern practice. Rowden constantly reminds you of the self-reflective aspect to this music, turning it into both an archive and a document that calls into question any authentic representation, other than of itself.

Is music an art form? Of course, you say, that’s an easy one. But is it really? Music, I mean. Derek Baron’s Fourteen Latches of Heaven and Earth hits you with art of the uncomfortable kind, the sort that you may first wish to dismiss as music. Its fourteen tracks are less collage and more mosaic, each element working together to present an image of music that causes us to question and pursue the deeper workings beneath the bland assumptions we typically make when we listen. Yes, every element is musical – in most cases, a brief sketch on upright piano – but labelled in a way to imply that these have been turned out and casually filed away over the years: ‘e j05 copy (2013)’ is a typical example. They’re pretty and charming miniatures, but presented here as unfinished or as offcuts. The titles reflect personal references without any accompanying significance. Other elements intrude, the ambient background, drum machines, a harmonium solo, uncategorisable sounds. The juxtapositions resist context, neither thematically nor through quotidian accumulation. The centrepiece is a long, tortuous runthrough by Baron and with Dominic Frigo of Bach’s Herr Gott, dich loben wir on recorder and guitar; their laboured playing presents music as a form of cultural transmission at its most unpolished and brutal. The album ends inconclusively with an excerpted recording of a choir being taught a mediaeval Salve Regina, another unresolved act of musical pedagogy. Far from a diary or sketchbook, Fourteen Latches of Heaven and Earth is an artistic statement, presenting music as work; uncommodified labour as both its material and its technique, the machinery of how music makes sense of the world laid bare.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Derek Baron, Takuroku, Zach Rowden
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“…started thinking about how popular music gets used as material these days. Once, tropes from rock or jazz would be incorporated into other musical styles to act as a signifier of that genre; now, the substance is reworked into new forms.” A gig I heard last year popped back into my head when listening to Bill Orcutt’s new solo guitar album, Warszawa. Having come to know his music relatively late and largely by accident at a gig in Brighton maybe ten years ago, I hadn’t made the connection to more recent experimental guitar music until now. What I remember from the Brighton gig was insistent activity that stayed resolutely in one place. The connections to rock came from that focus on the grain of the sound against its rhythm, listening inward, using the consistency of sound as a vehicle for the smaller timbral details to come to the fore. Warszawa is a more relaxed and varied affair, even as it features nothing more than Orcutt’s electric guitar without further adornment. The two untitled tracks are taken from a gig in the titular city last autumn. In the first, Orcutt plays melodic figures with varied pacing and elaboration, from gentle arcs to frenetic zig-zags. It’s all grounded by the open bottom string, plucked repeatedly to give a root to all the ornamentation. For all the activity, there’s a calm, steady concentration to the playing that can make it all unexpectedly sound soothing. The second piece (or side, I think this started as a cassette) is even more relaxed, which perversely makes the music even more fraught. The fixed bass is still there, but less frequent, the pace often slows to a pause, breaking the track into several sections. The restless pensiveness counter-balances the calm activity of the first half: Dürer’s Melancholia in reverse.

A superficial, fragile calm can also be heard in Threshold, a collaboration by Ed Carter and Jessica Lee. A lockdown recording, it combines Lee’s clarinet – layered over itself in slow, overlapping harmonies – combined with ambient sounds in and around her house. The environment may be encroaching upon the purity of the unaccompanied clarinet, or perhaps the clarinet is intruding into the everyday suburbia. The ambiguities are enhanced by the use of binaural microphones that open up the context and prominence of each sound, and by an Aeolian harp that is threaded through the piece, blurring boundaries between figure and ground even further. The clarinets and harp sound sweet and unhurried, but as the ear becomes trained on the details beneath the surface it all takes on a more troubled aspect. The sounds hover in limbo, neither private nor public – music heard on the doorstep, unsure of whether to venture outside or to welcome the listener in. For now, it marks time in an uneasy balance; a smile of optimism with a furrowed brow.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Bill Orcutt, Ed Carter, Jessica Lee, Takuroku
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A long year ago I wrote about Jérôme Noetinger’s sublime collaboration with Anthony Pateras, A Sunset For Walter. Cafe Oto has now put out two new Noetinger collaborations, recorded over Covid summer, again featuring his use of a Revox tape recorder as an instrument. Noetinger’s live shows typically have a playful element, exploiting the unpredictable nature of bending sounds through manipulating tape directly, with the mad-scientist theatricality adding to the off-kilter element in the music. As stand-alone recordings, they retain that spirit of adventure recording-only adventures through the slightly messy technology at work and provocative formal conceits that challenge the musicians’ creativity.

The concept behind Propagations is simple. Noetinger and Anthony Laguerre exchange tapes they have made and do a number on each other’s recordings, “just like in the 80s”. Although no longer dependent on physical media and the postal service, both Laguerre and Noetinger seem to be using their tape decks in their ‘edits’ of each other’s work. Each of the two 15-minute tracks is a noisy, chaotic ride of electronic sounds that never stick around for too long. This is just as well, for as with all chaos there are occasional irritating and boring moments mixed in between effects that range from cheesy to inspired. It keeps you guessing, particularly with questions like: is it all really that simple? In an attempt to drill down and distinguish the two pieces and the two artists’ work I kept hearing similarities arise between them, with a kind of symmetry that suggests each track started as the reverse of the other before the additional transformations took hold. Maybe I’m hearing things, but authentic-sounding chaos usually carries an underlying design.

The concept behind Nos cadavres is simple. Noetinger and Jean-Philippe Gross exchanged tapes, but only the last 10 seconds of their recording for each one to carry on after the other in a game of Exquisite Corpse. So the exchange passes back and forth, each new contribution adding a new twist to a hallucinatory continuity that makes itself up as it goes along. In lesser hands, this lack of greater context would wear thin pretty quickly. The length of each section, however, was allowed to be anywhere from ten seconds up to seven minutes, so that moments of stability are allowed to emerge and define an overall shape, however mysterious it may be. Gross and Noetinger are also smart enough to vary sounds from the continuous to discontinuous, allowing silences to both break up the information overload and create more distinctive sonic forms. Between them, they manage to put together a dazzling range of interesting sounds over the course of the two extended tracks. Surprisingly, each listening has added further intrigue, so far.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Anthony Laguerre, Jean-Philippe Gross, Jérôme Noetinger, Takuroku
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It’s inevitable that most of the releases on Takuroku are home recordings to some extent and most of them have avoided the obvious. An excessive focus on domesticity can lead to the petty dullness for which musique concrète was once criticised. The obvious and the simplistic are easy to do badly and very difficult to do well; domesticity can be put to good use by a truly creative mind. A number of solo Takuroku recordings are by musicians simply playing at home (or, in the case of Chik White, playing his home). Where these pieces may not be great artistic statements, they contain a directness that refutes any such pretension and so they gain a new value through their candour.

At other times, they can reveal more about the musician’s relationship to music than first expected. Hannah Marshall’s Clouds is a set of six improvisations for solo cello, recorded in a friend’s suburban spare room with an open window. The setting is itself much of the piece, but when heard at a low level the background disappears and the ordering and arrangement of the music comes to the fore. Everything is plucked or tapped, never bowed. If the pieces are numbered in order of performance, then they have been sequenced to provide a more complex and balanced structure, with one omitted. At first, they began mostly with silence, the gradually filled into rhyhtmic studies that acquire a sprightly melancholy as they progress. Unorthodox tunings are used, but this is used less for the sake of tuning and more for learning to explore the strings in new ways.

The house isn’t so much heard directly in Juliet Fraser’s My Adventures With The TC Helicon Voicelive 3, but its presence is implicit throughout. The twenty-two tracks were recorded over a six-week period, as Fraser decided to use her enforced downtime to finally learn how to use the titual piece of electronic equipment she had bought for a specific piece five years earlier. “No critical reflection” is the watchword here, with the album acting as an artist’s sketchbook, learning new effects, trying out various techniques and just singing, for the hell of it. Folksongs and poetry are here, with some garden recordings, made-up rhymes and experiments with looping, harmonising and pitch shifts. The cumulative effect becomes as much personal as it is pedagogical, an extended series of exercises in purposeful play. The deliberate gimmickry is used as a veil of modesty over Fraser’s superb vocal artistry, but can never fully obscure it. As it ranges from silly to sweet, always oddly charming, the album can’t help but become an informal portrait of Fraser herself, if not a strongly skewed view of her home life.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Hannah Marshall, Juliet Fraser, Takuroku
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Isolation drags on – at least it does for me. I’m vaguely aware of the passing of time, and kind of aware that I’ve been staying in one place for months, but a complacency sets in such that the sudden realisation of other times and places comes as something of a shock now. Cafe Oto’s Takuroku series of download releases continues for the foreseeable future, made by musicians coping with lockdown. As music made from necessity, it tends to fall into two categories, being either solo recordings at home or long-distance collaboration. The latter type is facilitated by online communication and typically takes the form of an exchange, or a series of exchanges between two or more musicians. The results are a type of montage, such as the decelptively complex sketches made up of multiple images by Ryoko Akama, Anne-F Jacques and Tim Shaw in their Takuroky album In Another Place. On the other hand, Otto Willberg and David Birchall have taken things further by exchanging the places themselves.

Willberg is a double bass player in London, while Birchall is a guitarist in Manchester. Their joint release Murky Sovereignty performs a rite of psychogeographical alchemy, by each recording a space near them and playing them back to each other. Each has scaled their playing back to forms of electronic treatment laid over the recordings, enhancing the audible space and layering them with acoustic tropes. The spaces chosen are liminal – the pair of works are titled walking about under junction 7 of the M60, singing and spending lunch time under the link road at Thamesmead a couple of times – concrete traffic overpasses with distinct acoustic characteristics yet also oppressive on a human scale. The baleful hum of traffic sets the tone for both works, a grey film that settles over every sound and darkens it. If this sounds too much like grim social realism, just remember that there’s a purposeful idleness at work in these recordings, in defiance of the utilitarian surroundings. An inadvertent performance takes place as people pass through the scene, in various guises. Willberg and Birchall are activist observers, finding life in supposedly dead spaces.

There’s a stark contract of place and time in Ute Kanngiesser and Daniel Kordík’s 5AM, recorded early one June morning not far from here, where I’ve been sitting for the past five months. I’m well aware it’s summer now, but everything I’ve been hearing this year suggests a perpetual British spring, slow and belated. Kordík’s recording of Kanngiesser playing cello on the Hackney Marshes began at 4:48 AM and it instantly reminds me that it was the right time of year to coincide with the dawn chorus. The piece is, in fact, a recording of birdsong gently accompanied by Kanngiesser adding faint sounds, usually harmonics. As an artistic statement, it’s simply an act of joining in with the surroundings, yet that simple act was both liberating and transgressive. Reading Kanngiesser’s notes reminds you of the evasive action needed to record this piece, at a time when “essential” travel was restricted. It seems later than I remembered, yet also so much longer ago than I thought. This release comes with writing by Evie Ward and is available in WAV format, as recommended by the musicians.

Tom Wheatley’s Round Trip returns to home, or stays at home, or both. The space itself becomes the subject as it encroaches upon his double-bass playing, at times disrupting it entirely. Or, the bass recedes into background noise amidst the domestic sounds that form the basis of this crowded landscape. With attentive listening, one hears musicianship frustrated by ambient obstacles; with casual listening one hears the bass notes merging into the space, a settled occupant, even if never fully at ease.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Daniel Kordík, David Birchall, Otto Willberg, Takuroku, Tom Wheatley, Ute Kanngiesser
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