The Another Timbre label has adapted a solid practice of releasing albums by new or under-represented artists and then following through with further recordings to establish their presence. The latest batch includes their first release of compositions by Barbara Monk Feldman, in what appears to be only the third disc to date that is dedicated entirely to her music. Verses is a collection of works for one, two and three musicians, sharing an intimacy of scale and a delicacy of touch. In the opening Duo for Piano and Percussion, the former is shadowed almost imperceptibly by the latter, with chimes and mallet instruments acting as a treatment of the piano, altering the colouration and adding faint echoes to disturb the background. That delicacy never lapses into preciousness, as Monk Feldman keeps the balance of sound and silence in constant tension, always holding energy in reserve and only occasionally letting short, lyrical flourishes burst forth. In the solo Verses for vibraphone, the instrument’s signature decay is measured out or drastically cut short, allowing sounds to sustain only to beat against subsequent notes. The GBSR Duo (George Barton, percussion; Siwan Rhys, piano) are joined by violinist Mira Benjamin on the longer The Northern Shore and it’s here that they truly excel in guiding the ear from one instrument to the next as the music passes through the scenery with unhurried but determined pace.
Ballad is the fifth Another Timbre disc to feature Linda Catlin Smith. Just two pieces for cello and piano here, from 1994 and 2005. The latter work Ballad is an extraordinary, incongruous 45 minutes. I said of an earlier collection of Smith’s music that it was high praise to call it more of the same; this is not the same. Besides the length and the dream-logic in the way it changes from one section to the next, the duet repeatedly conjures up new combinations of tone that could not be expected. At times playing in unison, at others letting high piano melody stagger above lugubrious pizzicato, or fragmentary folk tune over steadily repeated chords, the two instruments are united in that neither seems to be quite certain that it is itself, if not the other. Cellist Anton Lukoszevieze and pianist Kerry Yong play with a distanced solemnity somewhere between rapt and dazed, reinforcing the otherworldly experience.
If there are shared values to be observed between the four albums here, then Oliver Leith’s Me Hollywood is perhaps the outlier. The five pieces here expand upon the impression made by last year’s recording of the long good day good day bad day bad day, pursuing some of the tendencies heard there to more extreme ends. The characteristic melancholy is there, expressed through greater or lesser degrees of reticence in pacing and a deliberate, fuzzy vagueness in the ensemble pieces’ harmony and phrasing. Members of the Explore Ensemble infuse the sound with an appropriate remoteness even as Leith tempts potential, less au courant musicians into sentimentality. His gentle musical language is tempered by deploying it as an armature for ironic wit (whether this is self-awareness of defensiveness remains to be seen). Electronics are used in some works either to recontextualise the music or divert the meaning altogether. The title work is presented as a putative soundtrack to banal domestic activities, like a more knowing version of Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast and the conflicted response that may induce in the listener. 664 love songs guaranteed to cure heartache pushes a bass flute into unsteady lyricism while a keyboard sampler expands the ensemble’s palette yet also deflates with bogus pomp. The ludicrous Ten Commandments choir and strings gradually fade, leaving more earnest emotions that are not entirely soothing.
On the other hand, it may be James Weeks who is the outlier here. His previous release on Another Timbre was windfell, a solitary long, frail work for violinist. The five compositions on this new disc, Summer, show a preference for reducing where other composers would normally expand, with a tendency to leave pieces as their simplest, sparest elements. The brief piano piece Durham rests on two slowly alternating notes, which are then harmonised before falling silent. As a kind of counterpart, Düsseldorf is a gauzy depiction of quiet urban scenery, distant sounds heard in succession, disrupted by pealing chimes. Siwan Rhys returns here, on piano and Celtic harp, along with Barton and the Explore Ensemble. At times, things can seem a little too simple: the duets Violet and Violute are played simultaneously, as though interchangeable. The larger works are stronger, with the musicians finding ways to make the music breathe and take on subtle textures even when Weeks deals out the content so stringently. In Summer the piano takes the foreground, its chords draped by alternating colours and a slightly uncanny electronic sheen. Siro’s Garden is a thirty-minute setting of Virgil, but with reciting voices in the background, part of the warp and weft of a slowly expanding texture of interweaving instruments that ripens into contemplative lyricism.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Barbara Monk Feldman, James Weeks, Linda Catlin Smith, Oliver Leith
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Playing: Catherine Lamb – Cristián Alvear, James Weeks – Mira Benjamin
Thursday 29 August 2019
I’m listening to people playing instruments, making music. Are they playing with, or on, their instruments? It’s a trickier question here, as the musicians are performing scores composed for them by other people. If the playing here is to be understood as exploration, then it comes from the composer’s curiosity and from the musician discovering what can be made from the composer’s vision. Making music like this becomes largely a question of possibilities, balanced against the need for some level of restraint.
Both are solos, but augmented. Catherine Lamb’s piece, Point/Wave, is for guitarist. Accompaniment comes from the ‘Secondary Rainbow Synthesizer’: amplified ambient sound filtered into resonant frequencies. This is apparently the first piece she wrote using the device, which has since formed the basis of her Prisma Interius series of works. The sounds in Point/Wave are more clearly defined and separated here than in the later works; this would be partly due to the sole performer and to the bright, clear attack and decay of the guitar. The piece is conceptually clear, but with harmonic sophistication. The guitarist Cristián Alvear plays a cycle of chords over, or against, the passing harmonic clouds of the ambient synthesizer. Whether the two relate or not is a moot point: the interaction is one of two processes at work, each producing sounds of alternating clarity and complexity. The synthesizer’s changes are governed by the outside world; for the guitar, Lamb has composed an “infinite cycle” of chords related to smaller and larger prime numbers. Acoustic phenomena are explored and demonstrated, but in a lyrical, non-dogmatic way, rather like Alvin Lucier’s later works combining instruments with pure tones. I like that Lamb expresses her frustrations with the guitar through the piece, with the awkward tuning and quick decay turned into a virtue that adds extra colour to the sound. The piece was written for Alvear, a guitarist who has a knack of finding the space for potential shading and texture in the most seemingly reductive scores. He gives the piece warmth and presence, using a classical guitar to speak clearly, in a way Lamb thought would only be possible with steel strings.
Any play in James Weeks’ windfell is of a more serious nature. This hour-long solo for violin is also augmented: the musician is expected to sing vocalise from time to time. The piece was written for Mira Benjamin, so presumably her high, clear vocal tones are a requirement for anyone else attempting the piece. The inner sleeve of the CD warns listeners that the first five minutes or so are almost inaudible. The sounds are the most rudimentary type, the kind of inadvertent noises made in preparation to play. The home listener, already slightly apprehensive of what might follow (“resist the impulse to turn up the volume”) is then led through an open labyrinth, in which the path is marked but the ultimate direction never clear. After several hearings, it’s still hard to remember exactly where this path led. The piece doesn’t exactly build up from its near-silences, but transforms itself in ways which never seem a sudden divergence yet always efface the memory of what passed immediately before. Damndest thing. Pauses mark changes of direction; each section carries a tension with it, but the gestures are never hurried. Sounds are frequently sustained and repeated, with a restraint that always refuses to indulge the listener. Changes are marked by difference in pitch and intonation, rather than gesture and registration – just enough to be heard as new. The voice joins in at times, or whistling to blend in with the harmonics. Sometimes the voice provides three-part harmony with the double-stops – by this point in the piece, the music has become strongly present, perhaps even loud. Later, you notice things have become quieter again. Weeks (married to a violinist) demonstrates a deep understanding of the instrument, doubtlessly aided by Benjamin’s performance, a mixture of calmness and absolute control, the kind of heroic qualities that come from balancing contradictory impulses, as heard in her previous performances.
