Boring Like A Drill.

The first paragraph is a bad-tempered rant which may be ignored.

This album came in the nick of time. I’d been listening to a bunch of “new music” lately that left me disillusioned about what so many composers are up to today. They want to get away from all that stuffy, arty concert hall music, but they don’t seem to know how. This would be more palatable if they addressed their predicament honestly but instead they plough on with fixed smiles and serious sincerity, serving up boring, boring music while telling us the scene’s never been in better shape. They repeat the mistakes of the post-minimalist set from the 1980s and sound old before their time. Bland harmonies, four-square rhythms, aspiring to the lofty heights of pop music but ending up like library music, an internationalised corporate-speak that speaks to, and is spoken by, no-one.

It was such a relief to join the crowd in that hot, stuffy, noisy room at Cafe Oto to hear Apartment House play at the launch of their double-CD of Laurence Crane’s music. The uncomfortable conditions were made simultaneously worse, then better, by the sheer number of well-wishers crammed into the place and the celebratory mood they brought with them. The bigger relief came from prolonged exposure to Crane’s solo and chamber pieces.

Mostly short (5 to 10 minutes), seemingly simple and unambitious, each piece has sort-of clear harmonies, almost-regular rhythms, kind of like the habits of those post-minimalists – only completely different. The spareness of the music suggests an ambiguity of things omitted, its transparency allows nuances to emerge in a way that implies greater depths concealed beneath the surface and hints at how they may be revealed. The material may be conventionally seductive, but its presentation is disaffectedly formal. You suspect there’s a formula behind it, but also suspect that learning the formula would neither help nor hinder your enjoyment. Like Satie’s music, it is obstinately beguiling. Like Satie’s music, you could mistake it for aural wallpaper only to discover it is in fact furniture and unexpectedly bark your shins on it.

Listening right now, there seems to be a timeless quality to Crane’s music, inasmuch as its qualities seem to serve no manifesto nor oppose a prevailing fashion. You could play the CD to your non “new music” friends and not think less of it after it turned out they liked it. Like the best pop music, its bright surface can also suggest darker or more sinister moods.

At the launch I bought the CD so I could enjoy it at greater length. It’s put out by Another Timbre, whose discs I have written about before. Apartment House’s playing is appropriately clean, clear and possibly even deadpan. I’m playing it whenever I can to remind myself that there’s more than one way of doing things, that it’s always possible to make things new.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Laurence Crane