Boring Like A Drill.

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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Beats me how people find these things, but I’m glad that they do. Eventless Plot is Vasilis Liolios, Yiannis Tsirikoglou and Aris Giatas, a trio of musicians in Thessaloniki. The music they make can be hard to describe. It is typically referred to as ‘group composition’, a term that usually implies homogeneous improvisation or undifferentiated free-for-all, but that’s far from the case here. For starters, their newest release, Parallel Words, sees them working with a small ensemble of flute, clarinet and strings in addition to their own playing on instruments an electronics. This ensemble takes its lead from compositions jointly worked out by the trio; these compositional structures may, or may not, allow them certain degrees of freedom. Such strategies can often be highly reductive, but Eventless Plot work in a more idiosyncratic way, with intriguing results.

The title work had its material composed conventially at the piano and was then developed with instrumentation and electronics dividing the music between them into two independent strands. In its unhurried pace, the piece moves back and forth between tension and release as the strands – flute and piano versus strings, with electronic sounds thickening the plot – drift in and out of synchronisation, at times in conflic and at others in accord. The piece moves with an aleatory fluidity, while also creating a slow-motion contrapunctal call and response, each instrument in turn commenting on the others.

The opening work, Cosmographia, consists of a structure where the overall shape and individual parts were created to give rise to “common melodic slow shifting patterns and acoustic textures”. From one section to the next, each musician is allowed greater or lesser control to vary pacing and elaboration, with alternate tunings and extended techniques introduced both as variation and as material itself. The works on this disc fall into the “soft and slow” school of music but the playing on both these pieces, together with the imaginatively developed compositions, allows for a complexity of texture and detail to match the typically careful focus on timbre. Eventless Plot’s ‘group compositions’ guide the ensemble with a mercurial intelligence that is both human yet beyond individual subjectivity, quietly confounding expectations as each turn creates a new hybrid of sound.

That impersonal, third mind approach can be heard more explicitly in the final work, Conversion, which seems to be closer to some of the group’s previous work. The trio gently strike various percussion instruments and objects, each with contact microphones attached. The amplified vibrations are transformed into strange gong and marimba-like sounds, with bowed cymbals and electronic filtering producing continuous tones. These soft, sustained sounds are augmented and shaded by a viola, played by Stefanos Papadimitriou, who appears on all three pieces. The emphasis on exploration and discovery is at the forefront here, but that same tendency can be heard in the other pieces, applied to compositional principles.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Eventless Plot
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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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Just had a couple of weeks off, going nowhere, of course. Listening to this 2020 release hyazo by Cyril Bondi, Pierre-Yves Martel and Christoph Schiller, the same trio who have us tse a few years back and the brilliant awirë with Angharad Davies in 2019. The three pieces on hyazo are a purportedly different proposition from those previous albums, with each of the pieces here a more controlled composition – two by Schiller, one by Bondi – than an improvisation. The ensemble is much the same as before, with Bondi on harmonium, Martel on viola da gamba, and Schiller on spinet, with the usual additional of pitch pipes. While tse and awirë made use of compositional restrictions on their improvisations, hyazo shifts the balance and allows improvisation within a more encompassing compositional conceit. Where tse and awirë built their improvisations out of limited pitch gamuts, hyazo‘s three pieces use entire, pre-existing music as a reference point: Bondi’s title track is based on a saxophone solo, while Schiller’s Palestrina is self-explanatory. Perhaps the more elaborate structure has cramped the musicians’ style a little too much, perhaps their instrumentation and style is so distinctive… For whatever reason, while hyazo has that same impersonal beauty as their previous work, it’s hard to distinguish these three pieces from them, or indeed from each other.

A couple of weeks later, Bondi released another, larger piece, this time in conjunction with his regular collaborator d’incise. Levitas (Lane, De Asís, Mécanique, Majkowski, Garin) is another group effort that had me worried I was in for more of the same, again. Wrong, wrong. No explanatory notes are given here, but it seems that Bondi and d’incise are the composers but (supposedly) do not play here. The five piece electroacoustic ensemble are listed in the title and includes Rebecca Lane on bass flute and Clara de Asís on electric guitar, with other musicians I’m not familiar with. The true identity of Golem Mécanique, credited with “voice, tapes, electronic”, remains a mystery. The music itself is equally mysterious, falling into sections and episodes that betray the initial impression of a monolithic exercise in the minimal. Various poses and and attitudes are taken up, toyed with and discarded in a seemingly capricious way, with a solemn playfulness that keeps you guessing to the end, wondering if equilibium will be restored if the whole thing is going to blow up. It’s refreshing to hear something this imaginative, with some searching musicianship, permanently incongruous.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Christoph Schiller, Cyril Bondi, d'incise, Pierre-Yves Martel
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Over the weekend, someone on a popular social media site shared the following video, titled “Tree branch falls on power lines – high voltage – Wicked Effect”.

The first reply was:

It’s a fair point, at least for electronic (or in this case, electrical) music. As making it has gotten easier, so has it sounded more and more constricted by a curious quality of inertness. Either it becomes too easy – acceptably interesting timbres generated almost by default, without any larger musical impetus – or it gets worked over into a highly polished surface with all spontaneous disturbances buffed out, all sheen and no substance.

I got sent a new album of music by Sam Ridout the same week I bought the latest release off John Wall’s bandcamp. Fittingly, each composer has reviewed the other’s work: you could call it logrolling but listening to both reveals a strong resemblance in thinking and purpose, if not in sound. Both share a dissatisfaction with the obvious and facile, in form and matter, each using samples which are heavily reworked into complex sounds. While Wall’s M – [ B ] extends further into richer sonorities, the pieces on Ridout’s Aspect Spur Disjecta make a virtue of restraining their sonic pallette to shades of grey. The sounds are finely shaped, textured and layered to make those greys turn iridescent. The pieces, composed between 2013 and 2017, are short. Nothing stretches beyond four minutes and the entire set is over in twenty. Each piece is a distillation, inviting and rewarding concentrated listening. As with Wall’s pieces, there’s an awareness of space, depth, perspective and silence often lacking from the ‘experimental’ side of electronic music – but that’s enough for comparisons. There’s a liveliness in this music so often missing in electronics, which is all the rarer for not trying to ingratiate itself with the listener. Those heavily-worked sounds do not try to justify their presence, but exploit acoustic phenomena in ways that create seemingly natural forms that have otherwise never existed.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Sam Ridout
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