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.
