The fourth annual batch of releases from All That Dust is here, which always brightens up things a little at the time of year when the nights draw in. As usual, some new things and a fresh look at something older. There’s a collection of piano pieces by Evan Johnson which I want to get into later, but the other new piece is violinist/composer Angharad Davies’ extended solo work gwneud a gwneud eto / do and do again. It’s an intense work of small but telling details, despite its large scale, that makes some demands of the listener and much greater ones of the musician. Davies performs a disciplined action, repeated oscillated bowing on a prepared violin (nailfile in the strings), maintaining as consistent a sound as possible while searching out detailed overtones and complex timbres from the interaction of bow, strings, file and resonance. The sounds vary from mechanical to electronically treated even as they are all produced from Davies’s bowing; played loud and listened to with attention makes it all sound the more unreal. At times, even a type of counterpoint is produced. The profile changes over time as the speed and position of the bow is shifted, while also patiently eking out new sounds through persistence in one place. This determined search for difference borne out of repeated activity, combining force with lightness, recalls both the bloodymindedness of Tony Conrad’s early pieces and also James Tenney’s “very soft, very long, very white” percussion work. Twenty-six minutes into the piece and still only halfway through, that bloodymindedness starts to take effect on the listener as the piece, of necessity with any natural process, starts to change and the continuing presence of the music warns you that this is more than a simple excercise in timbre. The title takes two meanings, as Davies’s disciplined action repeated throughout the piece is heard performed twice simultaneously. The first unedited take was supplemented by a second played while listening to the first, reinforcing and elaborating on what was played before. As a question for the listener, it’s interesting to reflect at any given moment just how many violinists are envisaged: one, two, or none.
There are not nearly enough recordings of Aldo Clementi’s music in circulation, so All That Dust’s release of Canoni circolari should be embraced. This is one of their download-only albums, recorded in binaural stereo to best capture spatialisation. A selection of four pieces in Clementi’s signature style, with groups of similar instruments playing canons that unfold into a labyrinth of intertwining, self-similar parts, the sequencing here works as a suite despite being composed between 1979 and 2006. In Ouverture Kathryn Williams overdubs flutes, piccolos and alto flutes that rise and fall in different tempi, her playing unnervingly limpid and calm as the patterns overlap to form a sonic hall of mirrors. Clementi inverts and reverses his short melodic lines, keeping them simple but never easy to pin down, using scales that maintain an ambiguous harmony when heard simultaneously. The movement is dreamlike rather than clockwork, even in L’Orologio di Arcevia for percussion, played here by Joe Richards with Mark Knoop adding the celeste and piano parts. Despite Clementi’s note that the piece is “an instrumental realisation of a clock heard in a belfry”, the mix of tuned and semi-tuned percussion (bells, chimes and a gong never quite fitting in with vibraphone and piano) unwinds into drowsiness even as the musicians articulate each melodic fragment with precision. The high metallic sounds expire halfway through for a low gong that signals darker-toned instruments; a sonnet-like ‘turn’ that reappears in his supposedly static pieces. Mira Benjamin plays the eight violins in the later work Melanconia, distant and reedy, slightly sour. The turn comes again as the violins quickly exhaust themselves, then regroup but slower and fainter, with greater pauses. You begin to notice that you don’t hear repeats in Clementi, but echoes. All four musicians combine for the final work, the late Canone circolare, whose greater timbral breadth is offset by the piece’s brevity. Here, the piece becomes an enigmatic coda and not the summation that you might have expected. It’s a delicate work which places the emphasis on material over process, even as its construction makes it softly fold in upon itself, perversely making it all the harder to grasp before it slips away. This is a short album, but any extra material would be superfluous to its ideal conception and execution.
