I hear lots of nice stuff and I appreciate it. I thought you were supposed to get less tolerant as time went by, but attempting to listen critically just makes me find things to appreciate about craft even if I doubt there’s any point to what I’m hearing. There isn’t a particular point to art, anyway. I don’t expect, or really want, to be shocked by art, but at times I start to wonder if I’ve reached a state where I hear everything in the same way. Luckily the recent albums by Eventless Plot and Magnus Granberg have gently nudged me out of that complacency again. The Greek group composition ensemble Eventless Plot have recorded two contrasting pieces both titled Memory Loss. In the first, the trio is joined by sometime collaborator Chris Cundy on bass clarinet, who holds sustained pitches against analog synth tones over a backdrop of occasional psaltery and other analog electronics, with some digital processing. What’s most striking about this piece is not just the clear, unadulterated use of pitch, but that it’s keyed to delicate but purposeful activity, in a way which makes you realise how much recent hushed, low-level unnotated music has been getting fussy and mannered in its obsession with small details. The second piece is for the trio alone (Vasilis Liolios, Aris Giatas and Yiannis Tsirikoglou) and the main instrument is piano, replacing the sustained pitches with a fragile continuity that eventually breaks up rather than resolve or fade away.
Always a good thing when new music gets a second recording so soon after the first; or in this case, the other way around. Last year Another Timbre released a 2021 recording of Magnus Granberg’s How Lonely Sits the City? and now the Japanese Meenna label has issued a performance from 2020. The earlier version is for quartet only (Eva Lindal on violin, Leo Svensson Sander, cello and Stina Hellberg Agback on harp around Granberg’s usual prepared piano), without the electronics or percussion of the Another Timbre seven-piece version. Of the latter, I wrote that it had “the sparsest texture I’ve yet heard in Granberg’s compositions, even more so than in his quartet Nattens skogar…. while Granberg added parts for a larger ensemble, the prevailing mood remained small and sparse, with each musician adding to the overall work as sparingly as possible, making each individual sound count.” Hearing it now in its original form, it’s curious how the texture is even more open, while sounding less wintry or alienating. The combination of instruments is a little warmer, even as the group’s playing is just as faint and attenuated (save the cellist, all returned for the later recording). What’s most intriguing here is the way the work falls open, like a loosened knot, revealing details in its construction, showing how Granberg’s techniques change over the course of a piece to produce different interplays of sound. At times, the music falls into near silence as violin and piano tentatively exchange single notes, like a Cage piece in times when he was at his most reticent.
