I’ve got some catching up to do after my break. Composer Kory Reeder has just issued another five albums on his Sawyer Editions imprint – I’ll get to these shortly – but this time all feature other composers. Two of his own works appear on Everywhere The Truth Rushes In, released this month on Kuyin. The title work is a string quartet, composed in 2021, which exemplifies Reeder’s preoccupation with composing low contrast music, placing full trust in the quality of his material while preferring not to impress that quality upon the listener through changes in texture or dynamics. The piece can live or die upon your attentiveness, to be either experienced closely from moment to moment or else retreating into an overall impression without recollection of details. The quartet itself plays a long sequence of chords, softly, in unison, throughout – one after another in a manner which would seem both too simple to bother with and too tricky to make it work right. Reeder’s technique is deceptively uniform, appearing to be constant while slipping in an occasional prolonged chord, a small gap, a cadence in an unexpected context. The companion work is The Way I Saw Them Turning, a 2022 piece for voice, flute, viola and piano. Nicole Barbeau is the singer (the musicians here are all local to Reeder’s base in Texas), but you’ll have to crank up the volume knob to hear her. While the string quartet is soft, this piece is mastered at a level barely above a whisper. Listen close and you find both more and less than background music. Barbeau sings a text by Reeder; it’s terse. The terseness is matched by the accompanying instruments, creating a tension with the soft dynamics, but then again everything is spaced out with enough slowness to create a piece that’s skeletal in structure and appearance, at odds with the apparent languor of its progress. You will have to pump it to notice this, though.
Maybe I’m getting the hang of it. Maybe he’s developed his curious, protean animated notation to the point where it directs the listener’s ears as effectively as it does the musicians’ gestures. Maybe it’s the editing and studio enhancements. Maybe it’s down to the use of conventional instruments. Probably all three but I’m leaning towards that last one being the main reason I can get into Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson’s Stífluhringurinn more than the earlier pieces I’ve heard. Gunnarsson’s compositions require ensembles to interpret a digitally animated score that can change on the fly, meaning that the texture and overall shape of the piece can be elusive, with nothing settled until the performance is done. Other works I’ve heard have been scored for homemade instruments, toys and assorted objects which further inhibit comprehension that relates to any existing model. The found objects and harmonicas are still present in Stífluhringurinn, but appear as seasoning for the French horn, clarinet, cello etc. The more refined instruments are more versatile, while an orchestra of bottles and bird-calls offers a narrower palette of sounds and shifts the genre away from composition and towards sound sculpture. Stífluhringurinn was composed in 2019 for the Caput Ensemble, who play it here as a group of thirteen musicians. The two movements, or instances, of the piece contrast between short, percussive sounds and extended tones, with the emphasis moving from one to the other in the two versions heard here. It’s a living, mercurial work in which the independent forces compete or coexist to create a gestalt form that exists in the listener’s mind, ephemeral but indelible. Caput handle their instruments well, both the familiar and the strange, using extended techniques at times to blur the distinction between the two. It may be a paradox that the success of this recording exists through the artifice behind it, as Covid restrictions required the piece to be recorded in small batches, with an additional layer of interpretation given when the smaller groups were overlaid and edited together. The chance to enhance details through this method suggests that I may have found the earlier recorded pieces to be easier to perceive when heard in a live performance. In any case, if you were me, you’d start with this record and work backwards to best appreciate what Gunnarsson is doing. The album is a digital download but also available in a vinyl edition, including a small series of unique detourned album covers which, wonderfully, don’t bother with new vinyl and just include a download code with the LP that originally came in the sleeve, a move I heartily endorse.
