Paolo Griffin’s not as easy to pin down as he first seems. The three pieces on his debut album Supports & Surfaces were recorded in England, Canada and Finland. Each piece shares a common approach to composition, but it’s not the one you immediately think it is. The Purpose of an Empty Room seems simple enough: David Zucchi plays his alto saxophone into a delay loop system, playing two notes slowly in succession, repeating and moving to the next pair, as the texture quickly builds up to a thick but smooth layering of see-sawing harmonies. The inexorable logic of the delay loop is exploited to introduce some more esoteric harmonisation at times, threatening dissonance without hoping to achieve it, or more intriguingly to settle into an uneasy monotony. It all seems pretty familiar, right down to the fade-out. The second piece redirects your attention: Alone, Together is a duet for violin and percussion, sans electronics, played by Aysel Taghi-Zada and Michael Murphy who perform together as Duo Holz. Any logic present in this piece is undetectable, as Taghi-Zada bows isolated phrases of sundry durations in white-key modes with an unsteady but even tread, accented by occasional harmonics. Murphy plays in a slower and looser style on bells and small gongs, not quite precise in pitch, creating a quasi-accidental counterpoint to the melody. The two create intrigue simply by their presence together, then entrench that mystification by wending back and forth in no particular direction in no particular hurry to achieve nothing more than take up over half an hour of your time. Having lifted the album sequence above the ordinary, the final piece Madrigal redoubles by returning to the solo-plus-delay loop method, but this time around creating a completely different impression. Countertenor David Hackston sings a sombre melody that evolves through a series of transformations, with occasional pitch-bends up or down which render the piece more strange and affecting, while also tempting the listener to latch onto them as reference points while Hackston’s voice expands through an ever-growing hall of mirrors. The sax piece used loops as a means of establishing stability, but in Madrigal the loops create uncertainty, with no neat patterning to the uncanny voice. Also, Madrigal ends, suddenly. The three are united by Griffin’s conception of musical slack (pace Ivan Stang) as music “that doesn’t really go anywhere but doesn’t necessarily stay in one place” may therefore ensure it never achieves a definitive state of completion. If you get this on CD the first and last tracks are abbreviated: presumably the first fades out early and the third fades in late. Alone, Together must be heard in full.
The new Sawyer Editions release of Eden Lonsdale’s music shows marked differences from his earlier collection on Another Timbre, even though the pieces heard here were all written around the same time. The common element to the three compositions on ricercari for rainy days is the harp, played by Cara Dawson and accompanied by the ensemble red panel. The use of electronics and reverberation heard on the previous album are here restricted to the opening piece, falling asleep on an airplane, in which lever harp, cello, percussion and electronics are gradually sublimated into a hazy wash of evocative ambience. For the title work, the role of electronics is effectively substituted by harmonium, which binds together the fragile playing of the other instruments into a cohesive, denser sound, yet also suddenly swells into loud drones that drown out the smaller details to create thick, roiling textures. The process seems to invert itself in cycles/emptiness: a slow melody on the harp repeats itself, with harmonic colouration from cello and harmonium evoking low brass and high winds. The piece slows down and breaks apart into isolated sounds, with the increasing presence of silence, before gradually rebuilding itself into a quietly flowing continuum. It seems to function as a counterpart to Alone, Together.
