Is this drone? No, it’s not; but it’s slow and sombre throughout. Lugubrious, even. That fits, as the seven pieces that make up Sarah Davachi’s cycle The Head As Form’d In The Crier’s Choir [Late Music] all relate to and draw inspiration from the Orpheus myth. The theme of grief – of the solemn, stoic kind – is ever present, as each piece in succession rolls out at the same slow pace and low register, for a litle over ninety minutes in total. The immediate distinction to be made between each work is in its timbre, but the bourdon of the pipe organ is a defining characteristic throughout. Davachi has recorded her performances on four church organs, heard either solo, in combination or with other instruments; besides multitracking, she uses other analog electronics and tape effects. With time, each piece gains its unique identity in its harmonic and textural construction, with pieces alternating between monody and antiphony, even at one point venturing a sepulchral introit melody on synthesiser. When other instruments are added (ranging from viola da gamba to trombone) they serve to expand upon the organ’s tone rather than seek to introduce contrast. One work is entirely electronic and introduces sounds that are more translucent and less weighted down; it’s preceded by a quintet for wind instruments in which Davachi is absent as a performer (the musicians here are Rebecca Lane, Sam Dunscombe, Michiko Ogawa, M.O. Abbott and Weston Olencki). There’s been a recent trend of musicians assaying various organs in a kind of field survey, but this is the first set of pieces I’ve heard where the organs are a means to an end, with each composition having been thoroughly and solidly constructed, unencumbered by any documentary obligation that might have distracted from the overall artistic goal. This is why each piece and the entire cycle can be appreciated with each fresh hearing, as first impressions give way to admiration for the craft, which in turn reveals more artstic depth, despite Davachi having set herself the narrowest of ranges in which to work.
Clara de Asís and Rebecca Lane had worked on their piece Distances Bending [Discreet Editions] for a couple of years or maybe more by the time of the recording heard here – it’s “their long-term project, which takes different forms in specific contexts and configurations in their exploration of harmonic and time proportions”. The version heard here was recorded in Berlin in May 2023 and besides de Asís on synthesizer and Lane on quarter-tone flutes, they’re joined by Sarah Saviet on violin and Deborah Walker on cello. The pacing makes the Davachi album sound brisk, as the four musicians create a music of severe austerity, adding and removing each note with great deliberation. For the listener, it comes across as a prolonged meditative action, with each small, slow step coming from inner immobility rather than tentative fragility. Even when all four are playing, they consciously produce a sound that is consciously thin, favouring closer harmonies and melodic stasis. Flute, cello harmonics and a pure synth patch yield very small differences in timbre, with only the characteristic rasp and edge of Saviet’s bowing providing obvious colouration. It’ll take at least one hearing with patience and undivided attention for the music’s purpose to make an impression on you, but once you’ve got it you’ll probably keep getting it on later listenings in less strenous circumstances.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Clara de Asís, Rebecca Lane, Sarah Davachi
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Unearthed: Laura Cocks, Petr Bakla
Sunday 16 February 2025
Is this grunge? I don’t mean it’s amped-up distorted but it sure sounds dirty. Laura Cocks’ solo flute bears no resemblance to the typically bright and shiny instrument we all know, more like it’s just been dug up from a burial ground with clumps of dirt still between the keys. On FATHM [Relative Pitch / Out Of Your Head], Cocks stalks through the nine pieces all sneerin’ and a’smearin’, starting with a strangulated wheeze and then a quick gasp for air before plummeting into the abyss. Muddied sub-tones predominate throughout, with the usual ‘free’ repertoire of shrill outbursts and anguished vocalisations kept to the barest minimum, giving everything a dense, vegetative vibe that verges on claustrophobia. The blunt and murky sound works as a discordant contrast with the restlessness of Cocks’ playing style. Well-placed rough breath and grubby fingering blur every pitch into something organic, like nature operating at its grimiest level. A few tracks play out like a standard improviser’s-frenzy of running the instrument through its paces, but then you get tracks where Cocks takes the flute’s more improbable sounds to create something truly unique. A marsh wren lands on the ear like an uncomfortably close-miked field recording, FAVN is a soliloquy of low, wordless bellowing. YARN somehow manages to sound like a collage of musique concrète in its material and construction. The smaller servings offered here make this less formidable than last year’s duet SLUB with Weston Olencki but show that her aesthetics haven’t mellowed: if you buy the CD, the hand-made packaging uses “natural elements” that will degrade over time. “Do not worry, that is the nature of things.”
Speaking of obstinacy (which I kind of was, indirectly), cellist Matthias Lorenz and pianist Miroslav Beinhauer have recorded a set of three duets by Petr Bakla. Beinhauer was the soloist on Bakla’s Late Night Show album and also contributed a few Fluxus interpretations on that Stolen Symphony comp a while back. At the time, I referred to Mieko Shiomi’s Imaginary Garden No. 3 as “charming” without noting that obstinacy was also present, combining attention-deficit flightiness with left-brained obsessiveness. That’s a good enough reference point for Bakla’s Cello & Piano [Octopus Press], although there’s nothing flighty in the way Bakla puts his music together. There appears to be a system at work, or the impression of a system, even as it defies analysis. In Two Instances from 2016, the two instruments intertwine in a staggered arpeggio, cello pizzicato and piano muted una corda to create a muted, idle strumming. For Eduard Herzog is the earliest work, from 2006, and drops a clue to Bakla’s influences, invoking dodecaphonic rows and deploying them with febrile tremeloes and glissandi that both embrace and deride the means of the avant-garde from days of yore. The personal opinion is more overt here, as is the brittle, self-aware construction that recalls Ablinger or Spahlinger. The new piece dominates, not only because it’s nearly twice as long as the other two put together. Eight Notes, composed last year, beguiles with its reductive title. There’s a grand total of two pitches in the piece, a minor third apart in the bass clef: each may be held for one beat or two, played either as loud or as soft as possible. Bakla’s score meticulously rings the changes on how the two instruments combine these elements, cello and piano repeatedly exchanging between foreground and background, implying antiphony and dialogue out of what should be monotony. A lowkey masterpiece of the minimal, it’s mesmerising, it’s maddening, it’s compelling, kind of funny in a way, relentless, inevitable.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Laura Cocks, Petr Bakla
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Catching Up: Smith, Demoč, Lonsdale
Sunday 2 February 2025
While I get back up to speed, there’s been a whole lot of praise for Another Timbre’s latest Linda Catlin Smith collection. I’ve got no argument with that. Flowers Of Emptiness pulls together eight chamber works spanning nearly forty years – it’s quietly astonishing to think of how she’s created such a substantial body of work. As you would expect, the dimensions of each piece are modest (two exceed ten minutes, another stretches to nearly twenty) but they all establish an immediate presence and profundity through being contemplative without ever settling into passivity, combining seriousness of intent with lightness of touch. The gentleness of harmonies and dynamics in her language initially suggests a superficial resemblance to the current fashion in modern music for the polite and inconsequential, but where the latter typically resolve the tensions of their work into the lulling certainties of melody or vague folklorism, Smith turns those same elements towards abstraction, offering up emotion without interpretation. The musicians of Apartment House play this music with an authority that now imparts interpretative leeway; in the works for string quartet the silences and pithy fragments here resemble John Cage on the cusp of finding Zen.
The batch of three discs released by Another Timbre late last year are all repeat appearances by old favourites of the label, each featuring performances by members of Apartment House. Zamat is their fourth release by Adrián Demoč, a set of three new chamber pieces. Each is an exquisitely worked study in instrumentation, with Demoč reducing the substance of each piece down to the state of almost monody, articulated by subtle differences in colouration and texture with just enough variation to keep up the appearance of forward motion. The title work, for clarinet, bass clarinet, viola and cello, moves back and forth on the spot between a handful of notes, plucked strings hedged amongst the guttural effect of low clarinets, producing a complex, ambiguous tone. Gebrechlichkeit is a pensive string quartet that broods over several frail chords of close clusters, moving from one to another only when the strings’ various methods of attack have been exhausted. “…o protón jasu…” repeats the same instrumentation as Zamat, only with both clarinets in the upper register and evrything played in high treble, a loose gathering of thin harmonics. The sound here is naked and astringent, reminding me that Demoč’s music is not always as comfortable as it first appears.
Eden Lonsdale has had only one previous Another Timbre release from about a year earlier but apparently it’s already sold out. Dawnings is a double-disc of five longer pieces, in which longer durations allow Lonsdale to stretch out into elongated chorales like Cloud Symmetries (four violins played by Mira Benjamin, Chihiro Ono, Amalia Young and Angharad Davies) and Shedding (the seven violas of Ensemble Ipse). Each of the above pieces use strongly constricted pitch ranges to focus on timbre and small changes found within stasis. In my review of last year’s Sawyer Editions release, I talked about “hazy washes” and “thick, roiling textures”; in these works those elements appear more starkly, with less obvious direction point from one state to another. The large ensemble work Constellations, perfomed by Oerknal and conducted by Hardy Li at the 2023 Gaudeamus Muziekwiek, is almost too rich and roiling as it luxuriates in antiphonal layers of instrument groupings threaded through with organ chords. Most remarkable is the title work, in which Heather Roche on clarinet and Kerry Yong on piano seamlessly transform back and forth between figure and ground, always spare and unhurried yet always moving while appearing to be in the same place. There’s no melody as such, nor any particular direction of travel, but somehow you listen and at one moment one is high and the other low, then the other is high and one is low without any apparent intervention.
