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.
