Phillip Golub: Loop 7 [greyfade]. You may remember Phillip Golub’s earlier album Filters, in which four pieces titled Loop presented interlocking piano melodies with a recursive nature that resembled musical knots, loosened enough to allow each twist and turn to be observed but never ultimately traced to a resolution. Loop 7 stands alone here as a half-hour piece, suggesting something similar yet more elaborate. Befitting the subtle deviousness of Golub’s compositional thinking, it both is and isn’t. The long piano loops wind around each other in a lazy fashion, casually leading you back to where you’re sure you’ve already been, over and over. This time, the single Steinway is replaced by two Disklaviers retuned to a 22-note scale, adding to that woozy feeling of something being out of kilter despite sounding irrefutably correct. There’s also some subtle electronic processing, which you eventually start to notice, and two live musicians (Aaron Edgcomb on vibraphone and Ty Citerman on electric guitar) who you may not notice at all. Their almost imperceptible playing adds to the reverberant aura that shimmers around the pianos, making the music’s progress increasingly inexplicable. Seasoned punters will start getting flashbacks to “1/1” off Music For Airports and with good reason, each presenting the same imperturbable surface, only Golub’s is more playful than oblique.
Leo Chadburn: The Primordial Pieces [Library Of Nothing]. In their manner of presentation, Chadburn’s compositions purport to be simple, but their apparent directness is deceptive. This suite of five pieces are reworkings of “sketches” Chadburn made some twenty years back, but the simplicity of their materials belie the insidious effects they produce on the listener. The outer pieces present pianist Ben Smith, playing ascending, scale-like figures over a background wash of synthesiser tones. A Secret, heard at the Music We’d Like To Hear fest last month, is presented here with electronics acting as a background wash -the importance of that role should not be de-emphasised. Its opening counterpart, The Reflecting Pool, is more florid, with grand chromatic flourishes underpinned by ominous drones that occasionally slip out of gear. The strings appear in the inner movements, each for four violins (Angharad Davies, Mira Benjamin, Chihiro Ono, Amalia Young), appearing first as feathered chord sustained and motivated by incidental tremoloes, then on their return as pure quivering, relieved only by a short spell of descending harmonics. The central piece is Smith alone on piano, a troubled labyrinth of unresolved arpeggiations of an unresolved chord, that varies only in intensity, flagging and then redoubling in its efforts until suddenly stopping dead. It’s the unstill centre for a nested cycle of pieces that could otherwise be carelessly mistaken as calming.
