Tim Parkinson: The Projects [untitledwebsite]. I had something smart to say here but I forgot it so I’ll start over. I think I’ve previously described Parkinson’s music as acting like a non-sequitur to something never said. The four pieces presented on The Projects are all very different but try to convince you that they’re all alike. Siwan Rhys neatly trips through the piano piece untitled 2021a in a way that at first reminds of Christian Wolff’s later music, but the tonal language used here is less rarefied and deceptively sophisticated. Rhys spins the piece with a jazzy, insouciant breeziness that suddenly pulls up short at unexpected moments. The following pieces find other ways of being lulling and nagging simultaneously, leaving everything momentarily balanced but still unstable. Project 3 is a duet between Travis Just on saxophone and Parkinson on a motley assortment of keyboards. Across five movements Just plays two- or one-note riffs over obtuse, wandering keyboard lines and low-tech drum machines, with the sax managing to sound as affectless as a free MIDI instrument patch. The po-faced directness starts to accumulate arbitraty collisions between the instruments until it all ends on the verge of chaos; an even-tempered chaos, but still. Parkinson’s keyboards double piano and MIDI piano on the solo piece untitled 2021b, which seems to follow some sequence or process that chases its own tail, looping through harmonic circles while counting down to a preordained endpoint. Skipping ahead to Project 9000, we hear something that sounds programmatic but is entirely baffling. Rhys returns to bang out sporadic piano clusters, eventually joined by percussionist George Barton on various tasks of musical carpentry, all while Parkinson grandiloquently rhapsodises on an otherworldly Mighty Wurlitzer. It’s enough to make Kagel scratch his head. I don’t want to trivialise this album by asserting there’s a point to it all, but nevertheless Parkinson presses upon our assumptions and our anxieties that subconsciously play out when we listen to music, digging into the cognitive dissonances of misapplied logic that can amuse or frustrate us, to instill responses in the listener that are complex and strongly personal.
Okkyung Lee: just like any other day (어느날): background music for your mundane activities [Shelter Press]. Okkyung Lee dispenses with the cello and makes an album entirely of home recordings with electronic keyboards, computer and a cheap cassettee recorder. Ten pieces that are gnomic but fully realised. The setting and pervading mood of comforting melancholy recalls the convalescent feeling produced by the “lockdown aesthetic” of a few years ago, but the music here is more definite and complete. The keyboards hearken back to the clean synth sounds of the early 1980s, here brightly coloured but not strident, mellowed by a soft VHS burr of nostalgia. The slightly lo-fi sounds evoke the domestic form of techno-optimism from that period, when home computers were new and suggested boundless potential, simultaneously futuristic and quaint. Each of the ten tracks evokes a mood while also suggesting a quiet wit operating behind its pithiness. I mentally bracketed it with Tim Parkinson because it seems to share the peculiar combination of being friendly but aloof. The pieces are charming and seemingly trivial, too candid to be ambient, too obliging to be musique d’ameublement, but as with The Projects this music has an oblique way of acting on the senses.
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