Boring Like A Drill.

Timothy McCormack: mine but for its sublimation [Another Timbre]. (Don’t say Feldman don’t say Feldman don’t say Feldman) it’s an hour-long piece for piano with subdued dynamics that opens by obsessively interrogating a unresolved, ambiguous chord through changes in voicing and register and at first it seems a well-crafted study in tone and shading at least influenced, but more properly to say informed by… you know, that guy. As the piece progresses it takes on a greater character – independent, larger and more complex; perversely so as the musical continuity starts to break up. Pauses open up and resonances are allowed to linger until they start to become the material McCormack is working with. He understands that it’s not enough to preserve a mood through a piece’s entirety, but to sustain it in the listener’s mind by thwarting it, keeping things precarious. At several moments the music threatens to develop into something else, only to do so by falling away into near-silence. Chords are reduced to single harmonics, with sparse notes beating against the overtones. McCormack describes the work in terms of resonance, and in stages these resonances become more focused and sustained. The pianist is Jack Yarbrough, for whom the piece was written: he has a gift for coaxing prolonged sounds out of his instrument, with a pacing and a use of tonal colour that are deliberate without being calculating. Having achieved this state of otherworldliness, the piece goes further by stretching out resonance indefinitely, through the use of ebows on the strings; harmony condensed into an ominous, persistent hum. It all ends with a slow but brutal finality and I’m still knocked about by the way McCormack and Yarbrough have created a transformative piece out of chin-stroking acoustical considerations while also delivering an emotional thump.

Bryn Harrison: Towards a slowing of the past [Another Timbre]. Harrison’s latest musical labyrinth comes with a twist. This forty-minute piece is for two pianos and comes out of the gate like a doubled version of his solo piece Vessels from way back when, but all too soon it suddenly rebounds on you in a psychedelic tape reversal. As if the unadulterated form wasn’t trippy enough. Each passage starts off afresh in what seems a call-and-response of pianos and backwards-pianos, but gradually the contributions from the electronics become more pervasive and insidious. The reversed resonances wash in from beneath the live pianists, always a bit lower and a bit slower, and then they start to take a shape of their own. By the second half, the reversed passages are calling the shots, leading the pianists into darker registers, slowed to a trancelike dirge. It’s a disturbing development, making explicit the seductive danger that has been implicit in Harrison’s previous works. The pianists here are Mark Knoop and Roderick Chadwick, both veterans at Harrison’s music and adept at pulling off the nimble counterpoint needed to make it work; for this piece they convey the image of two workers industriously tackling the job at hand, only to be sobered as the technical demands give way to something more oppressive.

Ashlee Mack: green [Sawyer Editions]. I’ve been meaning to get around to the Sawyer Edition releases from early this year. Pianist Ashlee Mack plays four works by four composers, all of the quiescent school: each piece feels about the same in scope, regardless of length. Mack’s approach here highlights her interest in touch, using attentive dynamics and phrasing to say a lot, even where there could perhaps be more colour (might be down to the piano or the recording). Jeff Herriott’s piece green is passing seems made for such an interpretation, with its palette-dabs of single tones and small chords given substance as an abstraction, belying its relatively brief length. Eva-Maria Houben’s snow from 2023 is on the cusp between her just-enough and not-enough compositions, with a slow succession of single notes gaining a degree of momentum through each overlapping decay: Mack gives a nice sense of timing to lift the dry material off the page. Heard in this company, Marti Epstein’s Haven seems to owe too much to those preceding works; while it starts to add more to the mix to produce a certain expressive weight and dramatic shape, the effort is undermined by carrying on too long. The non-conformist in the pack is Ian Mikyska’s Distant bells; mist; stopping, which gets some slightly more robust dynamics and acts strangely by lapsing into periods of various ostinati. It could come across as fey if those gently reassuring moments didn’t come and go with such indifferent abruptness.

Morton Feldman and Tobias Hume: Intermissions [Sawyer Editions]. I got instinctive prejudice against anything overtly “curated” so when I see an album that proposes a “dialogue” between Feldman’s early piano pieces and Hume’s pieces for viol circa 1600 I reflexively start cueing up individual tracks. The album begins with a silent track (30 seconds) and ends with one (60 seconds), with several other silent tracks in between. There are other pauses, at the start and end of tracks, too. Guy Vandromme’s interpretations of Feldman are nicely modern while still trying to be as small as possible; not timid, just not making a big deal of it, while keeping enough of the old capital-M modernist brittleness. Luciana Elizondo plays Hume on a viola da gamba and it all sounds fine to a rube like me. I don’t think we need to hear repeat performances of certain pieces, which are presumably sequenced in for the sake of continuity. As a whole, it passes along as a series of sporadic but consistent objections to the silence, which seems too mild an objective.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Bryn Harrison, Eva-Maria Houben, Ian Mikyska, Jeff Herriott, Marti Epstein, Morton Feldman, Timothy McCormack, Tobias Hume
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Catherine Lamb: interius/exterius [Greyfade]. The most assured and balanced composition by Lamb to date, interius/exterius was composed in dialogue with the New York based Ghost Ensemble in 2022 and was recorded by them last year. It’s an all-acoustic piece for an ensemble of nine musicians, in which the strings are the dominant presence: viola, cello and two five-string double basses. As usual for Lamb, just intonation and its consequent microtonality form the basis for the piece, guiding the musicians to play specific pitches on the spectrum of overtones above a notional fundamental tone of 10 Hertz. The piece opens with a dense, dark thicket of interwoven (but not tangled) harmonies, with a complexity reminiscent of a La Monte Young drone. The rough and granular texture of bowed low strings are interleaved with pitches played on flute, oboe and accordion, but these instruments are subsumbed into the overall texture and work on the ear in the manner of overtones and beating frequencies, a sort of aural leavening. Contrast is provided by hammered dulcimer, echoed by a harp; with slow melody of single tones these two combine to function as a guide through the sonic labyrinth, resonating or contrasting with the aggregate of pitches.

The piece is structured to loosely alternate between compatible and incompatible harmonic intervals, hence the distinction of inward and outward movement reflected in the title; it provides a faint but ever-present sense of equilibrium as the musical fabric expands and contracts, between tension and rest. Throughout the work’s six movements, the overall balance moves steadily towards resolving into simpler, clearer harmonies with fewer pitches, each succeeding statement more succinct. The coda is all single-voice counterpoint, as dulcimer and harp alternate in solo. interius/exterius is unmistakably a Catherine Lamb composition, yet it’s the piece I’ve heard which most clearly reflects her study with James Tenney, as a clear organisational method behind the piece can be inferred from listening, even if it can’t be readily explained. The Ghost musicians do an excellent job of using subtleties of timbre to distinguish the material, the winds enhancing certain attributes of the strings, harp and dulcimer differentiated by attack.

Jürg Frey: Longing Landscape [Another Timbre]. Three recent works by Frey, also benefitting from close work with an ensemble – in this case the Prague Quiet Music Collective. The first two pieces can be read as Frey pushing forwards into less certain territory: The sound never has walls combines clarinet, electric guitar, violin and double bass in a way which consciously fails to blend the disparate sounds. Although everything’s within the usual apparently quiescent atmosphere of slow pacing and soft dynamics, the piece becomes increasingly fragmented and discordant, as the guitar becomes jarringly hooked on repeating notes in crescendo. The Prague Quiet Musicians succeed in making each each of their contributions appear to cover a wide dynamic range. For Fleetingness, composed last year, they’re joined by members of asamisimasa, with the enlarged ensemble creating a strange type of Klangfarbenmelodie where small, strange sounds are juxtaposed in unusual ways with no apparent direction, set amongst detailed percussion work. The title piece is comparatively normal, with the same musicians heard on the opening track now pulling together into a moody, sinuously uncoiling melodic line. Hearing all three, it feels like Frey is reaching out into yet another direction on his musical progress, but hasn’t quite arrived yet.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Catherine Lamb, Jürg Frey
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Raven Chacon: Voiceless Mass [New World]. What I’d heard of Raven Chacon’s music so far had fallen into two camps, either solemn works for small instrumental ensembles or electronically-processed field recordings that were occasionally harsh enough to make me wonder if the file was glitched. Voiceless Mass compiles three pieces which bring resolve those disparate elements into a clearer but still complex single image. The earliest piece, Biyán for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and percussion from 2011, makes use of repeating patterns with small variations but not in a way that you consciously notice. The effect is one of an everchanging stasis, as when observing landscape: evocation of place is an important feature of Chacon’s music, heard directly through field recording, through evocation in acoustic sound and imbued with the cultural elements of his native American heritage. In the case of Biyán the inspiration comes from singing in Navajo ceremonies and it’s tempting but unsatisfactory to describe these pieces as ritualistic, as rite and repetition are only one strand of thought brought to mind in Chacon’s complex reflections on nature and culture. What strikes the ear immediately is the way he is unafraid to harsh, disruptive sounds into what might be otherwise a mesmerising, lulling structure, sounding natural in a way that is beyond human.

In the two more recent works, both from 2021, Owl Song for sinfonietta and voice with electronics shows just how far Chacon has developed the approach from Biyán, with musical pitch and noise, voice and instrument, natural and artificial all merged into a work whose single purpose for itself is clear even as it may disorient and transform the performers. Unidentified percussive sounds have an uncanny effect, the voice verges on speech before finding greater purity, those ritualistic passages seem to emerge only to be subsumed again into a greater whole. It’s a powerful piece that belies its relatively brief fifteen-minute span. The ensemble on these later works is Present Music, conducted by David Bloom, Ariadne Greif providing the voice; they make the technical demands of these pieces such as the constant timbral changes seem normal, placing the listener’s focus on purely acoustic phenomena and how they build the piece’s overall impact. The title work is also for large ensemble, which spends the first half creating a large, dark space of low sounds before a pipe organ breaks through. With the added electronic reverberation and use of drums, you can now hear Chacon’s flair for the dramatic and how he wisely keeps it in check, only occasionally leaving it to simmer and threaten a wilder escalation before it withdraws. If you dig those old Polish recordings of Scelsi you should probably hear this too. Did you know it won a Pulitzer?

Martin Iddon: Hesperides [NMC]. I’ve perviously described Martin Iddon’s music as possessing vegetal qualities, but also noted that there are layers to his work which take time to make themselves known, and that what has been made commercially available to date hasn’t yet told us the whole story. The three works on Hesperides deliver on this promise, in spades. Coincidentally, there’s also one 2012 piece here plus two from the 2020s. The earlier work in’ei appears on paper to be a fairly simple scheme for a variable ensemble to make their way through a set of changes in timbre and pitch; the musicians of Quiet Music Ensemble focus their attention on low sounds to make their performance a brooding, atmospheric piece of disturbing transformations. It opens the album to set the scene for the larger works. Quiet Music also perform Hesperides, a piece for five musicians with a field recording which plays throughout. It forms a memorial for a deceased relative, centred on silent contemplation beside a riverbank where the subject is present through his absence, while life passes by. The sounds are impersonal but also disarmingly immediate, capturing a state where the senses are exposed. The music itself seems unobtrusive, at times even imperceptible, although close attention may reveal elements of liturgical music. Iddon has composed for Quiet Music Ensemble in a way which pitched notes seem to lose precision and soak into the recorded background, each voice set so transparently that there seems scarecely any artifice in the timing and manner by which each sound lands. The ensemble musicians sound remote, as though part of the distant activity caught on tape, colouring this solitary act of listening into a profound musical experience. They do an excellent job of adding a degree of organic uncertainty to their intonation, without sounding timid. All these pieces are written to be extremely quiet: the sleeve notes recommend setting your volume so the quietest moments are barely audible, but the playing can withstand closer scrutiny.

Between the two ensemble works is Λαμπάδες (Lampades), played by tubist Jack Adler-McKean accompanied by a fixed soundtrack. It’s an impressively chthonic piece, all darkness with occasional flashes of light. Again, Iddon has developed his style to the point where the music seems to have evolved by itself, without direct human intervention, a composition where pitch and timbre are indivisible. I’d hesitate before making any definitive statement on what is played by Adler-McKean and what’s on the soundtrack: solid dark clouds of deep, velvety tones echo back and forth throughout the journey, set about by the distant wailing of sirens amidst an ever-present gauntlet of percussive sounds, somewhere between dripping, ticking and rattles. Adler-McKean achieves the feat of turning in a bravura performance even as his presence dissolves into the sound. It’s an astonishing work, adding another layer to any understanding of Iddon’s music. Did you know it won a Novello?

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Martin Iddon, Raven Chacon
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Cosimo Fiaschi / Nicolò Francesco Faraglia: Variazioni [Superpang]. Here’s a funny one: a cycle of improvised duets for soprano sax (Fiaschi) and electric guitar (Faraglia), but it’s all structured by a serialist tone-row. The two musicians had worked together in this way for several years before making this recording, so have figured out a mutual language on “post-Webernian intervallic structures”. Not sure if that means it’s tighter or looser than Webern (it’s been eighty years), but it does sound different from any other improv set: besides the harmonic language, there’s a calm and steady approach to playing which prioritises those intervallic structures ahead of timbral diversity, to a certain extent. Twenty variations flit by in thirty-five minutes for a performance which resembles a modernist Konzertstück. You could also listen to each Variation as a self-contained vignette, but then they lose their affective punch and sound more geared towards inviting a post-facto musicological analysis. Other funny thing: it’s on Superpang.

Cosimo Fiaschi: Wunderkammer [Granny]. Released one day earlier, Wunderkammer has Fiaschi attributed sole compositional credit: he assembled a septet of musicians to record several takes of his piece in one day. Although Fiaschi had worked with each of the musicians before, they had never worked together as a group. Similar in length to Variazioni, this work stretches out for long tones and static phrases, with the instruments (flute, saxophone, accordion, cello, double bass, percussion) embellished with preparations and “objects”. Not everyone plays at once, so that every slow-rolling moment expands the range of timbres and textures, with great variety of register building up a surprisingly deep listening experience without ever demanding your attention. Fiaschi’s composition evidently allows the musicians a certain degree of liberty, so it’s to their credit that they know how to make things colourful without losing focus and when to keep schtum, and to his credit that he appreciates the balance between “full” and “empty” sounds. This was apparently a deciding factor in favouring this take, but also a chance intervention by the weather makes the ending particularly beautiful.

Maya Bennardo, Etienne Nillesen & Kristofer Svensson: For Violin, Snare & Kacapi [Kuyin]. Bennardo, Nillesen and Svensson’s fifty-minute Improvisation on Āsthita, January 2, 2024 makes for a nice companion piece to Wunderkammer, and for a study in how two works so similar in surface appearance and performance approach can be so different. The trio respectively play violin, snare drum and kacapi (I looked it up, it’s a Javanese zither); Āsthita is a Sanskrit term for a exotically-formulated just intonation mode devised by Svensson, so the music-making is free of any cod anthropology. More strangeness: the drum is played for its pitches, and forms the basis for the quasi-slendro tuning that underlies the piece. The snares aren’t heard, and the most percussive sounds come from Nillesen rubbing on the drumhead and Bennardo brushing her bow across the strings. The three of them tap into their inner immobility and play not so much upon the mode, but from within it. The piece slowly evolves through experience, each musician feeling their way through sound and silence, relying on their heightened senses for the right time to move on. In doing so, they establish a clear image of calmness, even though that image never settles into a single, fixed appearance.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Cosimo Fiaschi, Etienne Nillesen, Kristofer Svensson, Maya Bennardo, Nicolò Francesco Faraglia
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Sarah Hennies: SOVT [elsewhere]. It’s a Sarah Hennies piece so I’m going to listen to it anyway without reading anything in advance to tip me off about what I’m in for this time. Is this one going to be stringent, or more atmospheric? SOVT is for solo piano, nearly an hour long. The piano is muted, strings muffled by preparations, and plays in a single voice throughout. The pianist, in this case Richard Valitutto, is assigned a regime of exercises, repeated drills in morsels of dexterity. So yeah, with all the diligence and rigour applied by Valitutto in this performance I guess this piece is stringent. I would say bracing, but it’s more complex than that. The repetitions gain force through Valitutto’s application, while strangely closing off any broader suggestions for the imagination that repetitive music frequently implies. Each change in episode confounds, neither building on nor negating what has preceded them: the only progress made is in the steady accumulation of experience. Hear without preconceptions, the listener follows the pianist through a comprehensive routine of mystifying purpose to an indefinite end. At first it’s easy to find yourself identifying with the pianist as much as the composer, but then by turns he sounds less than human, more than human, pranking us with a deconstructive joke, breaking into a sudden burst of lyricism, faltering, exhausted, capricious and systematic. At times you wonder if the piano is in fact automated or looped, until you’re grounded again by the consistent thudding of felt hammers on damped strings. By the end you’re none the wiser but a little bit transformed – how, you can’t quite say. Better listen to it again and find out.

Derek Baron / Luke Martin: Distinct and Concealed [Notice Recordings]. I’ve learned to expect aesthetic challenges and confrontations from Derek Baron; Luke Martin is new to me but, on this occasion at least, he plays with feedback oscillators. He keeps the feedback hum and rumble mostly stable, leaving the natural volatlity of his medium to add to the texture and aura. Both pieces are recorded live: on the deceptively titled Distinct Baron and Martin work assiduously to do as little as necessary – background sounds become part of the piece’s translucent fabric. In fact the whole piece sounds like background, with Baron playing long tones and isolated, repeated notes on a small electric keyboard, offset by Martin’s distant-sounding mixer. The aim isn’t to fill the room, but tint the space. Towards the end, it hints at becoming something else. Concealed is a rougher sounding recording, with ambient noise as a backdrop for Baron’s aimless doodling on an upright piano. Martin enters playing feedback noise and random snatches of cassette tapes, while Baron trails off. Longeurs open up as each pauses to contemplate a response to the other, when the time is right; a kind of glacial antiphony evolves between grey noise and languid piano doodles. It seems pointless, because music is pointless; these guys are just here to remind you of the fact by presenting two pieces that strip away all the surface appearances of music and leave you with the deeper substance, engaging your senses of sound, performance and the passage of time. For physical media buffs: if you get the download it sounds like a cassette anyway.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Derek Baron, Luke Martin, Sarah Hennies
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Rebecca Bruton + Jason Doell: a root or mirror, blossom, madder, cracks; together [Collection CQB]. The two pieces on this disc have been pleasantly doing my head in; they’re enigmatic just by existing. Both works were created for Quatuor Bozzini and junctQín keyboard collective, who perform them here with the understated clarity you would expect. What makes these pieces stand out from the usual repertoire for string quartet with piano six hands? Well, Rebecca Bruton’s The Faerie Ribbon is a guilelessly titled work by a composer I know only from her work as half of a goofy vocal duet with Angela Rawlings. There are small vocalisations in this piece, too, slipping out here and there amongst the knotwork of superimposed melodic elements that make up the first movement. Things then break down into a sequence of vignettes: a short, wistful and wordless chorale for unaccompanied voices, a pensive interlude for piano that dwindles away to almost nothing. Things eventually rebuild into a more coherent and stately reconstruction of the opening thematic material, but the transformation is more enigmatic than a conventional resolution: an interpretation is implied but never revealed. Jason Doell’s to carry dust & breaks through the body sounds stranger than it is when you remember his altered piano pieces in becoming in shadows ~ of being touched. Strings and piano wend their way through a slow processional of restrained polyphony that pauses from time to time to remind you that the whole piece exists provisionally, held in suspense by a quivering after-image of resonant overtones and a soft low drone. The drone steadily, but almost imperceptibly, descends, and as it does the Bozzinis adjust their intonation in accord. As though unconsciously, the harmonies between the instruments stretch apart, as though threatening to break: the immobile tuning of the piano starts to sound out of kilter, even electronically altered, while all the while staying the same. The musicians maintain perfect calmness as the atmosphere grows icy.

Saviet/Houston Duo: a clearing [Marginal Frequency]. I’ve heard violinist Sarah Saviet on two sets of guttural pieces for solo instrument, and pianist Joseph Houston play composers ranging from Lamb, C. to Simaku, T. a clearing is a set of pieces jointly composed by the musicians themselves, when duetting in 2022. As you might expect, there’s a lot of exploration of timbre and technique in here, but the five pieces presented do prioritise compositional thinking and succeed as intimate, self-contained chamber works. The recording is close, detailed and stark, and Saviet and Houston know how to leave plenty of space around them when needed. For the first half, each track focuses on detailed studies of touch and decay, with small piano sounds matching fleeting violin runs, teasing out differences in sustained chords, maintaining an austere impression overall while relishing the variety of sounds they can articulate in dialogue. For the final, long track Houston switches to e-bows on the piano strings and produces drones that merge with Saviet’s held notes, mapping out degrees of warmth and cold to be found within each harmonic complex.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Jason Doell, Joseph Houston, Rebecca Bruton, Sarah Saviet
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Yes I fell off the posting wagon again and now I’m going through the pile of stuff I’ve been meaning to write about and gosh there’s a whole lot of stuff with guitars. I’m not going to cover all of them: this is just a selection. There’s a solo improv live set from Eldritch Priest, which you would kind of expect but also not expect if you heard his Omphaloskepsis from a little while back. Dormitive Virtue [Halocline Trance] is a neat little album of electric guitar which promises to be an informative but derivative curiosity, only to turn into an informative but beguiling curiosity. You know the drill: one-off solo show in small venue, “a friend cajoled him into releasing” yada yada and the album starts out with a typically abrasive, discontinuous riff on discordant melodies from this composer. Except it’s not typical; after the opening fake-out comes a wistul, bluesey jazz rumination which sets the tone for the rest of the album. When distorted sounds reappear, they gain a reverberant sheen of moody atmospherics; the shorter improvisations are endearingly charming or endearingly playful. The pre-composed pieces focus on melody alone, retaining a gentle feel even at their most angular. His take on Wayne Shorter’s Iris makes room for small asides as elaboration, providing an insight into his own compositional ideas.

I heard Francesco Serra’s close study of empty space Guest Room a few years ago and was taken by it’s use of resonance and sympathetic vibrations. His new work Personal [i dischi di angelica] is a work of similar protracted research in a given space, but this time the focus is on solo acoustic guitar. Nothing fancy, just plucking and strumming that thing with no apparent direction or purpose. It would appear that the focus is meant to be on the sound of the guitar, but the playing style doesn’t reorient the listener’s attention to the acoustics; it just trundles along in a familiar way until it’s just hanging around in the background. The use of resonating snare drums comes later but it feels a little like a forced intervention to make things more interesting. Things actually do get a little more interesting when the guitar disappears, leaving a quiescent field recording that eventually acquires an overlay of buzzing e-bowed strings. This would work as a mysterious, shadowy counterpart to the first half of the album if the whole setup hadn’t been so protracted and innocuous.

Maybe it’s because I’ve also been listening to Varvara [self-released], a solo work by guitarist/composer Àlex Reviriego. The presence of a steel-stringed acoustic is also the central force here, but its role is much more complex. The crystalline acoustic sounds are sampled, apparently, and become the motivator for a deeply-textured web of drones and unpitched noise. The use of feedback loops and empty circuits play an important role here, creating evocative backdrops which assume greater prominence as the guitar fades away, with an inherent instability that nudges the wash of sound into darker and more disturbing moods. When the guitar reappears in part two, it has become enmeshed within the electronic noise, partly driving the drones while also acting as an armature for the increasingly alien soundscape. Despite this, the plucked strings never sound incongruous with the heavy synthesised sounds, thus making the resultant work even stranger. If that’s not enough for your to chew on, remember that this is only the second volume of Reviriego’s projected tetralogy of guitar pieces “inspired by the virgin martyrs of the early Christian church”.

Erica Dawn Lyle’s cassette for Notice Recordings also captures her working through some stuff. The two parts of Colonial Motels are extreme studies on the use of the amplifier’s tremolo knob. Once again, improvisations with single unedited takes, using looping effects to build up layers of choppy sounds which are then sculpted on the fly into quasi-melodic squalls before gusting into walls of torrential noise. The strange overall effect is the way it skips and skitters along, propelling itself through the obnoxious loudness without ever resorting to rocking out to retain each performance’s shape or momentum.

Yaron Deutsch titling his album Soul, Soul, Soul, Sweet Soul. [self-released] really doesn’t prepare you for the music here. As with Lyle and Serra, Deutsch is working out some ideas here, taking his work with other musicians as launch-points for solo excursions. Sanen Song began as a solo played over a sound installation piece by Helena Persson; Sub_Current is Deutsch’s solo part for an electric guitar concerto by Stefan Prins spun off on its own; Greetings from Astridplein takes a recording of Deutsch and Tom Pauwels playing a duet by Matthew Shlomowitz and cuts in urban field recordings. Sanen Song begins with atmospheric high drones before becoming increasingly busy with fiddly little arpeggiations and capricious pitch-shifting, while Sub_Current throws distorted power chords into a blender of pitch-bending and tone-switching, restlessly hopping between swatches of slowed-down white noise and cartoonish bendy-stretchy pedal work. Both works show invention, but their emphasis on technique suggests that they would be of more interest to other guitarists than listeners in general. Greetings from Astridplein is a nice little vignette that makes me want to hear Shlomowitz’s piece in its original form: it’s titled Hocket for Dylan & Alan.

On the other hand, Lauri Hyvärinen and Jukka Kääriäinen’s guitar duets on Pulled Apart by Horses [Bokashi] are just as relaxed and soothing as the title would have you believe. First of all, the prospect of an album of two electric guitars and nothing else should be enough to set your teeth on edge. It does, but in the most delightful way: the five tracks here are shot through with freewheeling exuberance and malicious glee. Hyvärinen and Kääriäinen maintain a knife-edge balance of calculated spontaneity, coming up with a dizzying array of sounds that never stick around too long as they careen from one idea to another without sticking in one place too long. It’s bracing but it’s more fun than most of these types of excursions.

There’s been much deserved attention for Jules Reidy’s latest album Ghost/Spirit, which makes last year’s Instants & Their Echoes [Hospital Hill] seem slept on by comparison. It’s the most surprising of the lot here, not least because of the relative absence of Reidy’s trademark guitar. A pair of self-similar works, commissioned by the brass trio Zinc & Copper (Hilary Jeffery, trumpet and trombone; Elena Kakaliagou, French horn; Robin Hayward, tuba), Instants & Their Echoes is a real ear-opener, one that reveals a new perspective on Reidy as a composer. The brass plays softly, in just intonation, building up overlapping harmonies into gently separated moments, set within a web of slowly cascading electronic tones. Reidy’s guitar can also be heard on occasion, deep in the mix to add to the glistening electronic timbres. Sounds have been extended and lowered in pitch to create reflections and imitations, that disorient while also implying a loose canonic structure that holds the piece together. It’s very spacious, in a floaty, dreamy way, as brass and gutar will periodically drop away and let the electronics sustain the mood in self-contemplation. There’s a confidence in the way the music starts and ends, twice, tinting the air and the time it takes with its sound and then withdraws without the need for justification, leaving a deep aural after-image in the mind.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Àlex Reviriego, Eldritch Priest, Erica Dawn Lyle, Francesco Serra, Jukka Kääriäinen, Jules Reidy, Lauri Hyvärinen, Yaron Deutsch
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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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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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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.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Adrián Demoč, Eden Lonsdale, Linda Catlin Smith
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(Continued from Part 1)

There was more to the London Contemporary Music Festival than I previously let on, such as Melinda Maxwell playing an improvisation on an aulos and Kurdish songs sung by Dengbêj Ali Tekbaş with accompaniment on duduk by Murat Savaş, which open up a different perspective on the events overall. As supposed totem for this year’s festival, the Trickster gradually emerged over the four nights as a figure offering more substance than simple misdirection. The third night featured the LCMF Orchestra, which couldn’t help but appear more substantial. They began the evening with Yves Klein’s Monotone-Silence Symphony, a notorious work typically more contemplated than heard. In a reversal of much of the first two nights’s performances, something often mistakenly considered as a conceptual work was revealed as a piece that’s at least as impressive as a musical experience as it is as an idea. Inside Hackney Church, the orchestra made the air come alive with both the presence of sound and its absence, first playing a D Major chord for twenty minutes before resolving into a resonant silence of equal duration. The boldness of its structure creates a tension that plays upon our expectations and anticipations, while also signalling a number of musical attributes that would gain currency in the half-century or so following its composition: drones, diatonicism, steady dynamics, silence. It held the punters, partly thanks to conductor Jack Sheen’s valiant effort to stand still with his arms extended for forty minutes.

Not much later, Sheen was also required to throw shapes and then add spoken narration to the premiere of Maggie Nicols’ work for voices and orchestra Our Wits About Us, one of the cross-disciplinary events LCMF likes to try out. As on most other occasions, it was a fun and curious experience but ultimately ephemeral in a way that makes it better considered as a good old-fashioned Happening than as a composition. Looking back over the programmes for the last two nights I’m shocked to find that I’m struggling to remember a bunch of the pieces which I heard barely a week ago. This wasn’t a problem for the first two nights; possibly it’s true after all that it’s better for art to irritate than amuse.

That being the case, I’m going to jump ahead to the end of the Festival (not quite: there’s another event in January) when the Christmas lights went up on the balcony railings and Charlemagne Palestine was let loose on the Hackney Church organ to play SCHLINGENNN TRICKSTERRR BLÄNGENNN!!!!!!!! Palestine had played at the first LCMF and so ending this year’s festival seemed to close a circle; he addressed the crowd before playing, repeating a small ritual with two brandy glasses and saying he hoped to make our ears tingle. In a way, it was a fitting counterpart to the Klein symphony that opened the previous night: he filled the space with long chords that he would periodically adjust on the keys or the stops for varying harmonic density and brilliance, creating moments of contrast by throwing himself foward onto the manuals to produce dense clusters, then relaxing and letting harmony return. He might even be mellowing in old age, as towards the end he began working in some brief cadential motives in the bass, with some upper movement that could have been prodded into melody.

Besides James Clarke’s string quartet mentioned last time, the Sunday concert also featured Apartment House performing the premiere of Laura Steenberge’s I Only Have Eye For You. It’s a peculiar but mesmerising work, taking her signature blend of acoustic sound and dissasociated theatrical activity but on this occasion producing something that seemed to unfold as a single, integrated action, curiously purposeful even as it seemed to defy interpretation, in spite of the programme note alluding to Greek mythology. A string trio present but never quite complete, each member rotating between instruments while also attending to a funnel filled with sand cascading into a plastic pail, exchanging pails to ensure the funnel remained filled. The strings provided fragile continuity to the near-inaudible but constant backdrop; the percussion throughout the piece acted as both stabiliser and disruption at once, with knotted fabrics and a cymbal used in various ways to provide small, almost inadvertent sounds later on as the piece continued to evolve.

Focusing on the music-music, on Saturday night Lisa Streich’s KIND for prepared acoustic guitar, play by Jacob Kellermann, seemed to almost get lost in all the bustle: it makes itself seem smaller and thinner than it is. Streich requires metal strips and a small wire grill to be attached to the strings and soundboard, rendering much of the piece’s Spanish-influenced classical gestures to sound as tiny, high-pitched chimes, while other notes are filtered through to sound at normal register, but blurred and distant. The LCMF Orchestra’s premiere of Sofia Jernberg’s The murals in Quinta del Sordo was game in its evocation of rough textures in a disjointed series of tableaux, but the piece suffered from a recurring use of awkward stage business which added a comedic element that detracted from the music. Jernberg also suffered from her piece inadvertently following both Our Wits About Us and Laurence Crane’s Composition for Orchestra no. 5, with which it happened to share several distinctive elements. It could come across better given different staging in another context.

Which brings us to Crane’s Composition for Orchestra no. 5 ‘In Hackney’: the piece is a stunner. It begins in a strikingly uncharacteristic way, with the orchestra members all playing small, untuned, hand-held percussive objects. You think it’s a nice little opening gesture, but it keeps going. The gentle noise rises and falls in calm antiphony, amid repeated fake-outs that the real music is about to begin. It’s entirely unlike anything I’ve heard from Crane before, to the point you wonder if the piece and the title are some big Fluxus-inspired feint, in keeping with the Festival’s theme. Just as you’ve accepted the piece as a well-crafted essay in orchestrated white noise, a big Haydn-type cadence swells up. There’s no follow-through and the gentle noise continues. You’re now convinced the piece is a witty postmodern spoof; soon after you begin to realise you were wrong again. It’s just occurred to me that Crane’s method here resembles that of Lutosławski: you’re getting into the music when he suddenly reveals that he’s just been laying out his basic materials, and then he really goes to town. ‘In Hackney’ is utterly different yet entirely in keeping with Crane’s aesthetic, while pushing that line of clear musical thinking into new territory with more complex cognitive ramifications for the listener.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Charlemagne Palestine, Laura Steenberge, Laurence Crane, Lisa Streich, Maggie Nicols, Sofia Jernberg, Yves Klein
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“Where’s the music?” is just the sort of thing you should be saying at a contemporary music festival. LCMF was back for 2024 with a programme promising plenty of tricksters and musical shitposting, a prospect which threatened enforced jollity and pre-baked disappointment. At first, it delivered on that promise very nicely with acts heavy on the shenanigans; these are always awkward in an art context, uprooted from the more fertile soil of low culture. A large part of the first evening was given over to Adam de la Cour’s deliberately ham-fisted panto pastiche Groyne ‘n’ Goosed, with an all-star cast. De la Cour is one of a group of British composers who humourously interrogate and deconstruct the cultural mores of music-making in a clever way that has remarkably little pay-off for anyone who chooses to listen to it rather than contemplate it as an intellectual exercise. The mode is comedic, but draws its inspiration from Monty Python at their most obtuse, and leaned heavily on the very limited schtick of Only Pretending To Be Crap. Groyne ‘n’ Goosed‘s muddled premise and extended antics wore thin very quickly; as with Laurie Tompkins’ The Feelmouth Greeny earlier that night, the attempt to play it off as ‘modernist shitposting’ was torpedoed by the amount of visible exertion put into wasting our time and a persistent eagerness to please, so that both works lost confidence in themselves.

A complete contrast in approach, Russell Haswell’s opera the truth is as elusive as ever took an apparently earnest approach to produce something trivial: diverse narrations and narrators suggesting some implied narrative out of a random-association text, strung together with chunks of Haswell’s typical live electronic noise. Musarc was the chorus for this piece, and were required to dress in bin bags and mill about amongst the audience for a bit of minimum-viable-product drama, matching how the work’s ambitions didn’t live up to its aspirations. The night ended with aya reminding us that she’s a girl two or three times while talking about herself more than playing music. I assume I’ll want to know who she is one day but the opportunity to find out why will have to wait, apparently.

These were all world premieres, commisioned by the Festival. Everything was a premiere, if only for the UK, which was admirable. Also on that first night was a new viola duet by Viola Torros, with Catherine Lamb and Johnny Chang sticking out like a sore thumb with their quiet, focused and attentive playing, leading each other through a piece that elusively slipped back and forth between slow contrapunctal melodies and passages of near harmonic stasis, kept on edge by their microtonal intonation. A similar square-peg-in-round-hole effect was created on the second night by Explore Ensemble giving the UK premiere of James Clarke’s 2016-E, eight years after the British composer wrote it. Clarke’s presence on the bill was justified by the power his music has to frighten off most concert programmers in his native country: complex, virtuosic methods to produce sounds that can verge on brutalism. 2016-E is a particularly astrigent piece, juxtaposing violent but controlled bursts of action against a flat frieze of extended, dirty chords. On Friday, Apartment House also played Clarke’s String Quartet No. 7, composed just last year before getting its first airing here. It’s a concise single movement that boils down its expressivity to the most rudimentary gestures, each instrument playing solo descending lines in turn against compressed, flattened chords, yet still articulating turns of texture and mood as though it were a work from the Romantic era, shorn of all extraneous ornamentation to reveal the defiantly melancholic core.

Explore also premiered Laila Arafah’s Sibelius Studies 2: [keeping expectations to the absolute minimum so the disappointment will reciprocate], a title in keeping with LCMF’s premise but whose music in fact delivered much more. Arafah has used the music notation programme Sibelius and its automated playback system to make doodles, filling pages with rapid clusters of notes at impossibly high or low extremes, which the computer’s synth renders as oddly textured buzzing sounds. These scores were projected on screens while Explore added scraps of sound for added colour and eccentric rhythm, with unusual percussive effects adding to the strangeness. Each piece is very short, fleeting like a Webern bagatelle with electronic interference, while really being entirely dependent on computer scribble. Amongst this was more antics and shenanigans, the low point being hypnogirl 24 in which Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster took a pointless story and told it badly. (“It is difficult for me to explain,” she said. We had noticed.) There were some excerpts from Jon Rafman’s COUNTERFEIT POAST videos, made out of cultural trash and debris, much like punk aesthetics from the 80s and 90s but with the ideology inverted: immersing oneself in garbage in search of the uncanny and attempting to make it relatable. An improvised duet by Maggie Nicols and Steve Beresford showed the influence that the 60s/70s school of British free improv still has on contemporary musicians: their stiff, formal japery appeared to capture the spirit of denuded panto at the source.

Around this time it had occurred to me that the LCMF curators Igor Toronyi-Lalic and Jack Sheen might have put together an enormous four-night prank to confront us with the great con we tell ourselves that the reason we all come to these sorts of things is to enjoy music. It’s true that I was feeling a bit jaded by that stage, but I unexpectedly cheered up with the closing set from ∈Y∋ + C.O.L.O. Usually LCMF nights end with a loud set of demotic dance music but Tetsuo Yamatsuka and Yasumichi Miura infused their stage bit with so much harsh-edged, rigourous noise (accompanied by suitably eye-splitting rectilinear projections in stark black and white) that even when the dance beats kicked in they seemed to be an extension of the noise. Better still, they didn’t end it there but just kept moving on to one thing after another until you genuinely wondered where you were all going to end up – something that rarely happens with electronic gigs.

(Part 2 follows tomorrow)

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: ∈Y∋, Adam de la Cour, aya, C.O.L.O., Catherine Lamb, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, James Clarke, Johnny Chang, Jon Rafman, Laila Arafah, Laurie Tompkins, Maggie Nicols, Russell Haswell, Steve Beresford, Viola Torros
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Just when I thought I was in, they pull me back out. I’m sorry there’s been no activity here lately, but new music took a back seat during an enforced upheaval of living arrangements, then with hassles connecting to the internet and, just as I was settling down at my desk with the hi-fi set up nicely in the new digs… poof! The hard drive disappeared. Not literally; I can see it right now, sitting there on my desk, completely inert. My computer, however, says it doesn’t exist and in a philosophical way it’s correct because only the hard drive’s corpse remains while everything that made it what it was has departed: the thing’s dead as a doornail.

Of course I usually keep backups but of course that also took the crowded back seat over the past few months and of course I was just about to make a new backup when… poof. I had a bunch of cool things to write about but it feels a bit dismissive to write reviews of them based on my hazy memories at this time. In the meantime, people have been sending me interesting-looking stuff which I haven’t got around to yet.

The recovery plan is as follows: Step 1, go on holiday. Step 2, go back through my emails and see what I can still recover for review, while also playing catch-up on what people have been trying to tell me while I was out to lunch – this may start while I’m still on holiday as I do happen to enjoy it after all. Step 3, actually write and publish some reviews.

Thanks to all the artists who have been sending me music: I will be following up on as many of these as I can. It may take a while, as it always has (in the past I’ve left some things for up to two years before I took notice of them). Regular updates will resume as I start to get amongst it. My big lesson from all of this (besides the need to buy more hard drives) is that your music is important to me and I hope it’s not just me who benefits when I publicly engage with and respond to it.

Filed under: Music, Reviews, Self-promotion, Stupidity by Ben.H

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I’ve been catching up on some recent releases by Catherine Lamb, who continues to beguile and mystify in turn. Curva Triangulus [Another Timbre] is the sole work on the latest album, a thirty-five minute octet played most gracefully by Ensemble Proton. This is an outstanding work from Lamb, imbued with a warmth and respiration that her music typically doesn’t like to display on the surface despite its construction being worked out with equal thoroughness. It is, as always, composed for a form of just intonation, combining harmonics and overtones of varying complexity to create a spectral sound; but in this instance any semblance of an unfolding process is obscured by recurring cadences, wandering melodic lines and alternation of contrasting instrumental groups, textures and registers. Without drawing attention to itself, it charms with its odd eclecticism, mixing discrete tuning principles into its modal phrases, the modest ensemble harboring exotic instruments both old (triple harp, clarinet d’amore, a reconstructed microtonal arciorgano) and new (contraforte, lupophone). Whether despite this or because of it, the music nonetheless gives an overall impression resembling 18th Century hymn tunes, steady and serene with a little warping at the seams that only reminds you of the sureness of its purpose.

Three works for voices are heard on parallaxis forma [Another Timbre]. Exaudi and the Explore Ensemble give a luminous rendition of color residua, as I heard them play it live last year. The remaining two pieces feature bravura performances by Lotte Betts-Dean: pulse/shade was written for four like voices but here Betts-Dean overdubs herself to form a strangely precise chorus, even as the vocalise is softened by the lack of consonants. The hocketing effect starts to feel a little forced after a while, even as you’re impressed by the halo of resonant tones that suffuse each stuttering phrase, and it seems a smaller work than its length suggests. Perhaps even more impressive and uncanny is Betts-Dean heard solo in parallaxis forma, for voice and ensemble. Explore Ensemble are the musicians again, producing an aura that surrounds and backgrounds Betts-Dean as her voice ascends, sometimes climbing, at others gliding, at times soaring into something beyond normal. Later, the voice has to drop below the singer’s normal range, hinting at the physical demands this music can make while we’re considering the depth of its abstractions. The sound is beautifully captured, the resonance of St Nicholas’ Church at Thames Ditton providing an almost unnatural sheen as it complements the players.

andPlay is a violin and viola duo, the two musicians being Maya Bennardo and Hannah Levinson. They play natural sounds in a natural way, which can be harder than it seems; it can get a little easier when it’s just the two of you listening to each other and the tuning of your strings, getting into the naturally occurring order of harmonics without any external push back towards the conformity of equal temperament. The two works on Translucent Harmonies [Another Timbre] both date from a concert given by the duo in 2018. Lamb’s Prisma Interius VIII makes another appearance here, having been recorded at least once before in an expanded version for recorder and strings with electronic spectral resonance. As a string duet, minus electronics, this “melodic” version reduces harmonic saturation to a bare minimum, with Bennardo and Levinson plotting out a path through just intonation pitches that bleed into each other by association as much as through superimposition. It returns strongly to some elements of Lamb’s music brought out by Johnny Chang’s solo violin plus synthesiser interpretation of Prisma Interius VII, the folkish traces and simplicity of line (not minimal, there’s a difference) stripped of ethereality and artifice, grounded in guttural strings. Kristofer Svensson’s Vid stenmuren blir tanken blomma was composed for andPlay as a companion piece to their concert presentation of Prisma Interius VIII: it’s a longer work that recalls Duk med broderi och bordets kant his solo violin piece also recorded by Bennardo. Also in just intonation, the piece meanders with a roughness and casualness that makes the Lamb piece appear stuffy. Here, the two instruments shadow each other warily, with melody or counterpoint to be more inferred than directly heard from the brief fragments held together by speculative silences. It differs from the solo piece in forsaking the wistfulness and playful approach for a more contemplative traversal of the trail, it’s also about twice as long, so that over the forty minutes Bennardo and Levinson begin to piece together a kind of intuitive continuity that’s more felt than heard.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Catherine Lamb, Kristofer Svensson
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What are the sounds of nature? You think that’s an easy one but then you remember you’ve spent your whole life trying to see what’s in front of your eyes before forgetting to look and replacing what you see with what you’ve learned should be there. It’s harder still for us urbanised folk for whom all contact with nature is mediated in one way or another, before or after the fact. The term “nature” immediately calls up images of pastorals or writhing, quasi-organic forms as seen on the front cover of composer Amy Brandon’s album Lysis (New Focus Recordings). There are eight pieces collected here, mostly short, written between 2018 and 2023, which employ a variety of esoteric techniques to produce music that sounds more excavated than constructed. The album shocks with the opening flute solo microchimerisms, a fleeting vignette in which flautist Sara Constant implausibly hocks up deep aqueous rumbles that evoke the discovery of organisms in a soil sample. The Chartreuse String Trio make threads sound larger than it is, the three instruments drawing upon a wide range of timbres and registers in a piece which exemplifies Brandon’s strange but sophisticated approach to composition. She makes use of microtonality, geometry and rhythmic modulation purely as a means to an end, forgoing any impulse to demonstrate these principles to the listener to focus on producing music that resembles natural phenomena in their manner of operation. Thus threads weaves a counterpoint of irregular, unpitched sounds and complex noises finely differentiated by density and texture, while in the title piece Quatuor Bozzini begin with faint, voiceless string sounds that transform into thick harmonies made of tunings that sound arrived at in the process, rather than decided in advance. Some works definitely use electronics (Intermountainous pits ominous whooshes against Julian Bertino’s retuned 10-string guitar) while others sound like they do, such as the Bozzini’s pairing with Paramirabo and returned keyboards on Tsiyr. Dynamics and intonation are used to ferocious effect, making the music advance and retreat, snapping in and out of focus as though under a zoom lens. The odd one out in this set is the longer and larger Simulacra for cello and orchestra, with soloist Jeffrey Zeigler and Symphony Nova Scotia conducted by Karl Hirzer. The larger forces allow for more dramatic gestures and overt lyricism, but these outbursts are made more effective by sudden, striking gestures whose abruptness and inventiveness make any poignancy feel earned. Brandon’s talent for cutting such moments short also shows her awareness of nature’s indifference in practice.

The Normal Sounds (Moon Glyph) on Lia Kohl’s album aren’t exactly natural but they are real. Each of the seven pop-sized tracks is built out of pairings of field recordings, overlaid with Kohl’s cello and synthesizer ambience. (Ka Baird and Patrick Shiroishi contribute some flute and sax, too.) It has a cool quality throughout, not quite detached, even as it bases each track out of sounds considered at least inadvertent or else straight-up intrusive (alarms, electrical hums); then again, snow sounds are also used, so we can’t really call this a pointed interrogation of modern life. Kohl’s music plays both with and against the found sounds as it best suits her, repurposing for her own needs, leaving the listener to do whatever intellectual work they care to apply in discerning her motives. At times the premise adds more texture than grit, such as occasional distant car horns behind the sax solo (uh huh). Best of all is that the sleeve notes talk about other stuff but never tip you off to the running gag on which the album really is based: Kohl’s choices of keyboard samples and patches are now a greater part of our sonic landscape than the field recordings themselves.

Anthony Vine’s Sound Spring (Kuyin) is a film soundtrack album, but not one that would interest Sony Classical. There is a daxophone, played by Daniel Fishkin, but I don’t think Sound Spring is a horror flick, where this instrument usually seems to find its home. Vine on electric guitar and Fishkin are joined by Maya Bennardo on violin, Will Lang on trombone and Ryan Packard percussion to play along with with field recordings of natural sounds from within, and around the making of, the movie. In its own way, it becomes a reflective documentary, shifting the focus from action on-screen to location and process. As such, the nine tracks do blend into each other in an ambient haze where specific details remain indistinct. Sounds of running water predominate, with faint snippets of conversation occasionally in the background – I feel like this has become something of a trope for audio verité. It is all superbly balanced, with the instruments becoming part of the landscape, playing as much within the natural sounds as over the top of them. I think they should take it as praise that you forget there’s, say, violin and trombone in there.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Amy Brandon, Anthony Vine, Lia Kohl
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