Strings (2), mostly bowed
As well as the two Sarah Saviet albums, I’ve been listening to several more albums of solo violin music. Well, not exactly violin: Sarah-Jane Summers’ Echo Stane is performed entirely…
Apartment House play Morton Feldman’s Violin And String Quartet
Apartment House and Another Timbre have supplied another missing link in the late canon of Morton Feldman: Violin And String Quartet is a two-hour work from 1985 that, as far…
Tags: Morton Feldman
Strings (1), mostly plucked
Last month I got to hear Julia Reidy play live for the first time in a while (for me, not her). Her way of playing solo guitar with electronics has…
Tags: Alan Courtis, David Grubbs, Eldritch Priest, Hafdís Bjarnadóttir, Juhani Grönroos, Julia Reidy, Kalle Kalima, Pauli Lyytinen, Sergio Castrillón
Summer Shorts (2)
Anouck Genthon & Mathias Forge: Notice (Insub). Since my last post, I’ve been wondering about the use of external factors as a source of inspiration for music; even more so…
Tags: Anouck Genthon, Clinton Green, d'incise, Ian Andrews, Lise Morrison, Mathias Forge, Ross Manning, Ryoko Akama, Tarab
Summer Shorts (1)
John Eagle: erosion and growth (Sawyer Editions). A long, sombre work for piano and percussion that falls into unmarked sections, each containing a specific texture. At first it’s just Eagle…
Tags: Andrey Guryanov, Hunter Brown, John Eagle, Rohner Segnitz, Scott Solter
Sarah Saviet, solo violin: Spun and Every Strand of Thread and Rope
I was treated to a live performance by violinist Sarah Saviet at the All That Dust launch, playing Soosan Lolavar’s solo suite Every Strand of Thread and Rope. It’s a…
Tags: Arne Gieshoff, Evan Johnson, Lawrence Dunn, Lisa Streich, Liza Lim, Soosan Lolavar
Nomi Epstein: cubes
What little I’ve heard of Nomi Epstein’s music has been made from apparently simple structures that define certain parameters of the sounds to be used at any given time, but…
Tags: Nomi Epstein
Low Strings: Jack Sheen, Bryan Eubanks
The sleeve notes for Jack Sheen’s Solo for Cello recommend you to listen with the speakers “placed as far away as possible”, as if the music itself wasn’t alienated enough.…
Tags: Bryan Eubanks, Jack Sheen
Music We’d Like to Hear, 2023 (part 3 (there’s no part 2))
Stupidly, I missed the Friday night concert of Music We’d Like to Hear dedicated to pieces by Tim Parkinson, but I did get to the Saturday’s Amber Priestley gig. Pretty…
Tags: Amber Priestley
The Spectre of Taste: Lebel, Lind, Demoč
You don’t have to be original to be good, but the experimental allows a certain leeway while anything that tends to the conventional in substance runs the risk of setting…
Tags: Adrián Demoč, Emilie Cecilia LeBel, Rósa Lind
Funny pianos and droney organs: Jason Doell and Mia Windsor
The problem with droney organ music is that it’s both easy to do and difficult to do well. The organ can be a rich and vital source of timbral variety,…
Tags: Jason Doell, Mia Windsor
Music We’d Like to Hear, 2023 (part 1)
Fresh from hearing Juliet Fraser and Mark Knoop together on record in Laurence Crane’s Natural World, on Friday I heard them again, live this time, at the first Music We’d…
Tags: Bea Redweik, Erik Satie, Galina Ustvolskaya, Walter Zimmermann
Explore and EXAUDI premiere Lamb and Lang
The Spitalfields Music Festival doubles as a way of visiting some of the historic churches of London, and so last I evening I sat in a pew beside the reposing…
Tags: Catherine Lamb, Klaus Lang, Lara Agar
Pauline Oliveros and Chamber Music
Pauline Oliveros is one of those artists whose genius is sufficiently radical for her vast legacy to be generally acknowledged but rarely examined. A cursory review of her career highlights…
Tags: IONE, Pauline Oliveros
The Unexpected: Robert Piotrowicz, Jérôme Noetinger and Anthony Pateras
Had not one but two very pleasant surprises from Penultimate Press; well, more than two really. I’m sure I’ve never heard of Robert Piotrowicz before: he’s a Polish composer and…
Tags: Anthony Pateras, Jérôme Noetinger, Robert Piotrowicz
Juliet Fraser Sings Lucier, Armstrong, Crane
All That Dust has released its fifth batch of recordings, three of them as downloads in binaural audio. I went to the launch concert on Wednesday to hear live performances…
Tags: Alvin Lucier, Juliet Fraser, Laurence Crane, Newton Armstrong
Learning Alphabets with Dominic Coles
Dominic Coles has been working on music that skirts along the edges of speech for some time, but on Alphabets he also skirts along the edges of music. As with…
Tags: Dominic Coles
Two Types of Jürg Frey
More noise, but distant: Andrea Borghi, Evan Lindorff-Ellery
People keep finding sounds to play with. Andrea Borghi has made the eight pieces on his Palsecam EP by working with VHS tape recorders and their tapes. It reads like…
Tags: Andrea Borghi, Evan Lindorff-Ellery
Semi-tonal: Petr Bakla, Bekah Simms
The curiously named Late Night Show collects three piano-oriented pieces by Czech composer Petr Bakla. I’ve heard one piece by him before, the orchestral There is an island above the…
Tags: Bekah Simms, Petr Bakla
Noise versus Noise
I thought something had gone wrong. I’ve been taking a little noise holiday, away from the likes of Jürg Frey for a bit, and figured it was time to get…
Tags: Guilhem Lacroux, Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø, Jacques Puech, Michael Flora, Michelle Lou, Other Plastics, Stefan Maier, Yann Gourdon
Catherine Lamb: divisio spiralis
After blowing off going to gigs all year I actually made it all the way to Wigmore Hall to hear the JACK Quartet play Catherine Lamb’s divisio spiralis, composed for…
Tags: Catherine Lamb
Quick takes, mostly warm
Seán Clancy: Ireland England. It’s been ages since I’ve listened to any 70s German synth-rock, so listening to this reminded me of hearing analogue synth space-grooves for the first time.…
Tags: Ed Williams, Fabrizio Modonese Palumbo, Henning Christiansen, Seán Clancy
3 by 3, 1 by 3, 1 by 2.
There are some new Jürg Frey albums about on Elsewhere and Another Timbre but I’ll get to them later. Circles, Reeds, and Memories (Elsewhere) documents a concert in Limburg late…
Tags: Biliana Voutchkova, Emmanuel Holterbach, Germaine Sijstermans, Giovanni Di Domenico, Koen Nutters, Reinier Van Houdt, Sarah Davachi, Silvia Tarozzi
Lizzy Welsh: The Target Has Disappeared
The latest release on Discreet Editions comes from Australia. Don’t be fooled by the cover: The Target Has Disappeared features contemporary composers at the more provocative end of the spectrum,…
Tags: Alexander Garsden, Lizzy Welsh, Natasha Anderson, Samuel Smith
Three threes always
I don’t want to be nasty. Almost all the music I discuss here raises ideas that interest me and I want to engage with, even if I dislike it. I’ll…
Tags: Àlex Reviriego, Bruno Duplant, Erik Blennow Calälv, Finn Loxbo, Garazi Navas, Lisa Ullén, Miguel A. García, Ryan Packard, Seth Nehil, Vasco Trilla
Christopher Butterfield: Souvenir
Christopher Butterfield catches you off-guard and continues to do so for the duration of this album. Souvenir (Redshift Music) collects four of his ensemble pieces, adroitly played by the Aventa…
Tags: Christopher Butterfield
More Timbres: Frank Denyer, Evan Johnson, Bryn Harrison
Another Timbre continues to advance the noble cause of Frank Denyer: the latest is a double, making his complete Melodies cycle from the mid 1970s available to the public for…
Tags: Bryn Harrison, Evan Johnson, Frank Denyer
Short Cuts: Rawlinson, Friedl, Steiger
Pulsar Retcon by Jules Rawlinson (Superpang): nine quick takes of electronic noise that cram a lot into sub-twenty minutes. It all bustles about constantly, alternately scratching, squelching and beeping in…
Tags: Billy Steiger, Jules Rawlinson, Reinhold Friedl
Strange sounds: Martin Iddon, Eden Lonsdale
A couple of albums here that excel at being distant and eerie, but with substance far deeper than just setting a mood. Another Timbre has released a couple of albums…
Tags: Eden Lonsdale, Martin Iddon
Movement and stillness: Radigue, Pateras
Nearly twelve years ago I was in the audience for Rhodri Davies giving the first performance of Éliane Radigue’s Occam I for prepared harp, little suspecting the proliferation of acoustic…
Tags: Anthony Pateras, Éliane Radigue
Returning again: Eventless Plot, Magnus Granberg
I hear lots of nice stuff and I appreciate it. I thought you were supposed to get less tolerant as time went by, but attempting to listen critically just makes…
Tags: Eventless Plot, Magnus Granberg
Reinier Van Houdt: drift nowhere past / the adventure of sleep
It took a long time to come around to this one. Have we all had enough of Lockdown Art yet? I think I wanted to move on, and this thing…
Tags: Reinier Van Houdt
Routines: Rasten & Dupleix, Bondi & d’incise, Astasie-abasie
There are some pieces that act like a microcosm of dealing with new music – composing it, playing it, listening to it – in the whole: observed from a distance,…
Tags: Astasie-abasie, Cyril Bondi, d'incise, Fredrik Rasten, Léo Dupleix
Electric guitars etc.: Gavin Bryars with Sergio Sorrentino, Pauline Oliveros with Reynols (also Monique Buzzarté)
The listening pile grew big while working on my own stuff, so I almost overlooked these three little nuggets of Gavin Bryars’ work for electric guitar. It’s not a complete…
Tags: Gavin Bryars, Pauline Oliveros, reynols
Keyboards without Ego: Golub, Svensson, Tolimieri
“Who cares if you listen?” becomes something of a Zen koan when listening to these three collections of keyboard pieces: all at once they are personal in their conception and…
Tags: Kristofer Svensson, Phillip Golub, Quentin Tolimieri
Out of time: Ad Hoc, Passepartout Duo
All these little cracks and gaps in the record, with people here and there steadily working to fill them in one at a time. Ad Hoc were a small group…
Tags: Ad Hoc, Passepartout Duo
Freitag aus Licht in Paris
Stockhausen’s grand Licht cycle of cosmic mediaeval mystery plays get hardest to follow when he’s trying to explain what it all means. At their best, the theosophical tableaux he presents…
Tags: Karlheinz Stockhausen
Lost in music: Greenwald, Behzadi
How much of a piece of music do we hear as itself, compared to what we hear in it as a reflection of our selves? Perhaps its greatness may lie…
Tags: Andrew Greenwald, Ashkan Behzadi
Lost in music: Gunnarsson, Frey redux
I’ve wrestled with Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson’s music before, trying to pin down exactly where it’s coming from (hint: Iceland). This may be the wrong approach, as his music, even as…
Tags: Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson, Jürg Frey
Lost in music: duets
I’ve been listening to a lot of music without having time to write about it, so now I’ve got them all muddled together in my head and I’m trying to…
Tags: Amanda Irarrázabal, Bára Gísladóttir, Camila Nebbia, Carlos Dominguez, Kyle Motl, Nat Baldwin, Skúli Sverrisson, Tomomi Kubo
Apartment House get obscure, live and on record
There’s too much stuff about Apartment House here already but they keep playing gigs near my house and making records of stuff I really want to hear. Beginning of this…
Tags: Allison Cameron, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen
Organ x 2: Pateras, Arkbro
Krakow’s Sacrum Profanum festival ended this year with two performances on the organ at the Philharmonic Hall; new compositions by Anthony Pateras and Ellen Arkbro, each with the composer at…
Tags: Anthony Pateras, Ellen Arkbro
Maya Bennardo: four strings
Violinist Maya Bennardo has just released an album of two pieces for solo instrument, titled four strings. This is all new to me, except that I have heard other works…
Tags: Eva-Maria Houben, Kristofer Svensson
Greg Davis: New Primes
There’s something pleasing and aspirational in the idea of making music out of nothing but pure sine waves; even moreso when employing principles of the mathematics of tuning as purely…
Tags: Greg Davis
Block Rockin’ Summer Slam, Part 2
Getting back to Germaine Sijstermans’ Betula: each of the compositions is written for a small minimum of pitched instruments, mostly without getting too fussy about type or number. Only one…
Tags: Germaine Sijstermans, Isaiah Ceccarelli, James Clarke, John Edwards, John Wall, Johnny Chang, Katelyn Clark, Keir GoGwilt, Mark Sanders, Matteo Liberatore, Tom Mudd
Block Rockin’ Summer Slam, Part 1
When you listen to a lot of new stuff at once you start lumping pieces together, which is great for developing an authorial conceit, not so good for the music,…
Tags: Germaine Sijstermans, Ian Power, Sylvia Lim, Tim Parkinson
What’s New? Remixes, Fluxus, Drones, Industry, Potatoes.
What do we mean when we talk about ‘new music’? The term carries multiple meaninings: for starters, there’s what strikes us as outside our previous experience, or there’s what signifies…
Tags: Ashley Bathgate, Deison, Henning Christiansen, Jascha Narveson, Michael von Biel, UNIONBLOCK, Yoko Ono
Silence, Directness and Naïvety: Lang, Lely, Stiebler & Kanitz
I’ve been re-reading some of James Pritchett’s writing about John Cage and was reminded of how much there is still to understand about his music. This time, it was about…
Tags: Ernstalbrecht Stiebler, John Lely, Klaus Lang, Tilman Kanitz
GBSR plays Barbara Monk Feldman live
Last year I gave a brief rave for the all-too-rare Barbara Monk Feldman album released by Another Timbre. Since then its quiet presence has steadily grown in stature, amongst listeners…
Tags: Barbara Monk Feldman
Minimalistic: John Tilbury plays Terry Riley, plus: Kaori Suzuki
I got two discs of minimalist music here. To quote T.S. Eliot: “Well here again that don’t apply. But I’ve gotta use words when I talk to you.” Last night…
Tags: Kaori Suzuki, Terry Riley
Number Pieces live (part two), plus John White and Mark Ellestad
(Part one here.) It was wonderful to hear Cage’s Eight played live, in the round no less, at the Music We’d Like To Hear concert in St Mary at Hill.…
Tags: John Cage, John White, Mark Ellestad
John Cage’s Number Pieces live (part one)
A Week’s Diary part 2: LCMF
I’m not buying into the premise of this year’s London Contemporary Music Festival, back after a Covid-induced hiatus, but after two hot nights beginning in bright light under the skylights…
Tags: Andy Ingamells, Ben Patterson, Cerith Wyn Evans, Clara Iannotta, Crystabel Riley, Elvin Brandhi, Evan Johnson, Frank Denyer, Kikanju Baku, Mariam Rezaei, Oliver Leith, Rebecca Saunders, Roscoe Mitchell, Tyshawn Sorey
A Week’s Diary part 1: Morphogenesis, Lucy Railton
I’ve been out all week and my brain is fuzzy. Last Sunday it was to see Morphogenesis playing at Cafe Oto, for the first time since 2015 I think. This…
Tags: Catherine Lamb, Lucy Railton, Morphogenesis, Morton Feldman
anthem, an album
As someone who instinctively distrusts curatorial conceits, this new album from the Birmingham Record Company should be welcome. anthem is an LP-length collection of five works with no common composer,…
Tags: Andy Ingamells, Corey Mwamba, Emily Abdy, Genevieve Murphy, Ryan Latimer
Night Music: Jack Sheen, Rohan Drape & Anthony Pateras
If not dark (pace Lorca), then indelibly crepuscular; SN Variations’ release of Jack Sheen’s large ensemble work Sub arrives just in time for northern summer. A broad, dank thicket of…
Tags: Anthony Pateras, Jack Sheen, Rohan Drape
Cage/Not-Cage: Opening Performance Orchestra’s Chess Show
“John Cage has become a playground for second-rate minds”, or words to that effect, is one of the more pertinent comments Richard Kostelanetz has made about the late composer who,…
Tags: John Cage, Opening Performance Orchestra
Ostrava Days Live 2019–2021
Real life, honest-to-god concerts are happening again, so here’s a quick primer on what you’ve been missing. The Ostrava Center for New Music has put out a two-disc compilation of…
Tags: Ana Sokolović, Christian Wolff, Devin Maxwell, Frederic Rzewski, Georgina Bowden, Iannis Xenakis, Martin Smolka, Miroslav Srnka, Petr Bakla, Petr Kotík
Richard Emsley: Still/s
“It’s like looking at someone with short hair. We could tell if that person had long hair in the sixties and now has short hair, as opposed to the guy…
Tags: Richard Emsley
More Lost Canadians: Michael Oesterle, Mark Ellestad
Thanks to the musicians who keep exposing me to contemporary Canadian composers I’d have otherwise never heard of. Quatuor Bozzini’s set of Michael Oesterle’s Quatuors opens with a nice comfy…
Tags: Mark Ellestad, Michael Oesterle
Guitar? Solos? Fredrik Rasten, Lauri Hyvärinen
I guess there is still a lot more that can be done with guitars; as with pianos in previous centuries, the synergy between artistic creativity and technological development is prodigious.…
Tags: Fredrik Rasten, Lauri Hyvärinen
Out of Character: Eva-Maria Houben, Magnus Granberg
What a strange piece! What I’ve heard of Eva-Maria Houben’s music tends to fall into either of two categories: static, dispassionate music that becomes oddly affecting by its very remoteness,…
Tags: Eva-Maria Houben, Magnus Granberg
Pandemic Reflections: Robin Fox, Francesco Serra
The pandemic’s legacy of space and contemplation lingers in the most social of artforms, even as things are just starting to open up around me. Francesco Serra’s Guest Room is…
Tags: Francesco Serra, Robin Fox
Alvear-Bondi, d’incise etc.
I’ve been catching up on Insub’s recent releases. Guitarist Cristián Alvear with Cyril Bondi on percussion, mostly, have produced a trilogy of recordings of which I have heard the first…
Tags: Anna-Kaisa Meklin, Cyril Bondi, d'incise, Nicolás Carrasco, Santiago Astaburuaga
Not Dead Yet
My little world has started to open up again after a couple of years away. Went out to drink in public and hear the latest in Apartment House’s string quartet…
Tags: Hermann Nitsch, Jérôme Noetinger, Jonas Kocher, Louis Laurain, Luc Ferrari, Nadia Ratsimandresy, Okkyung Lee, Philip Glass
Tom Johnson: Combinations
As Wittgenstein would often remind you, the simplest statements, when exposed to close examination, conceal a wealth of contradictions and absurdities. Several years ago I heard a chamber ensemble play…
Tags: Tom Johnson
Laura Cocks: field anatomies
Scariest album of flute music ever. Laura Cocks’ solo recital disc field anatomies is a gruelling, intimidating experience when heard in one sitting. Don’t let the pressed flowers on the…
Tags: Bethany Younge, David Bird, DM R, Jessie Cox, Joan Arnau Pàmies
Post-Confusion, 2: Tim Parkinson, Eventless Plot, Luciano Maggiore
Speaking of forgotten trends in experimental music from past generations, I recently listened to a two-hour free-form slab of late night US public radio from 1975. Amongst all its eccentricities,…
Tags: Eventless Plot, Luciano Maggiore, Tim Parkinson
Post-Confusion, 1: Clinton Green, Tarab, Tony Buck & Rik Rue
I’ve been listening to a range of pieces by artists working with degrees of freedom in their approach to composition, from fixed but open structures to pure improvisation. The eclectic…
Tags: Clinton Green, Rik Rue, Tarab, Tony Buck
End of quiescence, 3: A quick comment on Feldman’s Piano and String Quartet
It took a long time to listen to this recording, but not long to find something to say about it. Morton Feldman’s music, despite immediate apperances, is not quiescent; it…
Tags: Morton Feldman
End of quiescence, 2: Johan Lindvall, Judith Hamann, Adrián Demoč
What does quiescence in music mean? John Cage, seeking his way out of a musical and psychological abyss, turned to Eastern religion and embraced quiescence as a goal to be…
Tags: Adrián Demoč, Johan Lindvall, Judith Hamann
End of quiescence, 1: Ilia Belorukov and Gaudenz Badrutt
Time to do some catching up on winter listening. I quickly started zoning out to Ilia Belorukov’s solo release Someone Has Always Come on Sublime Retreat but then started paying…
Tags: Gaudenz Badrutt, Ilia Belorukov
Quiet endings: Martin Iddon, Andrew McIntosh
It’s the quiet end of the year, when it seems everything can wait until later. I’ve got a lot of recordings sitting on my hard drive which I want to…
Tags: Andrew McIntosh, Martin Iddon
Words as Music (II): Esmeralda Conde Ruiz & Dominic Coles
Pandemic Art keeps coming, with the recurrent themes of online mediation and trying to build connections in unfavourable circumstances. Esmeralda Conde Ruiz’s Cabin Fever is a 24-hour audiovisual work made…
Tags: Dominic Coles, Esmeralda Conde Ruiz
“No matter what we do it ends by being melodic.” Ryoko Akama & Georgia Rodgers
From the 1950s Christian Wolff quote above to Jürg Frey playing Wandelweiser, once we have acquired a new perspective we cannot help but appreciate disparate elements in a wider context.…
Tags: Georgia Rodgers, Ryoko Akama
Words as music: Jürg Frey, Samuel Beckett, John Tilbury
Jürg Frey’s I Listened to the Wind Again, a 45-minute piece for soprano, clarinet, string trio and percussion, seems to trace the evolution of his compositional voice in microcosm. It…
Tags: John Tilbury, Jürg Frey, Samuel Beckett, Takuroku
Evan Johnson: lists, little stars
Evan Johnson’s music is hard to hear. Does everyone say that about him? While other composers may reward your closer attention, Johnson just seems to compound your uncertainty. Are you…
Tags: Evan Johnson
Mattin Licking Ears
Sam Salem’s London Triptych
Karlheinz Essl: Gold.Berg.Werk
It’s a mug’s game, really, messing with the classics. No matter what your intentions are, you will probably come across as a wannabe iconoclast or a toady. The need for…
Tags: Karlheinz Essl
Small but important differences: Christopher Otto’s ‘rag′sma’
Does this sound funny to you? I think I’ve heard enough music tuned in just intonation lately to stop it sounding immediately ‘weird’, so that the strangeness to be found…
Tags: Christopher Otto
All That Dust 2021: Angharad Davies, Aldo Clementi
The fourth annual batch of releases from All That Dust is here, which always brightens up things a little at the time of year when the nights draw in. As…
Tags: Aldo Clementi, Angharad Davies
Rocktober! (Part 2): Bill Nace, Ferran Fages et al., Dimuzio / Wobbly / Courtis
Closing out the month of electric guitars, of sorts, with a couple of reissues and two new items. I’m not sure how I got this first one as it got…
Tags: Alan Courtis, Alfredo Costa Monteiro, Bill Nace, Dimuzio / Wobbly / Courtis, Eduard Márquez, Ferran Fages, Jon Leidecker, LLUMM, Taumatrop, Thomas Dimuzio
Rocktober! (Part 1): Mamer, Julia Reidy
It must be the time of year because I’ve been getting a lot of stuff involving electric guitars and suchlike lately. The Takuroku download project is entering its final stage…
Tags: Julia Reidy, Mamer, Takuroku
Guy Vandromme plays Bruno Duplant’s ‘l’infini des possibles’
I’m glad that this thing is two hours long as it gave me the chance to come around to it without having to start over. Bruno Duplant’s l’infini des possibles…
Tags: Bruno Duplant
Live Music: David Dunn and Jackson Mac Low at Cafe Oto
A double bill of American Buddhists, my god. At least if there’s any religious knowledge to be picked up here, it’s taught by example (as with Cage, the didactic element…
Tags: David Dunn, Jackson Mac Low
New Elsewhere: Michael Pisaro-Liu, Jordan Dykstra and Koen Nutters
Michael Pisaro-Liu (fka Michael Pisaro) walks an eccentric path between conceptual process (cf. ricefall) and free-flowing wanderings that follow a concealed narrative. In Tombstones, this approach is atomised: a collection…
Tags: Jordan Dykstra, Koen Nutters, Michael Pisaro, Michael Pisaro-Liu
Electronic survey, not yet weary
Electronic music tends to polarise even the individual listener, where the extremes of appreciation and disdain map out like an inverted bell curve. For each piece that realises the potential…
Tags: 7balcony, Alex Christie, John Chantler, Madalyn Merkey, Paolo Sanna, Paul Abbott, Ryan Ross Smith, Simon Balestrazzi, Taku Unami, Takuroku
Following up Adrián Demoč: Hlaholika and Dotyky. Za zrkadlom
What do you do for a follow-up? It seems like Adrián Demoč’s Žiadba was a bit of a sleeper hit last year for Another Timbre: kind of haunting but kind…
Tags: Adrián Demoč
The Return of Music We’d Like To Hear: Ives, Couper, Haas, Barlow, Fargion
There’s an alien character common to all quarter-tone piano music: the claustrophobially close intervals spelled out in clear tones once so familiar to the ear can’t help but call up…
Tags: Charles Ives, Clarence Barlow, Georg Friedrich Haas, Matteo Fargion, Mildred Couper
Thoughts on Apartment House playing John Cage: Number Pieces
[Will Guthrie] (+ | ×) [Jean-Luc Guionnet] = ????
There hasn’t been enough discussion of Will Guthrie here. I’ve briefly talked about his holistic approach to percussion here but not discussed his wider application of these methods. That far-sighted,…
Tags: Jean-Luc Guionnet, Will Guthrie
Time Travel with Secluded Bronte and The Bohman Brothers
I know it’s a little early but I’m putting this down as the best prog album of the decade. It’s based on a live gig from 2019 but I don’t…
Tags: Secluded Bronte, The Bohman Brothers
Anthony Pateras: Pseudacusis
One of the most special gifts I received in lockdown last year was an early mix of Anthony Pateras’ Pseudacusis, and I resolved to say something about it here as…
Tags: Anthony Pateras
Takuroku update: Tatsuhisa Yamamoto and Taku Sugimoto
I had to throw out my original review of Tatsuhisa Yamamoto’s ano kane wo narasu. In that one I enthused over his superb handling of electronics, marvelling at how he…
Tags: Taku Sugimoto, Tatsuhisa Yamamoto
Ferran Fages: Electronics
I think it’s safe to call Ferran Fages eclectic. These two reissues from 2010 are works for electronics, different from the sparse works for guitar and piano previously reviewed here.…
Tags: Ferran Fages
Eventless Plot: Anisixia
Collective composer Eventless Plot is made up of Vasilis Liolios, Aris Giatas and Yiannis Tsirikoglou, using objects and instruments combined with live electronics. They jointly produce performance scores for themselves…
Tags: Eventless Plot
Old regulars: Lance Austin Olsen and friends
Canadian-based artist-musician-composer Lance Austin Olsen appears to be getting even more prolific, with at least four releases this year, so far. I’ve reviewed a bunch of them in the past…
Tags: Barry Chabala, Lance Austin Olsen, Terje Paulsen
Another Timbre: Spring to Summer
The Another Timbre label has adapted a solid practice of releasing albums by new or under-represented artists and then following through with further recordings to establish their presence. The latest…
Tags: Barbara Monk Feldman, James Weeks, Linda Catlin Smith, Oliver Leith
Deep Ambience: Maya Dunietz and Andie Brown
If you’ve read enough of my stuff here you’ll already have figured out that I like funny pianos. Yes, they can get over-fetishised and sentimentalised over but it’s always wonderful…
Tags: Andie Brown, Maya Dunietz
Reduced circumstances: Bondi & d’incise
Cyril Bondi and d’incise’s collaborative work with various enembles, including the large Insub Meta Orchestra, has been documented here in recent years. How has lockdown treated them? Well, it’s been…
Tags: Cyril Bondi, d'incise
Where are we going? And what are we doing?
I heard Erkki Veltheim give a talk a couple of years ago which made me reconsider how I heard his music. I knew of his clear-eyed cynicism about the music…
Tags: Erkki Veltheim, Julia Eckhardt
Sound as Environment: Ernie Althoff, Clinton Green
Ernie Althoff has been a mainstay of the Australian experimental music scene for decades: a situation that often ends up with one’s presence being taken for granted. It’s been good…
Tags: Clinton Green, Ernie Althoff
A live concert
The crowd was small and well-spaced, by necessity. After fifteen months without socialising, it looked like I wasn’t the only one who was both a bit excited and a bit…
Tags: Henry Birdsey, Louise Bourgeois, Milan Adamčiak, Milan Knižak, Roland Kayn, Stephen Whittington
Matthew Shlomowitz’s Explorations in polytonality and other musical wonders, Volume 1
I don’t enjoy writing bad reviews. If I can’t find anything interesting in a work then I prefer to leave it alone instead of use it as a pretext to…
Tags: Matthew Shlomowitz
Spaces: Tasting Menu and Tarab
Sometimes you can’t help but hear things the wrong way. I first put this on by mistake, having thought I’d cued up Booker T. & The MG’s. I’ve had worse…
Tags: Tarab, Tasting Menu
Jim O’Rourke: Best that you do this for me
Over the last twenty-five-plus years, the ensemble Apartment House has amassed a formidable repertoire of new and rediscovered music, much of it recorded on the Another Timbre label. I’ve been…
Tags: Jim O'Rourke
Alex Paxton: Music for Bosch People
The word ‘manic’ pops up twice in the press release for Alex Paxton’s album Music for Bosch People. ‘Garish’ should be used too, meant as a positive; it should come…
Tags: Alex Paxton
Voiceless voices: Jason Kahn & Antoine Läng, Biliana Voutchkova
To uncultured ears such as mine, avant-garde vocal performance often falls into a sort of uncanny valley; the moments in which it resembles human expression without reaching verbalisation are when…
Tags: Antoine Läng, Biliana Voutchkova, Jason Kahn
Reinier Van Houdt: Mouths Without A Head
The theme here is prophecy, which may be why so much of the album seems presently unknowable. I’ve been aware of Reinier Van Houdt only as a pianist, interpreting the…
Tags: Reinier Van Houdt
Thomas Ankersmit’s Perceptual Geography, Phil Julian’s Carrier Dynamics
You don’t have to be smart or knowledgeable to enjoy stuff. I just got hold of Thomas Ankersmit’s new release Perceptual Geography and spent the weekend getting off to it,…
Tags: Phil Julian, Thomas Ankersmit
One-track minds: Michael Winter and Catherine Lamb
“single track is a really arresting piece that appealed to me immediately,” begins the Another Timbre proprietor’s blurb. Same, dude; same. “A seven-part canon which starts fast and gradually slows…
Tags: Catherine Lamb, Michael Winter
Takuroku Springtime Speedrun
Josten Myburgh: Sculthorpe Studies
One of the most exquisite items of late 20th Century kitsch is Bird Symphony, an album by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation featuring various Australian orchestras playing popular classics by Fauré,…
Tags: Josten Myburgh
P.S. False Self plays music for six pianos
Speaking of disorienting piano, got wrong-footed by this recent Takuroku release by Rudi Arapahoe. Never heard of this guy before but he’s my kind of composer, drawing on algorithmic art…
Tags: False Self, Rudi Arapahoe
Personal notes: James Rushford’s Música Callada and See the Welter
I want to thank James Rushford for putting me on to Mompou in the first place, during a conversation some years back. He said he’d been playing Música Callada a…
Tags: Federico Mompou, James Rushford
Sense and Nonsense: Grimm Grimm v Great Rack
We’ve been through all this before: music isn’t supposed to make sense. Koichi Yamanoha aka Grimm Grimm has produced a sweet little EP of six tracks recorded at home in…
Tags: Emily Bennett, Great Rack, Grimm Grimm, Koichi Yamanoha
More field recordings and music
I wish the contradictions inherent in field recordings were great enough to make them interesting as a paradox. As material, they contain so much in themselves that to use them…
Tags: Anna Murray, Caroline Profanter, Duncan Harrison, Julia E Dyck, Lucy Railton, Teresa Cos
Genuine improvised duets
At a time when just getting two people into a room to play together is a dimly-remembered luxury, it’s nice to hear again the strange interactions that happen during an…
Tags: Barnaby Oliver, Clinton Green, David Grubbs, Lucio Capece, Ryley Walker, Werner Dafeldecker
Gentle Fire: Explorations (1970 – 1973)
Some archival releases are historically important, restoring a significant musical movement to present-day consciousness. Others can throw accepted history into a different light, making the past a deeper, richer source…
Tags: Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, Gentle Fire, Graham Hearn, Hugh Davies, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Michael Robinson, Richard Bernas, Stuart Jones, Toshi Ichiyanagi
Antoine Beuger’s jankélévitch sextets
In my mind I’ve worked up Antoine Beuger as my personal nemesis. Never met him, but his music has always aroused a vehement antipathy, sufficient for me to have resolved…
Tags: Antoine Beuger
Drones Club: Allotropes, John Chantler
Been immersing myself in a succession of glorious sonic baths lately, all luxurious warmth and invigorating refreshment. Allotropes is the duet of Jim Hoult and Stephan Barrett, collaborating remotely on…
Tags: Allotropes, John Chantler
(no title)
I’ve been listening to a lot of new stuff over winter, making some notes, as well as working on my own projects, but right at the moment I’m at a…
Newton Armstrong, Judith Hamann: go out, collapse
Until recently I’d mostly known Newton Armstrong’s work only through his technological contributions to other people’s music, but thankfully that’s been changing lately. The way to go out is a…
Tags: Judith Hamann, Newton Armstrong
Martin Arnold’s Stain Ballads
I had my first encounter with Martin Arnold’s music back in 2016, at the end of a concert by Apartment House at Wigmore Hall. It knocked me out. “The way…
Tags: Martin Arnold
Inexhaustible x3: Nick Ashwood, Ferran Fages, TRUSS
Thanks to my habit of neglecting to read the sleeve notes, I only just realised that all three albums here are from Inexhaustible Editions. Also thanks to this habit, I…
Tags: Ferran Fages, Nick Ashwood, TRUSS
Maya Verlaak: All English Music Is Greensleeves
There’s more irony in this title than first appears. This collection of pieces by Verlaak is itself a hearkening back to a golden age, but her reiteration of the past…
Tags: Maya Verlaak
Old rituals, new grounds: Hermann Nitsch and Mark Harwood
From time to time I remember that there was a Hermann Nitsch retrospective held a couple of years ago in Croydon. I didn’t go. Even in these Covid times, I…
Tags: Hermann Nitsch, Mark Harwood
Takuroku Shooting Gallery: End-Of-Year Edition (Part 3)
(Previously: Part 1 and Part 2) These Takuroku writeups got a bit longer than intended and there’s still a few remaining releases I want to mention, the ones which are…
Tags: Anton Lukoszevieze, Calum Storrie, Farida Amadou, Neil Charles, Steve Beresford, Takuroku, Tom Scott
Takuroku Shooting Gallery: End-Of-Year Edition (Part 2)
In Part 1 I mentioned the substance of Takuroku’s lockdown releases and the climate of discovery they encouraged. A perfect example of this is Leon, by the ensemble Jamaica! The…
Tags: @xcrswx, Aquiles Hadjis, Crystabel Riley, Danny McCarthy, Grundik Kasyansky, Jamaica!, Lia Mazzari, Mick O'Shea, Nerve, Seymour Wright, Shakeeb Abu Hamdan, Sholto Dobie, Takuroku, The Quiet Club, Tom Wheatley, Tom White, ТЕПЛОТА
Takuroku Shooting Gallery: End-Of-Year Edition (Part 1)
Cafe Oto’s Takuroku imprint has now released over a hundred albums of new music made during this year’s pandemic lockdown, with more promised for 2021. (Presumably it will end sometime…
Tags: Kelly Jayne Jones, Maggie Nicols, Michael Speers, Nakul Krishnamurthy, Nour Mobarak, Phoebe Collings-James, Roy Claire Potter, Takuroku
Magnus Granberg: Come Down To Earth Where Sorrow Dwelleth, bis
If you’re reading this, you’re probably the sort of music nerd who listens to composers like Magnus Granberg and wonder how their compositions might sound in different configurations. It’s partly…
Tags: Magnus Granberg
Kraig Grady: Monument Of Diamonds
Here’s a rare and welcome chance to experience a major work by Kraig Grady, courtesy of Another Timbre. Like so many who are dedicated to exploring alternative tuning systems, Grady…
Tags: Kraig Grady
Reprise: Eventless Plot, Catherine Lamb
They’ve already put out some great stuff this year, but in the last couple of months both Eventless Plot and Catherine Lamb have each released another album. While Eventless Plot’s…
Tags: Catherine Lamb, Eventless Plot
Liquid Transmitter / Jamie Drouin
Two of Jamie Drouin’s personae at work here. As Liquid Transmitter, Arboreal continues on from where Meander left off. Bell-like synth tones and clear washes overlap in old-school ambient tones.…
Tags: Jamie Drouin, Liquid Transmitter
Marcus Schmickler: Richters Patterns
For the past ten years I’ve been quietly kicking myself for not paying more attention to Marcus Schmickler’s compositions, failing to twig that they were more than just a sideline…
Tags: Marcus Schmickler
Mega-post: mostly Insub but also Mappa and Roeba
I’ve been listening to a bunch of collaborative recordings and group compositions over lockdown and meaning to do justice to them, but in my head they started to link up…
Tags: ATRL, Barry Chabala, Burkhard Stangl, Carl Ludwig Hübsch, Cristián Alvear, d'incise, Lance Austin Olsen, Philip Zoubek, Pierre-Yves Martel
Stumblebum Aesthetics and Secluded Bronte
There’s radical amateurism and then there’s amateurism that may happen to be radical. I am listening to some defiantly amateurish music-making from the Far East, which is making it quite…
Tags: Ali Robertson, Firas Khnaisser, Pressure Carcass, Secluded Bronte, Takuroku, Xu Shaoyang
All That Dust, Batch 3: Lamb, Braxton, Pateras and Veltheim
Things to be thankful for: music keeps getting made and the third batch of releases from All That Dust has come through as planned. Two are also available on CD,…
Tags: Anthony Braxton, Anthony Pateras, Catherine Lamb, Erkki Veltheim
Judith Hamann: Shaking Studies, Music for Cello and Humming
You wait for ages, then four come along at once. After starting the month with Judith Hamann’s Peaks and Portals at the start of the month, I’m ending with her…
Tags: Anthony Pateras, Judith Hamann, Sarah Hennies
Takuroku Shooting Gallery Redux: Electronics
Left Hand Cuts off the Right – Worker. Modestly described as ‘sketches’ made while holding down a job during Covid, these start out as pleasant ambient tracks which turn ominous…
Tags: Ben Bertrand, Cara Tolmie, Left Hand Cuts off the Right, Li Yilei, Nemeton, Otto Lindholm, Rafael Anton Irisarri, Takuroku
Maya Verlaak & Andy Ingamells: Tape Piece
Art gags: don’t you just hate them? Especially when they’re made by artists. If it’s going to work at all, you’ve got to commit to it – ideally by just…
Tags: Andy Ingamells, Maya Verlaak
Clara de Asís & Mara Winter
Another product of this year’s lockdown and enforced isolation is the first release on a new label based in Basel, named Discreet Editions. Rise, follow is an hour-long composition by…
Tags: Clara de Asís, Mara Winter
Les introuvables de Henning Christiansen, cont.
New releases from the Henning Christiansen Archive continue to build up a much more comprehensive understanding of the sometime Fluxus artist’s achievements as a composer. The links between music and…
Tags: Bjørn Nørgaard, Chiara Giovando, Henning Christiansen, Mai Dengsøe Hansen, Mara McCarthy, Mark Harwood, Paul McCarthy, Thorbjørn Reuter Christiansen
Judith Hamann: Peaks and Portals
I’ve enjoyed cellist Judith Hamann’s music for years now, both in solo live shows and as part of Golden Fur. We’re finally getting more recordings out in public, with more…
Tags: Judith Hamann, Marja Ahti, Takuroku
Oliver Leith: good day good day bad day bad day
Damn this is a good title. It feels self-explanatory and yet it keeps you listening for a deeper meaning behind it. As such, it matches the music perfectly as each…
Tags: Oliver Leith
Wet Ink: Smoke, Airs
The Wet Ink Ensemble describe themselves as a collective, but with a ‘band’ atmosphere. As you would hope, they place an emphasis on improvisation and collaboration accross genres while also…
Tags: Bryn Harrison, Charmaine Lee, Kristina Wolfe, Pierre Alexandre Tremblay
Got yer art right here: Zach Rowden, Derek Baron
I’ve ranted about field recordings before, spouting off a poorly-connected set of complaints which can be boiled down to the medium’s general tendency towards complacency. No such thing in Zach…
Tags: Derek Baron, Takuroku, Zach Rowden
Urban subjectivity: Bill Orcutt, Ed Carter & Jessica Lee
“…started thinking about how popular music gets used as material these days. Once, tropes from rock or jazz would be incorporated into other musical styles to act as a signifier…
Tags: Bill Orcutt, Ed Carter, Jessica Lee, Takuroku
Jérôme Noetinger with Anthony Laguerre and Jean-Philippe Gross on Takuroku
A long year ago I wrote about Jérôme Noetinger’s sublime collaboration with Anthony Pateras, A Sunset For Walter. Cafe Oto has now put out two new Noetinger collaborations, recorded over…
Tags: Anthony Laguerre, Jean-Philippe Gross, Jérôme Noetinger, Takuroku
Alvin Lucier on Black Truffle
As well as releasing lots of fine music by new composers, Black Truffle has been preserving the legacy of the old masters. In particular, they have been steadily releasing recent…
Tags: Alvin Lucier
Home recordings: Takuroku
It’s inevitable that most of the releases on Takuroku are home recordings to some extent and most of them have avoided the obvious. An excessive focus on domesticity can lead…
Tags: Hannah Marshall, Juliet Fraser, Takuroku
Eventless Plot: Parallel Words
Beats me how people find these things, but I’m glad that they do. Eventless Plot is Vasilis Liolios, Yiannis Tsirikoglou and Aris Giatas, a trio of musicians in Thessaloniki. The…
Tags: Eventless Plot
Senses of place: Takuroku
Isolation drags on – at least it does for me. I’m vaguely aware of the passing of time, and kind of aware that I’ve been staying in one place for…
Tags: Daniel Kordík, David Birchall, Otto Willberg, Takuroku, Tom Wheatley, Ute Kanngiesser
Hyazo v Levitas
Just had a couple of weeks off, going nowhere, of course. Listening to this 2020 release hyazo by Cyril Bondi, Pierre-Yves Martel and Christoph Schiller, the same trio who have…
Tags: Christoph Schiller, Cyril Bondi, d'incise, Pierre-Yves Martel
Sam Ridout: Aspect Spur Disjecta
Over the weekend, someone on a popular social media site shared the following video, titled “Tree branch falls on power lines – high voltage – Wicked Effect”. The first reply…
Tags: Sam Ridout
Takuroku: Viola Torros, Orazbayeva, Duplant
My personal setbacks from coronavirus have been trivial compared to others. One of the disappointments has been the second missed chance to see Johnny Chang and Catherine Lamb’s Viola Torros…
Tags: Aisha Orazbayeva, Bruno Duplant, Takuroku, Viola Torros
Ends and beginnings: Ernstalbrecht Stiebler
Like many people – judging by the interview on this album’s web page – my knowledge of Ernstalbrecht Stiebler’s music centres on the CDs of his 1990s music released on…
Tags: Ernstalbrecht Stiebler
Words and non-words, subjects and objects
I’ve been puzzled by Leo Chadburn’s pieces for speaking voice and ensemble: Freezywater dispassionately lists place-names that encircle the greater London area, The Indistinguishables pits a string quartet against a…
Tags: Leo Chadburn, Louie Rice, Luciano Maggiore, Takuroku
Takuroku Shooting Gallery
Later thoughts on Mittwoch aus Licht
The morning after I saw Mittwoch aus Licht in Birmingham, I turned on the news and heard that Neil Armstrong had died. Suddenly, the Helicopter String Quartet made sense to…
Tags: Karlheinz Stockhausen
Home listening with Han Bennink, Yoni Silver and Xenia Pestova Bennett
The variety on display at Takuroku continues to amaze. Here are three home recordings, made during and for the mitigation of Covid lockdown. Han Bennink’s Musical Collage for Mara captures…
Tags: Han Bennink, Takuroku, Xenia Pestova Bennett, Yoni Silver
Three LPs by Jamie Drouin and Lance Austin Olsen
Good to see some people making better use of Covid-19 downtime than I have. It’s been a while since I wrote up any music by Lance Austin Olsen or Jamie…
Tags: Jamie Drouin, Lance Austin Olsen
Isolation Pianos (2): Lisa Ullén, Bobby Mitchell, Frederic Rzewski
More odious comparisons: pianos, this time. This was going to get posted yesterday and include Alex White’s Transductions but I got a bit carried away about that one. I’m catching…
Tags: Frederic Rzewski, Lisa Ullén, Takuroku
Isolation Pianos (1): Alex White’s ‘Transductions’
Alex White’s album Transductions came out on Room 40 early this month and I’m still getting over it. As a huge fan of pianos, real or virtual, being pushed beyond…
Tags: Alex White
Takuroku Roundup No. 3
The new music from Takuroku just keeps coming. This is London’s Cafe Oto download-only label for a series of pieces recorded by artists around the world waiting out the Covid-19…
Tags: Ken Ikeda, Rie Nakajima, Takuroku, Toshimaru Nakamura, Valentina Magaletti
What is the deal with Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson’s Sinfónía?
There have been so many times when I’ve been tempted to start a posting here with the opening sentence of that old Rolling Stone review of Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait…
Tags: Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson
Unusual suspects: Magnus Granberg and Skogen, Angharad Davies, Klaus Lang, Anton Lukoszevieze
Thanks to the coronavirus snafu I misplaced the last batch of CDs from Another Timbre (will remedy this later) but now I’m happily getting amongst this even newer set from…
Tags: Angharad Davies, Anton Lukoszevieze, Klaus Lang, Magnus Granberg
Cobalt Duo: Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Strange, Charm
Lost my internet over a week ago so I’ve been listening to more music but posting about it less. First thing of many I need to catch up on is…
Tags: Anton Lukoszevieze, Egidija Medekšaitė, Fumiko Miyachi, James Black, Michael Wolters, Sarah Lianne Lewis
Lockdown Roundup (2): Nick Ashwood and Laura Altman, Agnes Hvizdalek, Jacken Elswyth
I’ve been busy while sequestered at home, but still listening, including some more new releases from the past few weeks. I’ve heard one record before involving Nick Ashwood, so it’s…
Tags: Agnes Hvizdalek, Jacken Elswyth, Laura Altman, Nick Ashwood, Takuroku
Lockdown Roundup: Lucy Railton, Melaine Dalibert, James Rushford
Responses to Covid-19 are coming thick and fast now. Quarantined from the wider world, musicians are making music alone, where they can. Cafe Oto, the bold experimental music venue in…
Tags: James Rushford, Lucy Railton, Melaine Dalibert, Takuroku
On being won over: Alvear-Bondi-d’incise, NEF
Tags: Cristián Alvear, Cyril Bondi, d'incise, NEF
Lockdown Roundup: James Rushford, Will Guthrie
Musicians everywhere are getting slugged by Covid-19 shutting down venues and travel for months. What can you do? Keep making music. New pieces are going out on Bandcamp, Soundcloud, streaming…
Tags: James Rushford, Will Guthrie
Aisha Orazbayeva: Music for Violin Alone
The idea of violin, or of any musician, alone has taken on a new meaning in the last couple of months. It has further associations for Aisha Orazbayeva, a fine…
Tags: Aisha Orazbayeva, Angharad Davies, James Tenney, John Cage, Oliver Leith
Telematic Concerts (with Pauline Oliveros)
In these days of self-isloation I keep getting told that teleconfernced gigs held over Zoom are becoming a thing, only to be subsequently told that they’re not really a thing…
Tags: Alan Courtis, John Tilbury, Pauline Oliveros, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith
Juliet Fraser, spilled out from tangles
It’s good to remember that music is still being made. There’s a new album out soon by Juliet Fraser – I’ve raved about her singing before. In terms of presentation,…
Tags: Lawrence Dunn, Lisa Illean, Nomi Epstein, Sivan Eldar
Lying low
It’s awful when people describe music as ‘relaxing’. We know they mean to be nice, but it’s just so wrong. It’s an experience made from hearing recordings, that no longer…
Tags: Jamie Drouin, Liquid Transmitter, Torsten Papenheim
Social distance: Apartment House play Demoč and Aglinskas
Now everyone’s staying indoors, keeping to themselves, in a state of uncertainty, we may seek out distraction but ultimately everyone deserves some mental space, to “quieten the mind” as Cage…
Tags: Adrián Demoč, Julius Aglinskas
A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance
I listened to this new tape by Jennifer Walshe and had a whole bunch of ideas about what to write about it. Then I listened to it again and immediately…
Tags: Jennifer Walshe
aaangelicaaa: Charlemagne Palestine and Cassandra Miller at laaaaast
It’s a fitting title. I dischi di Angelica seem to have been on hiatus for a few years but returned with some new releases in 2019. The label, dedicated to…
Tags: Cassandra Miller, Charlemagne Palestine
Apartment House plays Jackson Mac Low
It was great to hear “Is That Wool Hat My Hat?” performed at last. Getting to know Mac Low’s work has often been an exercise for the imagination, reading his…
Tags: Jackson Mac Low
Xenia Pestova Bennett: Atomic Legacies
I’ve heard Xenia Pestova Bennett’s piano playing on various occasions, but not heard of her work as a composer until now. Her new release Atomic Legacies features two substantial works…
Tags: Xenia Pestova Bennett
Electroacoustic duos: Kevin Drumm & Adam Golebiewski, Phil Durrant and Bill Thompson
The electronics are unspecified but sound like feedback oscillation plays are large part – as may be expected from Drumm’s guitar background. That sound is also present in Intraspect, a…
Tags: Adam Golebiewski, Bill Thompson, Kevin Drumm, Phil Durrant
Apartment House plays Jim O’Rourke
Jim O’Rourke’s music for small string ensembles (with electronics). I’ve been waiting for this one; an intriguing and almost unknown aspect of his music, brought to light by Apartment House.…
Tags: Jim O'Rourke
Five years of 840
The year has started. Two gigs this weekend just gone, both at Cafe Oto. The 840 series celebrated their fifth anniversary on Friday with an evening of music for voices…
Dark Night On The Black Dog Highway
I’ve been playing this one on and off since the end of summer and on these cold, dark nights it’s coming into its own. Dark Night On The Black Dog…
Tags: Jamie Drouin, Lance Austin Olsen, Tim Clément
Ryoko Akama’s ‘Dial 45-21-95’; Jon Heilbron’s ‘Puma Court’
It’s like looking at someone with short hair. We could tell if that person had long hair in the sixties and now has short hair, as opposed to the guy…
Tags: Jon Heilbron, Ryoko Akama
Insub Meta Orchestra plays Granberg and Pisaro
I’ve praised previous recordings by the Insub Meta Orchestra, a large ensemble of some twenty-five to thirty musicians combining an eclectic mix of acoustic instruments with live electronics. Their earlier…
Tags: Magnus Granberg, Michael Pisaro
Philip Thomas playing Feldman and Wolff, live and on record
Everyone has been raving about Philip Thomas’ box of pretty much all of Morton Feldman’s solo piano music which came out late last year – with good reason. So much…
Tags: Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman
LCMF 2019 Highlights, Part 3
(Continued from Part 2, here.) It’s the last day of the year. On my desk is a small ammonite fossil; it is 140 million years old. It was handed to…
Tags: Angharad Davies, Jennifer Walshe
LCMF 2019 Highlights, Part 2
(Continued from Part 1, here.) I’ve already said eclectic, haven’t I? The thrid night began with a Bulgarian folk ritual, performed by the Mogila Kukeri Group: enactments of peasant life…
Tags: Alison Knowles, Alwynne Pritchard, Cassandra Miller, La Monte Young, Louis D’Heudieres, Michael Finnissy
LCMF 2019 Highlights, Part 1
Flubbed last year but saw all of the latest London Contemporary Music Festival. Curators Igor Toronyi-Lalic and Jack Sheen put together the most ambitious programme yet – six gigs over…
Tags: Eva-Maria Houben, Jennifer Walshe
Frank Denyer’s ‘The Fish that became the Sun’
Frank Denyer’s hour-long work for chorus and large ensemble The Fish that became the Sun received its premiere at a sold-out performance in Huddersfield last week, some twenty-three years after…
Tags: Frank Denyer
Jennifer Walshe: ALL THE MANY PEOPLS
Jennifer Walshe makes computer music. Her voice remains at the centre of things, free of electronic modification but shaped and conditioned by present-day information technology. The most essentially human and…
Tags: Jennifer Walshe
Frank Denyer: The Boundaries of Intimacy
This weekend, Frank Denyer’s hourlong work The Fish that became the Sun receives its premeire at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, some twenty-five years after it was composed. It goes…
Tags: Frank Denyer
...for some reason that escapes us
I got sent this a while back and it keeps popping up on my stereo and I to go look up what it is. It keeps reminding me of other…
Tags: Fredrik Rasten, Vilhelm Bromander
All That Dust live, and Georgia Rodgers’ A to B, Late lines
I’ve been writing up the new batch of releases by All That Dust, who had their launch gig on the weekend. Sadly, Georgia Rodgers had to cancel at the last…
Tags: Georgia Rodgers, Tim Parkinson
Piano: Tim Parkinson played by Mark Knoop
The picture gets more complex. I previously described Tim Parkinson’s opera Time With People as “warm-blooded reductionism”, noting how his music had emptied out the form, transforming structure into content.…
Tags: Tim Parkinson
Piano: Annea Lockwood and Luc Ferrari played by Xenia Pestova Bennett
Circumstances and temperament conspired so that I hadn’t been to a gig in ages. Broke the drought last week with two piano recitals: Philip Thomas with the launch of his…
Tags: Annea Lockwood, Luc Ferrari
Stockhausen: Kontakte (Barton/Rhys)
Some physicists hope that evidence will be found that contradicts the Standard Model, opening up an entirely new understanding of how the universe works; in the meantime, the theory remains…
Tags: Karlheinz Stockhausen
Cassandra Miller: Songs about Singing
I’ve been waiting a year for the next batch of releases from All That Dust. The first bit of great news is that one of the new CDs is dedicated…
Tags: Cassandra Miller
Federico Pozzer: Breaths
Been listening to this repeatedly over the past couple of months but not writing about it; just enjoying it*. Don’t know anything about composer Federico Pozzer, other than what comes…
Tags: Federico Pozzer
Parts: 180º, d’incise
I’ve been listening to a lot of music released as parts lately. In some cases they are definitely extracted from a larger performance but at other times it’s less clear…
Tags: 180º, Amanda Stewart, d'incise, Jim Denley, Nick Ashwood
Pancrace: The Fluid Hammer
Jérôme Noetinger and Anthony Pateras: A Sunset For Walter
The hell is going on here? It’s, it’s… beautiful. A long, long way from his signature hyperactive style, Anthony Pateras contemplatively plays slow, arpeggiated octaves over a gentle ambient hum…
Tags: Anthony Pateras, Jérôme Noetinger
Charles Ross at Cafe Oto
You really need to see it as well as hear it; not just the visual element, but to appreciate the music as a theatrical experience. Until now, my exposure to…
Tags: Charles Ross
Playing: Catherine Lamb – Cristián Alvear, James Weeks – Mira Benjamin
I’m listening to people playing instruments, making music. Are they playing with, or on, their instruments? It’s a trickier question here, as the musicians are performing scores composed for them…
Tags: Catherine Lamb, James Weeks
Playing: Simon Balestrazzi & Nicola Quiriconi, A Spirale w/ Chris Cogburn
I’m listening to people playing instruments, making music. In these cases, they’re playing with their instruments, the verb used in the sense of exploration. Making music like this becomes largely…
Tags: A Spirale, Chris Cogburn, Nicola Quiriconi, Simon Balestrazzi
The End of Time: Olivier Messiaen, Linda Catlin Smith
Who would have thought that Messiaen needed rescuing? Yet all this time, in full view, his reputation has been in peril. Despite his secure position as one of the great…
Tags: Linda Catlin Smith, Olivier Messiaen
Music We’d Like To Hear, 2019 season (part 3)
(Part 2 here.) The fiftieth Music We’d Like To Hear concert began with Séverine Ballon playing from her compositions for solo cello, which I’ve described before from a recital and…
Tags: John McGuire
Music We’d Like To Hear, 2019 season (part 2)
(Part 1 here.) Music We’d Like To Hear‘s latest season continued their bold approach to reappraising recent music. The second concert began with a live performance of Timing by Phil…
Tags: Alvin Lucier, Éliane Radigue, Kenneth Werner, Lee Patterson, Phil Harmonic, Rie Nakajima
Music We’d Like To Hear, 2019 season (part 1)
Summer has been cruelly disrupted, but not before I got to take in all of this year’s Music We’d Like To Hear season. I got to write about the 2018…
Tags: Marc Sabat, Matteo Fargion, Thomas Stiegler
Samstag aus Licht in Paris
A friend of mine once attended the summer school Stockhausen hosted at Kürten each year. When he told me about it, we joked back and forth about the ridiculousness of…
Tags: Karlheinz Stockhausen
Lance Austin Olsen: Look At The Mouth That Is Looking At You
This gets dark and disturbing. I’ve written before about Lance Austin Olsen, the artist and composer who uses his paintings as scores to be realised as music. “As with painting,…
Tags: Lance Austin Olsen
Hearing it again: awirë
I was at this gig and I swore I’d written something about it, but nope. My memory gets hazy and my mind wanders. It happens sometimes when listening to music…
Tags: Angharad Davies, Christoph Schiller, Cyril Bondi, Pierre-Yves Martel
Stockhausen For Times To Come
The Stockhausen fest at Southbank which started with Donnerstag aus Licht reverted to business as usual with a quick tour of the standards – Kontakte, Stimmung, Klavierstücke, Mantra – with…
Tags: Karlheinz Stockhausen
Maryanne Amacher’s GLIA at Kammer Klang
The last ever Kammer Klang was a celebration in their typical brilliant and daring style. Two nights of talks and films about Maryanne Amacher at the ICA, culimating with a…
Tags: Maryanne Amacher
Donnerstag aus Licht on Southbank
A head full of pseudoephedrine and gin was never going to be an obstacle to enjoying a second performance of Stockhausen’s Donnerstag aus Licht. If needed, there were plenty of…
Tags: Karlheinz Stockhausen
Similarities and differences: Cyril Bondi & d’incise, Magnus Granberg
Listening to the latest release by Cyril Bondi & d’incise, it’s easy to hear similarities with their previous releases with the Insub Meta Orchestra. The sound pulses and flows without…
Tags: Cyril Bondi, d'incise, Magnus Granberg
Oren Ambarchi at 50
A three-day weekend at Cafe Oto: less a showcase of Ambarchi’s talents, more a swag of really cool birthday presents. Here’s a quick trip round the bits that stuck in…
Tags: Oren Ambarchi
Klaus Lang & Golden Fur: Beissel
Usually, when someone says that a piece grows on you, they mean that they didn’t like it at first but then came to find at least certain aspects to admire.…
Tags: Golden Fur, Klaus Lang
Annea Lockwood at Kammer Klang
Annea Lockwood is one of those composers who I like even when I don’t like their stuff: there’s always a point of view, an insight into how the world is…
Tags: Annea Lockwood
Julius Eastman: Femenine
From time to time, the legend of Julius Eastman – tragic decline, obscurity, posthumous elevation to musical martyrdom – threatens to overshadow his achievements. He hasn’t quite attained the bedroom…
Tags: Julius Eastman
Debasing the Coinage of Popular Usage: Alan Courtis, Diatribes
After hearing so many stripped-back works for solo guitar, it makes a fun change to get sent a guitar album that is cranked and processed halfway to heaven. Alan Courtis’…
Tags: Alan Courtis, Cyril Bondi, d'incise, Diatribes, Julia Reidy
Solos: Félicie Bazelaire, Ferran Fages
I’ve been listening to some new releases by d’incises, working in collaboration with various composers and musicians. (This is the guy who’s part of the Insub Meta Orchestra.) L’épaisseur innombrable…
Tags: d'incise, Félicie Bazelaire, Ferran Fages
Alvin Lucier at the Round Chapel
Almost ten years ago, I saw Alvin Lucier in one of the most memorable gigs I’ve been to, performing Bird and Person Dyning at Wilton’s Hall. It’s a magnificent piece…
Tags: Alvin Lucier
Works on Paper: Gil Sansón and Lance Austin Olsen
Feels like I’ve been away forever. I got a bunch of new albums I want to talk about and a superb Alvin Lucier concert I went to last week, but…
Tags: Gil Sansón, Lance Austin Olsen
Things Seen, Heard (3)
Two gigs in churches in my neighbourhood this month. Áine O’Dwyer and Eva-Maria Houben at the Old Church in Stoke Newington. Primary reason for going was that I’d enjoyed hearing…
Luc Ferrari, Tautologos, Situationism, Entropy (beginning, not to be concluded)
A map of the 16th Arrondissement drawn by Debord’s friend Paul-Henri Chombart de Lauwe, traces the routes taken by a student over the period of a year as she circulates…
Tags: Luc Ferrari
Deeper listening: Mark R Taylor, Morgan Evans-Weiler, Michael Pisaro
As I was saying, I’ve spent a few weeks getting to know a few CDs more closely. Two in particular have required closer attention, for differing reasons. I’ve been listening…
Tags: Mark R Taylor, Michael Pisaro, Morgan Evans-Weiler
Catherine Lamb and Johnny Chang with or without Viola Torros
When I got back to town, people told me I’d missed a great gig, with Johnny Chang and Catherine Lamb playing at St Mary at Hill. At the end of…
Tags: Catherine Lamb, Johnny Chang
Michael Parsons at 80
A small bright spot, then another week of flu. I can still recall enough of that previous Friday evening with gladness, the ambience of bonhomie that filled Cafe Oto for…
Tags: Michael Parsons
Mattin: Songbook #7
Þráinn Hjálmarsson: Influence of buildings on musical tone
It’s easy to get jaded, to burn out on new music. You go listen to a lot of stuff and after a while you keep hearing the same things coming…
Tags: Þráinn Hjálmarsson
Matthew Shlomowitz, live and on record
I am not enjoying this. Freeze-dried samples set in stiff rhythms; that febrile, brittle texture of Eighties pop music and Eighties art musicians who wanted to be “with it”, the…
Tags: Matthew Shlomowitz
Old Masters: Babbitt, Nono, Feldman
“Babbitt?” One of the punters at the All That Dust record label launch party looked incredulous. As well as issuing CDs, the label is releasing extra titles as download-only. The…
Tags: Luigi Nono, Milton Babbitt, Morton Feldman
Trip Report: An Assembly play Charlie Usher and Rowland Hill
I’ve got some new recordings I need to talk about (Þráinn Hjálmarsson, All That Dust) but first I should follow up on that An Assembly gig previewed a couple of…
Tags: Charlie Usher, Rowland Hill
Séverine Ballon: inconnaissance
I went to four unrelated cello gigs in about a week, each demonstrating some a aspect of playing and composing for the instrument. 840’s most recent gig at St James’,…
Tags: Christian Wolff, Judith Hamann, Phill Niblock, Séverine Ballon
Organs, Inner and Outer: Thomas Ankersmit, Rohan Drape
I’m a sucker for feedback synthesis* and therefore I’m very happy with Thomas Ankersmit’s new CD Homage to Dick Raaijmakers. There are two things that stand out after the first…
Tags: Anthony Pateras, Rohan Drape, Thomas Ankersmit
Canadian Composers Concluded: Smith, Jang, Olsen
I mean this as highest praise to say the new Linda Catlin Smith CD on Another Timbre is more of the same. The two previous releases of her music, Dirt…
Tags: Alex Jang, Lance Austin Olsen, Linda Catlin Smith
Cassandra Miller: ‘O Zomer!’ and ‘Just So’
Everyone else has been raving about these two new Cassandra Miller CDs and I need to get in on it too. Like many others, I’ve been waiting for the second…
Tags: Cassandra Miller
Ingrid Plum: Taut
I got sent a digital version of the latest release from Graham Dunning’s Fractal Meat label: a book and CD of vocal compositions commissioned by Ingrid Plum. (Not sure if…
Tags: Ingrid Plum
Real Live Canadians at Cafe Oto
They were promised, and they delivered. It takes one hell of a strong programme to get me to bear an August evening inside Cafe Oto so of course I went…
Tags: Alex Jang, Cassandra Miller, Lance Austin Olsen, Linda Catlin Smith
Composed, Uncomposed, Discomposed
I’m allergic to jazz; don’t know why. Probably from being raised on rock, but I always hated rock music that held on to the past as a crutch, as a…
Tags: Anthony Pateras, Erkki Veltheim, Magnus Granberg, Scott Tinkler
Memory, Forgetting
When I wrote about that new recording of John Cage’s Two², I tried to link to my recent review of some of Cage’s other piano music on Another Timbre. And…
Tags: John Cage, Jürg Frey, Terry Jennings
A Portrait of Frank Denyer
An all-too-rare chance last weekend to hear live music by Frank Denyer, an English composer treated like a guilty secret in his home country. Not that a gala evening at…
Tags: Frank Denyer
John Cage: Two²
Difficult Music
Last Saturday night I was out at Iklectic, listening to a live set by Marie-Cécile Reber and Christoph Schiller. Missed the rest of the gig as I sat outside with…
Tags: Christoph Schiller, Cyril Bondi, Marie-Cécile Reber, Morgan Evans-Weiler, Pierre-Yves Martel
Insub Meta Orchestra: Choices & Melodies
Right at the end of last year I wrote about a CD of two pieces by the Insub Meta Orchestra; a fine disc that showed what can be done when…
Tags: Cyril Bondi, d'incise, Insub Meta Orchestra
Glenn Branca
After a while, all that remains is the music. Heard last night that Glenn Branca died. After what I said a couple of weeks ago about there always being something…
Tags: Glenn Branca
Music by Henning Christiansen: The Executioner and Den Røde Skov
Most musicians don’t trust artists. Too focused on content, on saying stuff. Not enough emphasis on technique, always the risk that someone on stage might make sounds the wrong way…
Tags: Henning Christiansen
More guitars, and the editor as composer
In Sonic Youth’s imaginative but haphazardly executed album Goodbye 20th Century, their tackling of various Cage and Cageian compositions contained one key insight: electric guitars can be equated with percussion.…
Tags: Anthony Pateras, Clara de Asís, Earle Brown, Joanna Bailie, Stephen O'Malley, Zwerm
Alvear plays Sugimoto; Sugimoto plays Duplant
I went a Taku Sugimoto gig in a community centre in Footscray about fifteen years ago and he didn’t do shit. For an hour or so he sat there, guitar…
Tags: Bruno Duplant, Cristián Alvear, Taku Sugimoto
Jürg Frey & Magnus Granberg: Early to Late
This Friday Music We’d Like To Hear is presenting a one-off concert outside of their usual summer season, of Ensemble Grizzana playing two new pieces by Jürg Frey and Magnus…
Tags: Jürg Frey, Magnus Granberg
MP Hopkins: Aeroplanes & Puddles
Australians have a knack for eviscerating the more rarefied pretentions of psychography. While the Europeans drew upon an inherited mythology, the Americans self-mythologised. Meanwhile, the Australians remained reluctant to ascribe…
Tags: MP Hopkins
Words and Music: Opera?
There’s a CD rip of Samuel Beckett’s play Words and Music in my MP3 player, with the music composed by Morton Feldman. I’ve tagged it as an opera. Earlier this…
Tags: Anton Lukoszevieze, Morton Feldman, Samuel Beckett
Principal Sound: Feldman and Nono in particular
In the days when information was scarce, one of the few readily available recordings of Morton Feldman’s late work was the CD of Joan La Barbara singing Three Voices. It…
Tags: Luigi Nono, Morton Feldman
Repost: The Fall and the Liminality of Kitten Kong
(Originially posted 2006. RIP Mark E. Smith, who my girlfriend thought “looked pretty good for sixty-five” at the time.) Has anyone made a comedy map of Britain? I don’t mean…
Tags: Mark E. Smith, The Fall
Opera as Entropy: Cage’s Europeras 1 & 2
Working With Limitations: Olivia Block
How do you compose through improvisation? Just let go and try not to think about it? Keep it as it is, or go back and revise? If you revise, do…
Tags: Olivia Block
Working With Limitations: Insub Meta Orchestra
13 unissons: thirteen groups of two to three musicians each, playing one note in unison. Each group may play whenever they want but never with more than three or four…
Tags: Cyril Bondi, d'incise, Insub Meta Orchestra
Sophisticated — God, I’m almost sophisticated
I’ve been running with the same crowd too long. Like-minded people. It’s all very agreeable, as you slowly encourage each other to become more and more jaded with your circle.…
Tags: Antoine Chessex, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Georgia Rodgers, Mauricio Kagel
Magnus Granberg: ‘Nattens skogar’
I’m starting to think of Magnus Granberg’s music the way I think of late Morton Feldman: each one is the same yet each one is different. The restrained but taut…
Tags: Magnus Granberg, Skogen
Pianos (II): Epstein Abrahams Pateras
Nobody has made it…. Nobody is accessible*.” At the last Music We’d Like To Hear concert this summer I heard the first live performance in the UK of John McGuire’s…
Tags: Anthony Pateras, Chris Abrahams, Paul A. Epstein
Tom Phillips’ ‘Irma’, for real
Tom Phillips’ opera Irma is nearly fifty years old and at the pre-performance talk on Sunday evening the host, the director and others were still a little squeamish about directly…
Tags: Tom Phillips
Ryoko Akama: places and pages
This is a vast work, in duration and scope, made from the briefest notations. It shows that there is so much more to be explored in and understood by the…
Tags: Ryoko Akama
The Most Influential Rock Album Of The Last Twenty Years
I live in a country where Oasis is still treated as more than a punchline so I can’t help but notice that their album Be Here Now was released twenty…
The Presence of Julius Eastman, in full
While I was away a new issue of Tempo came out, which includes my review of last December’s London Contemporary Music Festival. This is a much expanded and improved version…
Tags: Julius Eastman
Pianos (I): Parkinson Dalibert Pateras
For reasons economical as much as ideological the piano has become the one-man* laboratory for the composer as autonomous author or auteur using the instrument as a vehicle for musical…
Tags: Anthony Pateras, Melaine Dalibert, Tim Parkinson
Christoph Schiller & Morgan Evans-Weiler: spinet and violin
It describes itself as “an extended improvisation” but I don’t believe it. A few years back Another Timbre put out a solo album by Christoph Schiller titled Variations – a…
Tags: Christoph Schiller, Morgan Evans-Weiler
Late Feldman live and on record
Last September Mark Knoop, Aisha Orazbayeva, Bridget Carey and Anton Lukoszevieze played Morton Feldman’s last piece, Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello at Cafe Oto. I’ve written before about the playing conditions…
John Cage’s ‘Concert For Piano and Orchestra’
The programme notes for the St John At Hackney gig last Thursday admitted that Cage’s Concert For Piano and Orchestra is a work more often seen than heard. Its spectre…
Tags: Christian Wolff, John Cage
A Post-Cage World: Antoine Beuger’s Ockeghem Octets
In my mind I’ve worked up Antoine Beuger as my personal nemesis. Never met him, but his music has always aroused a vehement antipathy, sufficient for me to have resolved…
Tags: Antoine Beuger
Convulsive Amnesia and Disruptive Technology
How does a composer respond to the modern world? Do you try to shut it out as a distraction and risk irrelevance? Or do you try to engage with it…
Tags: Anthony Pateras
I bought 10 Edition Wandelweiser CDs for 50 Euros and now I’m posting tweet-length reviews after drinking beer in the sun.
Tim Parkinson: cello piece A study in self-knowledge triumphing over self-expression, allowing the personal to speak for the universal. Eva-Maria Houben: von da nach da She calls them ‘pictures’ and…
Tags: Wandelweiser
The Canadian Composers Series on Another Timbre: Sabat, Ceccarelli and live
Three nights last week at Cafe Oto to hear concerts dedicated to The Canadian Composers Series on Another Timbre. As always, you get new perspectives on hearing and seeing music…
Tags: Chiyoko Szlavnics, Isaiah Ceccarelli, Linda Catlin Smith, Marc Sabat, Martin Arnold
The Canadian Composers Series on Another Timbre: Smith, Arnold, Szlavincs
In its own quiet way, this is one of the major events I’ve been looking forward to in 2017. Over the past year or so I haven’t been alone in…
Tags: Chiyoko Szlavnics, Linda Catlin Smith, Martin Arnold
Format Trouble: Line Gate v Claudio Parodi
Spent the last month making music, listening to it, making notes but not wanting to expand on them until now. All the music in my collection is ripped to digital…
Tags: Claudio Parodi, Line Gate
One of those wonderful moments where nobody knows what’s going on
Went to the latest Kammer Klang gig a couple of weeks ago. It was recorded by the BBC and is on their website for the next month. Which is good,…
Tags: Cassandra Miller
New music that stays new
I need to talk about some recent releases on Simon Reynell’s Another Timbre label because I’ve got a small stack of them here and still more are due to come…
Tags: Christian Wolff, Dante Boon, Dirar Kalash, Giuliano d’Angiolini, John Lely, John Tilbury, Jürg Frey
The Presence of Julius Eastman
For four years now, the London Contemporary Music Festival have put together the most exciting new music events in town. After last year’s eclectic extravaganza, LCMF 2016 was tightly focused…
Tags: Arthur Russell, Frederic Rzewski, Julius Eastman
More from the guitar: Sarah Hennies, d’incise, Cristián Alvear, Clara de Asís
Earlier in the year I raved about Cristián Alvear’s album of Jürg Frey’s music for guitar. I’ve now been sent two new recordings by Alvear, again both for solo guitar.…
Tags: d'incise, Sarah Hennies
Morphogenesis – Immediata
You sometimes get the feeling that musicians these days are frightened of complexity. It seems to go back to the 1990s, when Pärt and Górecki captured the imaginations of a…
Kammer Klang 2016-17: A Curmudgeon Writes
The new season of Kammer Klang kicked off this week at Cafe Oto. It’s about the most innovative and interesting new music programme going around right now. It works by…
Serious Listening Weekend
Are you playing an instrument or playing music? I’m old-fashioned enough to be leery of improvisation. Spent the weekend listening to new(ish) CDs of music that was not strictly composed;…
Tags: Adam Asnan, Angharad Davies, Anne-F Jacques, Anthony Pateras, Erkki Veltheim, Gaudenz Badrutt, Ilia Belorukov, Illogical Harmonies, Johnny Chang, Jonas Kocher, Keith Rowe, Kurt Liedwart, Louie Rice, Mike Majkowski, Tim Olive, Tisha Mukarji, Vasco Alves
Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello at Cafe Oto
You wish Morton Feldman’s life hadn’t ended so soon; not least because his work was still revealing unknown territory. For all that his late works give the impression of having…
Tags: Morton Feldman
Eva-Maria Houben at Cafe Oto
A warm Tuesday night in London and Eva-Maria Houben is playing piano at Cafe Oto. She’s chosen to play three short sets, so people can enjoy the outside air, a…
Tags: Eva-Maria Houben
Violin+1: Bryn Harrison and Linda Catlin Smith
First, I have to say that I had Linda Catlin Smith all wrong. A couple of months ago Another Timbre released four CDs under the general title ‘Violin+1’: four violinists,…
Tags: Bryn Harrison, Linda Catlin Smith
Music versus material (3): Arturas Bumšteinas
When is a field recording a composition? I suspect many musicians would like to keep this line as vague as possible, without considering how some more abstracted thought might clarify…
Tags: Arturas Bumšteinas
Music versus material (2): Lucio Capece
When is a field recording no longer a field recording? I originally started to phrase this question “where is the line between field recording and…” but stopped when I couldn’t…
Tags: Lucio Capece
Music versus material (1): Claudio Parodi
I don’t trust field recordings. I’ve probably said this before, but I mean a certain type of field recordings: the ones with a pretence to authenticity. It’s a double whammy…
Tags: Claudio Parodi
Who is neither in nor out
If there’s a Renaissance this century it will come from rediscovering what happened last century. So far it feels like a lot of modern musical activity is a matter of…
Tags: Claudio Parodi, Harry Partch
Donnerstag aus Licht in Basel
As with Cage, so with Stockhausen: composers who upset the musical establishment are told their music will not survive them. On Sunday I was at the new production of Stockhausen’s…
Tags: Karlheinz Stockhausen
Composing or improvising, or… (II)
For the last fifty-odd years there’s been a grey area between what is composed and what is improvised. At home, I’ve been listening to some more new CDs from Another…
Tags: John Lely, Jürg Frey, Marek Poliks, Sarah Hughes
Composing or improvising, or… (I)
Each composition is built upon a computer program governing interaction between performers and the system, and creates situations rather than set pieces. The performers have options rather than instructions, and…
Tags: David Behrman, Marginal Consort, Ora Clementi
Jürg Frey: guitarist, alone
Postscript to The Curse of Taste: Christian Wolff
There was another typically eclectic Kammer Klang night a couple of weeks back (the music of Christian Wolff, Vinko Globokar and… Chicks on Speed?). A new piece by Wolff received…
Tags: Christian Wolff
The Curse of Taste: Marchetti, Pisaro
From the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries Western aesthetics were founded upon a fraught consensus of taste. The romantic understanding of art that was naturalistic and intuitive became, strangely, a…
Tags: Michael Pisaro, Walter Marchetti
Stefan Thut, un/even and one. Songs, 1 & 2.
I’m getting Wandelweiser from all over. First Sheffield, then Bilbao and now St Petersburg. Intonema sent me a nice little package and it’s taken me too long to write about…
Tags: Rishin Singh, Songs, Stefan Thut
Kammer Klang: John Wall and Michael Finnissy
Managed to make it to the latest Kammer Klang gig at Cafe Oto (it’s available in streaming audio for the next few weeks). For years they’ve been putting on regular…
Tags: John Wall, Michael Finnissy
Australia Now and Then
I’ve been listening to a lot of music which I should talk about, both live and on CD. The CDs will come up later; for starters I’ve been thinking about…
Tags: Anthony Pateras, Brett Dean, Georges Lentz, Lisa Illean, Richard Meale, Thomas Meadowcroft
Apartment House at Wigmore Hall
You get a funny crowd at Wigmore Hall on a Saturday night. Some punters come just because it’s am awfully nice venue and they fancy an evening of refined entertainment.…
Tags: Egidija Medekšaitė, Henning Christiansen, John White, Luiz Henrique Yudo, Martin Arnold
Bryan Eubanks: The Bornholmer Suite
Looking very Goth, something else I received in the swag from Nueni Records. I’ve only heard a couple of pieces by Bryan Eubanks before, both at last year’s Cut And…
Tags: Bryan Eubanks
Manfred Werder: 2015/3
More text scores and more original Wandelweiser, from Manfred Werder. For the past ten years Werder has been composing music in which the score consists of a found text object,…
Tags: Manfred Werder, Regler
Jürg Frey: Circles and Landscapes
Joseph Kudirka: Beauty and Industry
Other than hearing a performance of his piece wyoming snow on the radio last year, I really knew nothing about Joseph Kudirka before receiving this new CD in the mail.…
Tags: Joseph Kudirka
Unfinished Business: Ezra Pound’s Music
Been listening a lot to two new CDs on Another Timbre: a new album of Jürg Frey’s piano music played by Philip Thomas, and a collection of pieces by Joseph…
Tags: Ezra Pound
LCMF 2015, first three days real quick
I’ve spent the last three nights at the London Contemporary Music Festival and plan to spend the next four there, too. No time to put any of these thoughts into…
Three Days in Huddersfield (Part Two of Two)
Part One is here. If you want a better of what was actually happening at the HCMF this year, go over to 5:4 for detailed reviews of practically everything. I…
Three Days in Huddersfield (Part One of Two)
First night in Huddersfield for the HCMF I went to the first UK performance of La Monte Young’s The Melodic Version (1984) of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line…
Michael Vincent Waller: The South Shore
I got a shock when I first put on this album. It was kindly sent to me by the composer. I opened the package to see an album from Phill…
Tags: Michael Vincent Waller
Apartment House at 20
The question is not whether or not what Cage is doing is art. I’m convinced that it will be art without even hearing the piece, only because he does it.…
Jürg Frey: Grizzana and other pieces 2009-2014
James Saunders – assigned #15
This is a weirdly evocative piece. I wrote about James Saunders’s music last year, having heard a CD and attended a live concert of his music. At the time I…
Tags: James Saunders
The Great Learning at Union Chapel, 2015
One of my formative experiences as a youth was hearing a few minutes’ excerpt from that old LP of Paragraph 7 from Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning on AM radio.…
Tags: Cornelius Cardew
Time With People: warm-blooded reductionism
“Madame, you are an eloquent and warm-blooded woman. I am a cold-blooded reductionist. Let us leave it at that.” — J. V. Cunningham Tim Parkinson has composed some music and…
Tags: Tim Parkinson
Despairs, Would Fall
I’ve been listening to these two CDs from Another Timbre as a sort of diptych. Each one is a single work for ensemble, 45 to 55 minutes. Despairs Had Governed…
Tags: Magnus Granberg, Skogen
Olson III: everything was mapped out in 1967
“It sounds like the music of the future,” he said as he put the CD on. He was right. It was the Organ of Corti release of a Swedish high…
Tags: Terry Riley
Frank Denyer’s Whispers
If only for having the advantage of hindsight, it may be easier to rediscover the past than to discover the present. I got sent some new CDs from Another Timbre,…
Tags: Frank Denyer
George Maciunas, Musical Scoring Systems
I was always annoyed by the insincerity of the art world; I mean the way it pays lip service to stuff it says is important and then ingnores. That’s what…
Tags: George Maciunas
Thanksgiving: Thomas Buckner sings Robert Ashley
I didn’t write about the last time Robert Ashley was in town. Sometimes you have an experience that gives you too much to think about, to write it down coherently…
Tags: Robert Ashley, Thomas Buckner
The technique. Pateras, Toral, Frey.
Not much to report lately except for two gigs, both at Cafe Oto, about one week apart. First night: two solo sets, by Rafael Toral and Anthony Pateras. I’d heard…
Tags: Anthony Pateras, John Lely, Jürg Frey, Rafael Toral
Is This Wandelweiser? West Coast Soundings
I think I’ve ragged on Wandelweiser a few times recently, finding fault with its apparent sense conformity and complacency. It’s not completely true, of course, and as it happens I…
Tags: Casey Anderson, Catherine Lamb, Chris Kallmyer, James Tenney, Liam Mooney, Mark So, Michael Pisaro
Old-Fashioned Modernism: An Index of Metals
Just reading about what Fausto Romitelli hoped to achieve with his final work, the “video opera” An Index of Metals, is enough to cause apprehension. The wish to immerse the…
Tags: Fausto Romitelli
Konzert Minimal play Antoine Beuger and Catherine Lamb
I’ve been getting to know Catherine Lamb’s music. Listening to the CD of her trio three bodies (moving) from Another Timbre has been one of the year’s high points, along…
Tags: Antoine Beuger, Catherine Lamb
Laurence Crane, live and on record
Tags: Laurence Crane
Non-systems (1)
On Saturday I got to see and hear the Scratch Orchestra play selections from Nature Study Notes. I saw these guys performing Cage’s Song Books a couple of years ago,…
Tags: Scratch Orchestra
An Evening with Christian Wolff
Last Monday, on the way back from the Tectonics festival in Glasgow, Christian Wolff gave a talk in London about his music. After his talk, members of Apartment House played…
Tags: Christian Wolff
After “Vessels”
Last night I got to see Philip Thomas play Bryn Harrison’s Vessels live, at Cafe Oto. As implied last time, I hadn’t re-listened to the piece on CD prior to…
Tags: Bryn Harrison
Bryn Harrison’s “Vessels”
I’ve been working my way through that bundle of CDs from Another Timbre and so far the highlight has been the recording of Vessels for solo piano by Bryn Harrison.…
Tags: Bryn Harrison
James Saunders, live and on record
In my last post a month ago(!) I was navel-gazing over the musical conversation going on in London. It’s occurred to me that I’ve been taking for granted how many…
Tags: James Saunders
in vain and outside of taste
I had the good fortune to hear Gorecki’s 3rd Symphony live in concert a few months before the famous recording of it was released and quickly became ubiquitous. This made…
Tags: Georg Friedrich Haas
July Mountain in Clapton
Pretty special night on Saturday, at the Round Chapel in Clapton. Tim Parkinson and a host of other muscian/composers including folks from Sonic Arts Research in Oxford playing music by…
Tags: Makiko Nishikaze, Michael Pisaro
Abundance versus Excess: the Proms, part 2 and Stockhausen
I just remembered I never got around to talking about seeing Stockhausen’s Mittwoch aus Licht in Birmingham last year. That needs to change soon. What sticks in my mind the…
Tags: Karlheinz Stockhausen
Listening to Some Recent Silences
Like John Cage, I’m drawn to art with either too much or not enough in it. This means that I was compelled to attend the Apartment House gig on Sunday…
Tags: Ben Isaacs, Charlie Sdraulig, György Kurtág, Mathias Spahlinger, Michael Pisaro
Working backwards through summer: the Proms, part 1
I was excessively busy with boring workaday stuff this summer, but I did get to see a few shows besides the LCMF. This year’s Proms season was sadly of the…
Tags: Helmut Lachenmann
Authenticity is Overrated
“Cubism must have developed when the artist considered how much of his sketch must be finished. Finishing involves a stupidity of perception.” – Guy Davenport, Narrative Tone and Form. “The…
Tags: Mauricio Kagel
Late November
A lot of good things came together on the night of 9 March. A bit over five years ago I first heard of Dennis Johnson and his piece November, when…
Tags: Dennis Johnson
Evidently I will freeze my arse off for Philip Guston
I spent Saturday afternoon in an empty art gallery in Camden listening to a live performance of Morton Feldman’s For Philip Guston. In a high-ceilinged back room of the gallery,…
Tags: Morton Feldman
Morton Feldman’s early piano music at Cafe Oto
I’ve complained about the piano at Cafe Oto before. Just about everybody has, particularly John Tilbury, who refused to come back until it was replaced. The new piano’s been there…
Tags: Morton Feldman
Golden Fur played Morton Feldman’s “Patterns In A Chromatic Field” at Cafe Oto.
All the elements were in place for a disaster. Cafe Oto can be hot and stuffy in the best circumstances but after several intense summer days, followed by an evening…
Tags: Morton Feldman
John Cage meets Regieoper (part 2)
John Cage meets Regieoper (part 1)
Charlemagne Palestine versus Oren Ambarchi
There’s a bunch of stuff I need to catch up on but first I have to talk about the Charlemagne Palestine and Oren Ambarchi gig at Cafe Oto last week.…
Tags: Charlemagne Palestine, Oren Ambarchi
Song Books Song Books
I have problems with drones (part 1)
As an aside, I mentioned before that I have problems with drones. One thing that nagged at me during the Eliane Radigue gigs was the sense of time: this came…
Tags: Éliane Radigue
It Is Two Weeks Since I Saw Eliane Radigue’s Naldjorlak Trilogy
Still thinking about it. I’m pretty sure that everyone who’s familiar with Eliane Radigue and heard her recent music has remarked on the surprising change so late in her career.…
Tags: Éliane Radigue
Two kinds of craft: Max Eastley v Eliane Radigue
I’m getting fed up with this persistent fad of holding concerts in churches. Even when the acoustics don’t suck, there’s zilch soundproofing between the “hall” and the outside world. In…
Tags: Éliane Radigue, Max Eastley
Mark Knoop plays Morton Feldman’s “For Bunita Marcus”
Where is that buzzing coming from? It sounds like a small piece of machinery grinding away. I’m sure other people are noticing it too; from time to time they’re looking…
Tags: Morton Feldman
John Tilbury and the Smith Quartet play Morton Feldman
Piano and String Quartet, at King’s Place last Thursday. How little you need to make something beautiful, elusive; not just the material, the subject, but how it is articulated. It…
Tags: Morton Feldman
Bird And Person Dyning
An old man is walking slowly through the room. At one end of the room a bird is twittering. Not a real bird; it’s an electronic bird call. The man…
Tags: Alvin Lucier
So wrong it’s right: Morton Feldman
I missed the concerts dedicated to Morton Feldman, my second-favourite composer, at the Huddersfield Festival last month. I’m not exactly sure where Huddersfield is – I suspect it’s Up North…
Tags: Morton Feldman
The Fall and the Liminality of Kitten Kong
Has anyone made a comedy map of Britain? I don’t mean a map indicating clubs and the birthplaces of comedians; I mean a map marking the real locations inhabited by…
Tags: Mark E. Smith, The Fall
Brand New You’re Retro: Elysian Quartet at Cargo
One distinctive tic in my psyche is that scenes from the movie Highway 61 keep appearing, unbidden, in my consciousness. At one point the hero (for want of a better…
Tags: Frederic Rzewski, Gabriel Prokofiev
Political music. No wait, come back!
Percussionists have a rough time of it: they get lumped with all the musical odd jobs nobody else wants, or is allowed, to do. This can include appearing before a…
