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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
(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…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
Where is the “new” in new music? Some composers work in a style that seems to present something modern, at least on the surface. To what extent is this based…
Paolo Griffin’s not as easy to pin down as he first seems. The three pieces on his debut album Supports & Surfaces were recorded in England, Canada and Finland. Each…
There’s a counterpart to those composed drones I was talking about last week, in improvisation when musicians make a piece out of sounds that remain mostly static, where development or…
Do we even know what we mean anymore when we talk about drones? I seem to remember a definition given by Robert Ashley many years ago which turned away from…
I’ve been listening to the latest batch of releases from Kory Reeder’s Sawyer Editions label. Bodies of Water presents two instrumental trios by Sarah Hennies which give further insight into…
I’ve got some catching up to do after my break. Composer Kory Reeder has just issued another five albums on his Sawyer Editions imprint – I’ll get to these shortly…
Back from mental vacation, lots of catching up to do.
It’s been eight years since I first heard Lisa Illean’s chamber orchestra piece Land’s End, in a concert with Brett Dean conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra. At the time I…
The latest Music We’d Like To Hear this weekend was a de facto launch for Scott McLaughlin’s album we are environments for each other, with the second half of the…
The second release under Greyfade’s new Folio book/music imprint continues in the same vein as last month’s treatment of Kenneth Kirschner’s July 8, 2017. Joseph Branciforte has made an acoustic…
It took me ages to hear these two albums. I mean, I’d listened to them, repeatedly, but I’d never latched on to a true idea about what was going on.…
There’s a paradoxical tension at work in the best of slow, quiet music. While appearing faint and fragile, it maintains resilience through the integrity of its structure, each element supporting…
Do not try to think too much about what you’re hearing when listening to El Jardín de las Matemáticas (The Garden of Mathematics); you’ll end up tying yourself into intellectual…
It’s great that art doesn’t have to come from or go to any specific place, much as we’d sometimes like to forget that when we try to put our enthusiasm…
Elsewhere has released two albums of very spare, refined music. Samuel Reinhard’s For Piano and Shō presents a pigeon pair of like-titled works which find inspiration in John Cage’s late…
Rodney Sharman: Known and Unknown (Redshift). My exposure to Sharman’s music is small and spotty: when describing his works for voice and guitar performed by the Paramorph Collective I lumped…
This ain’t drone. It’s slow and monophonic, with no obvious change in pitch over the time it takes you to normally breathe in and out, but it plays out like…
Last Sunday an afternoon of concerts was held at the Round Chapel in Clapton to commemorate what would have been the 88th birthday of composer John White. White, who died…
[Part 1: daytime concerts] In the evening at Wigmore Hall, Apartment House presented two more premières but opened the concert with a late work by Elisabeth Lutyens, Go, Said the…
Only Music Can Save Us Now was the title for the three concerts presented by Apartment House at Wigmore Hall last Saturday, led as ever by Anton Lukoszevieze, where morning…
Gabriel Vicéns is a new name to me, despite not being the first record he has out. A quick look through his back catalogue explains why: originating from Puerto Rico,…
I’ve occasionally mentioned the Octandre Ensemble – particularly their advocacy of Frank Denyer, like last month – but not the music composed by their co-director, Christian Mason. Time – Space…
The Ostrava Days Festival began the new year with a compilation of highlights from their 2023 season, available in a few permutations (the CD version captures only a quarter of…
At Christ Church Spitalfields in 2011 I witnessed one of the most astounding performances in my life when Charles Curtis played Eliane Radigue’s Naldjorlak with uncanny flawlessness. So glad I…
I got sent a digital download of a limited-release cassette of not-bad bedroom collages turning 20th Century composers into Yuppie-friendly repetitive loops that would have knocked my socks off in…
It’s composition, but who composed it? William Walker’s The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion is an anthology of American shape note hymns, published in 1835. In 2022, Cleek Schrey and…
I swear I’m not warming to Matthew Shlomowitz’s music; it’s just that he jerks me around, which is doubtless part of his intention, and that I’ve been fortunate enough to…
Christian Wolff has now entered his tenth decade, and I Dischi di Angelica have celebrated by releaseing a concert of premieres and some of his older pieces, presented in Bologna…
Maya Verlaak’s metamorphosis into an English eccentric continues apace. Her new album Trace from Birmingham Record Company comes without text on the cover and without explanations for any of the…
Think I’m the wrong type of person to be listening to these records, so assume the following comes from a grumpy old man who has fallen out of touch with…
It’s taken me a while to get a handle on Jakob Heinemann’s compositions; not that I found it difficult to like, but it’s hard to get a bead on what…
Like a bad dream, you wake from it and it fades, only to resume as soon as you relax. You can’t remember the details, it’s all a vague wash of…
I feel like I’m rating different grades of sandpaper when writing listening notes on these. They’re all deliberately awkward music made from digital electronic synthesis and/or processing. Andreja Andric’s two…
Someone expected me to listen to fourteen hours of music by a composer I didn’t like. It’s not that I disliked Philip Corner’s music as such; just that I found…
Ah yeah I’ve heard some new music this year. It was Apartment House again at Cafe Oto again, this time premiering four new works. Apparently it was part of some…
There’s a new batch of five recordings on Kory Reeder’s Sawyer Editions imprint, this time including one by Reeder himself. I’ve only heard one other piece by Reeder, the 70-minute…
Evidently, I missed a few great gigs in Ireland last year. Fortunately, the Louth Contemporary Music Society has preserved them. Folks’ Music documents three works commissioned by them, each one…
There’s always something horrible about Fluxus anthologies. They inevitably end up less than the sum of their parts; a motley collection of dusty, mismatched relics from a brief moment of…
Haven’t been writing much lately because I keep listening. Each time I listen changes what I want to say. The Canadian Redshift Music Society has released a new set of…
Some music starts out as one thing and ends up another, some music appears to be about one thing when it’s really about something else. Then, there’s Ian Power’s Ave…
Another Apartment House gig at Cafe Oto, bringing out stuff it’s hard to imagine getting heard anywhere else. Anton Lukoszevieze began with a cello solo before being joined by the…
Marja Ahti and Niko-Matti Ahti created this piece for radio in 2020. Nokivesi (it means ‘soot-water’) is a musique concrète montage of domestic and natural sounds, deftly treated with electronics…
To use a British euphemism, making an album of solo accordion music by Colombian composers is “a bold decision”. It’s a shared fate of colonial nations that their culture will…
There are a few composers and musicians I’ve always enjoyed and reviewed a number of times here before, so I tried to pause for a bit before writing about them…
Just before, I was talking about distinctions between the process and the piece when musicians get together. “The ensemble Les Certitudes was created in 2021 as a means for developing…
There’s a difference between the process and the piece. Even when the two are conflated in practice, a conceptual distinction is made by the artist to allow both to coexist…
Presque rien could be the watchword for Aaron Einbond’s compositional method. Each of the four pieces on his All That Dust album Cosmologies lurk in the background almost imperceptibly, to…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
(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.…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
“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,…
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…
“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…
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…
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.…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
“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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
(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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“…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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
(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…
(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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
(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…
(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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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’…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“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…
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…
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’,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
(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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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;…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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,…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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.…
“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…
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…
“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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
