Sarah Hennies: SOVT [elsewhere]. It’s a Sarah Hennies piece so I’m going to listen to it anyway without reading anything in advance to tip me off about what I’m in for this time. Is this one going to be stringent, or more atmospheric? SOVT is for solo piano, nearly an hour long. The piano is muted, strings muffled by preparations, and plays in a single voice throughout. The pianist, in this case Richard Valitutto, is assigned a regime of exercises, repeated drills in morsels of dexterity. So yeah, with all the diligence and rigour applied by Valitutto in this performance I guess this piece is stringent. I would say bracing, but it’s more complex than that. The repetitions gain force through Valitutto’s application, while strangely closing off any broader suggestions for the imagination that repetitive music frequently implies. Each change in episode confounds, neither building on nor negating what has preceded them: the only progress made is in the steady accumulation of experience. Hear without preconceptions, the listener follows the pianist through a comprehensive routine of mystifying purpose to an indefinite end. At first it’s easy to find yourself identifying with the pianist as much as the composer, but then by turns he sounds less than human, more than human, pranking us with a deconstructive joke, breaking into a sudden burst of lyricism, faltering, exhausted, capricious and systematic. At times you wonder if the piano is in fact automated or looped, until you’re grounded again by the consistent thudding of felt hammers on damped strings. By the end you’re none the wiser but a little bit transformed – how, you can’t quite say. Better listen to it again and find out.
Derek Baron / Luke Martin: Distinct and Concealed [Notice Recordings]. I’ve learned to expect aesthetic challenges and confrontations from Derek Baron; Luke Martin is new to me but, on this occasion at least, he plays with feedback oscillators. He keeps the feedback hum and rumble mostly stable, leaving the natural volatlity of his medium to add to the texture and aura. Both pieces are recorded live: on the deceptively titled Distinct Baron and Martin work assiduously to do as little as necessary – background sounds become part of the piece’s translucent fabric. In fact the whole piece sounds like background, with Baron playing long tones and isolated, repeated notes on a small electric keyboard, offset by Martin’s distant-sounding mixer. The aim isn’t to fill the room, but tint the space. Towards the end, it hints at becoming something else. Concealed is a rougher sounding recording, with ambient noise as a backdrop for Baron’s aimless doodling on an upright piano. Martin enters playing feedback noise and random snatches of cassette tapes, while Baron trails off. Longeurs open up as each pauses to contemplate a response to the other, when the time is right; a kind of glacial antiphony evolves between grey noise and languid piano doodles. It seems pointless, because music is pointless; these guys are just here to remind you of the fact by presenting two pieces that strip away all the surface appearances of music and leave you with the deeper substance, engaging your senses of sound, performance and the passage of time. For physical media buffs: if you get the download it sounds like a cassette anyway.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Derek Baron, Luke Martin, Sarah Hennies
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Apartment House in pursuit of the obscure
Saturday 9 December 2023
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 rest of his ensemble. The solo was Heiligenschein by Erkki Veltheim, which was reminiscent of a potted, all-acoustic version of his Ganzfeld Experiment, a heavily-bowed block of thick overtones that buzzed and hovered. Not sure when it was composed, but it conveyed his recent interest in cognition and parapsychology. The Tenney piece was an equally concise piece, of course carrying his own interest in gestalt cognitive theory. Timbres #1 is an unpublished score from the late 1960s, a pointillistic vignette with clever permutations between each instrument, but everything on a single pitch throughout; a kind of extreme klangfarbenmelodie, reduced and compressed flat into one dimension for our ears to hear in three. Between these was a larger work by Pluto Bell, Saint-Girons for small ensemble with field recordings. I previously had no knowledge of this composer, but kind of liked the grey late-cubist approach to combining natural and musical sounds on first listen, with the latter fragmented and ephemeral as though torn and scattered through the indistinct landscape, working to alienate the sounds that might otherwise be more recognisable.
The second half of the concert was taken up by the premiere of Derek Baron’s The Game of Letters, a suite for ensemble in seven movements written for Apartment House. I’ve previously heard Baron’s Fourteen Latches of Heaven and Earth, a gratifyingly challenging collection on Takuroku, and so expected another aesthetic confrontation. Which I pretty much got, inasmuch as The Game of Letters confounded expectations by being confrontingly homogeneous. The musicians moved in almost unison back and forth over meandering modal-type melodic fragments without any pressing urgency. It had that blank, affectless quality admired by John Cage, heard elsewhere in pieces like Arthur Russell’s Tower of Meaning. Baron’s writing here seemed to locate the musicians somewhere between mediaeval folksong and classical antiquity, as the impassive material gave rise to inadvertent counterpoint when things were allowed to slip out of phase. I’m not sure if the piano only came in towards the end of the piece, or if I just hadn’t noticed it in all the monophony.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Derek Baron, Erkki Veltheim, James Tenney, Pluto Bell
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Got yer art right here: Zach Rowden, Derek Baron
Sunday 20 September 2020
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 Rowden’s piece We were listening to music on his new Takuroku release We were talking about music. The signal intrusions of electronic mediation, duplication and distortion hiss and crackle throughout, mixed with various levels of fidelity. Pipes and bowed strings slowly loop and drone amongst a persistent grey hum of urban open spaces. It is music as a practice, of activity located in space. If the dirgelike playing reminds you of folk music, then it is only because those qualities have been buried, unearthed and denatured to the point that any tenuous claim to authenticity comes from the act of claiming those traditional roots through modern practice. Rowden constantly reminds you of the self-reflective aspect to this music, turning it into both an archive and a document that calls into question any authentic representation, other than of itself.
Is music an art form? Of course, you say, that’s an easy one. But is it really? Music, I mean. Derek Baron’s Fourteen Latches of Heaven and Earth hits you with art of the uncomfortable kind, the sort that you may first wish to dismiss as music. Its fourteen tracks are less collage and more mosaic, each element working together to present an image of music that causes us to question and pursue the deeper workings beneath the bland assumptions we typically make when we listen. Yes, every element is musical – in most cases, a brief sketch on upright piano – but labelled in a way to imply that these have been turned out and casually filed away over the years: ‘e j05 copy (2013)’ is a typical example. They’re pretty and charming miniatures, but presented here as unfinished or as offcuts. The titles reflect personal references without any accompanying significance. Other elements intrude, the ambient background, drum machines, a harmonium solo, uncategorisable sounds. The juxtapositions resist context, neither thematically nor through quotidian accumulation. The centrepiece is a long, tortuous runthrough by Baron and with Dominic Frigo of Bach’s Herr Gott, dich loben wir on recorder and guitar; their laboured playing presents music as a form of cultural transmission at its most unpolished and brutal. The album ends inconclusively with an excerpted recording of a choir being taught a mediaeval Salve Regina, another unresolved act of musical pedagogy. Far from a diary or sketchbook, Fourteen Latches of Heaven and Earth is an artistic statement, presenting music as work; uncommodified labour as both its material and its technique, the machinery of how music makes sense of the world laid bare.
