Mark Harwood: Two Actors [AKTI].I’ve previously described Harwood’s music as… self-evasive, I think? Ah yeah, “disingenuous exercises in deflection from the absurdity of the audience-performer situation“; which on record transfers the onus almost entirely onto the listener, as the performer’s presence must be deduced rather than observed. What can we infer from the title? There are voices, more than two, so who is playing multiple roles, or who is the patsy? The album begins firmly but gently, arch enough to be sincere. There are oblique laments and fragmentary reminiscences. Each short track is a vignette, captured verité, quotations of quotations, exercises in style, collaged like a film-maker’s diary. Allusions to genres jostle. In the second half things spread out into haunted ambiences, shadowy and sombre; any remaining pop allusions become more disturbed amongst the general air of foreboding. It all ends with a brief moment of self-interregation, followed by an extended dense hum that crowds out any possibility of meaning or resolution. The ways in which this album differs from a lot of Harwood’s earlier stuff is that the process is less in evidence, so that what you hear must be accepted as the complete, finish product for you to contemplate on its own terms. The offhand, even jokey way of presenting itself to the listener to slip past their consciousness has been replaced with dense, thoroughly worked out tracks with an emphasis on depth. (His recent turn to painting may have something to do with this.) This time, the parts all add up to something, even though you may never be sure what that something is.
Erwan Keravec: There will be no miracles here [Buda Musique]. This is a good drone, I mean like a really, really good drone. They don’t get much better than this. First, it’s the real deal: seven bagpipe players literally playing just the drones of their instruments, with no melody whatsoever. Besides the dense sonorousness of multiple bagpipes in unison, the distinctive piercing, nasal aspect of the melodic instrument is entirely absent, except for the subtle brilliance of the fixed low tones. In addition to the pipers, there are three musicians playing on large metal basins; they clamp bundles of long rushes to the rim of each bowl and drag on them, causing the metal vessel to resonate as with a lion’s roar. The continuous pulsing sound of the basins contrasts with the pipes, building up a swirling, irridescent sound. The piece amplifies itself and creates internal movement through its own persistence, shimmering and ominous, until it slowly oscillates across the span of a semitone. This is monolithic music made through ancient means: both the bagpipes and the reed-pulling are drawn from traditional Breton culture, placing this piece outside of time, simultaneously very old and very new, and very powerful. The title is a challenge to the listener.
Zoë Martlew: Album Z [NMC]. I heard a charming work for solo cello by Martlew a while back, Salat Babilya, played by Louise McMonagle. It’s derived from an Iraqi lullaby and shows Martlew’s tender insight into the instrument as a cellist herself. The pieces on Album Z were all composed over ten years later and the charm is conspicuously absent, replaced by a desire to convey style and attitude. The opening track is Martlew herself on amplified cello with effect pedals: G-lude is a fairly convincing and fun display of tube-distortion braggadocio, amongst some lighter theatrical gasping. Other works, like the song cycle Musae, come across as confused and self-conscious attempts to cross-breed racy modern social mores with Proms matinee decorum, producing a musical language that’s akin to arts-admin bureaucratese. It’s not a case of trying too hard as such, but the music is often at pains to make its effects heard. Two works are for soloist and electronics: bravura work by Ben Goldscheider on horn in Nibiru and Mark Simpson on Atma for clarinet is pitched in amongst sound effects and aural cinematics which impress as much for their gaudy bravado as their bold reaching for significance. Both works contain spoken (declaimed, whispered) texts, music itself not being quite enough. It feels mean-spirited to say this and I’m getting it all down here as a way of setting out what does not work for me in music: anything that seems to stake itself on an appeal to a supposed higher authority than what it sounds like. After all, the main point of criticism is to impress upon the reader what sort of person the critic is.
Gamut Inc: Music For Air [Karlrecords]. Who doesn’t love a computer-controlled pipe organ? Humanly-impossible keyboard stuff is almost always fun, whether computerised or mechanical, dazzling with superhuman effects, amusing in the way it flouts expectations, breaking free from apparent physical limitations and rewiring the mind with an expanded consciousness of what is possible in this world. Gamut Inc – Marion Wörle and Maciej Sledziecki – have been doing this sort of things for years, apparently, but I’ve just heard of them with this record. Their work involves getting settled in with a church organ, in this case Église du Gesù in Toulouse, and then wiring up and programming the controls to wring the most out of it. The fast tracks near the beginning resemble Ligeti’s barrel organ arrangements, lots of choppy sounds nimbly dancing about in off-centre but still precise clockwork. They then make great use of controlling the air through the pipes, creating waves of woozy sliding tones as they keep stepping off the gas. By switching things on and off, they can get curving tones that rise as well as fall at different rates, for better microtonal complexity. At times it recalls a wood at dawn, scattered with listless cuckoos. At other times, the intensely rapid effects merge to form blinding illusions, to the point where the organ itself isn’t so much transcended as made superfluous to its own purpose. In one way, that’s saying it’s all a bit gee-whiz, but in another, it made me wonder if I was hearing anything intrinsic to this particular church organ, or if subjected to this level of technical intervention they all start to sound alike.
Paul Beaudoin: bright shining light [Edition Wandelweiser]. More church organ, but completely different. In fact, this is unlike any other organ music released through Wandelweiser, as you can actually hear it. Possibly unlike anything else released on this label, both in motivation and immediate effect. Each of the five pieces here marks its presence immediately upon your consciousness; they’re slow, but never too soft. At times, they’re even forceful. Beaudoin’s inspiration behind these pieces is explicitly spiritual and driven by a need for self-reflection; for us to relfect, that is – he’s not flaunting his own refined sensibility but effacing his ego in the hope of finding betterment for all. One work explores “the powerful emotions tied to our deepest beliefs”, another “the concept of grace… as an ever-present force that reaches beyond us”. It’s almost religious, but he never resorts to a specific deity or a defined belief system; it’s definitely spiritual in the contemplative sense, rather than mystic. Each piece unfolds with the inner calm of a hymn, only the phrasing ebbs and flows from moment to moment, freed of fixed metre. All of this – anonimity, spirituality, immobility, contemplation, aspirational thought – locates the music in the same grounding as John Cage’s later work, even though this sounds nothing like Cage. Beaudoin’s music is informed by that same strength, which is how it holds itself up while seeming at first to be innocuous. I’ve just realised this is the reason why I discussed Martlew’s album above: both compose music with strongly held convictions and meaning, striving to communicate, yet all those qualities are imbued within Beaudoin’s music, while Martlew’s wears it on the outside, a body that gets suitably dressed up for each occasion. Beaudoin trusts us to listen in, gives space to find ourselves, and trusts us to act for the best. The organist is Carson Cooman, playing at Harvard’s Memorial Church, where he fills each piece with a luminous warmth and disarming humanity. The only tiny nod to the capital-E Experimental is the electronic track in stillness emerging, where gentle rumbles and rustling that resemble the amplified workings of the instrument are illuminated by Cooman with the gentlest of colours. The longer work, notes of union and longing, is particularly fine, masterfully contrasting timbre, register and dynamics in a way that seems to happen all by itself.
