Jon Catler: The Young Mountain of the East [Chaikin]. If the title doesn’t tip you off, the Jung Hee Choi cover art will: this is an homage to La Monte Young. Catler is a veteran of Young’s Forever Bad Blues Band and Choi’s own Sundara All Star Band, with a long history of playing microtonal electric guitar across a range of genres. As an homage, The Young Mountain of the East is a well-informed and constructive extension of Young’s legacy, more than any derivative or sound-alike “tribute”. Catler takes the opening chord of Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano and builds upon it, extending the paired intervals beyond Young’s imposed limit om harmonic complexity into even finer gradations (to get technical and quantitative, Young’s composition sticks with pitches relatable to the first seven harmonic overtones – Catler’s goes as far as thirteen). Written as a double quartet for overdubbed fretless guitars, Catler produces rich but translucent sonorities made of e-bowed strings in esoteric tuning. The generated harmonies of the chords are very tasty, with the signature sound being the use of sliding tones to resolve from one set of intervals to another. The piece is organised into twelve sections, each of precisely equal length, suggesting the formal rigor beneath the music’s superstructure. While there is a logic to the piece as it progresses from one set of intervals to the next, it also allows development and further apparent flexibility to emerge as a consequence of the process – from one section to the next things get more complex, until reversing and resolving back to the initial stability of the opening section. Catler uses the complexity to extrapolate rhythms out of the beating frequencies in the centre of the piece, breaking the prevailing gloss of the sustainer guitars, and even cuts loose a little with some melismatic soloing before stability reasserts itself. It’s a different beast from Young’s own works, as you would hope, while sharing some of the same qualities: interrogative study, self-discipline, a devotional approach to expression, an immaculate surface. It does not, however, make demands on the listener’s endurance.
Cristiàn Alvear: Sin título #30 – Singularidad #1 (Carrasco – Astaburuaga) [Insub]. Alvear is a guitarist who brings a necessary attitude somewhere between patience and bloody-mindedness to pull off pieces composed out of the slenderest means with an absolute rigor and austerity. He makes each of these works inexorable and inevitable, without ever seeming machine-like about it. The composers here for these two solo works are Nicolás Carrasco Santiago Astaburuaga, both of whom I’ve heard Alvear play before. Each piece sounds either antecedent or precedent to the respective previously recorded work. Carrasco’s previously heard sin título #26 is a study in stasis, as is this sin título #30. Over half an hour, Alvear begins by ringing the changes on harmonics and then settles into a repeated, chiming chord. In terms of form, it’s the skeleton of a James Brown jam slowed down about ten times, staying on it until over halfway through when the harmonics briefly come back before resuming as before. Well, not quite as before, as the chiming chord is now a single low note that broods at length before suddenly cutting out. Astaburuaga’s Singularidad #1 is about half as long but works on a similar scale. As with the Carrasco, it’s a puzzling, oblique non-sequitur of a piece, beginning with Alvear slowly picking out a loose, repeating riff disturbed by occasional off-kilter bursts of electronic chaff. A field recording interrupts, leaving us with some audio verité while the guitar grumbles with bass reverberations until it eventually rebuilds into a slow, indecisive vamp. A few other intrusions occur before everything just breaks off. As observed last time, “Time passes in a dreamlike state, with no logical connection or momentum, and so will either soothe, frustrate or disturb you.”
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Jon Catler, Nicolás Carrasco, Santiago Astaburuaga
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Alvear-Bondi, d’incise etc.
Sunday 20 March 2022
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 two. So far, each has paired two works by different composers, most of whom I’m not familiar with at all. The exception is d’incise, whose 40-minute Sigh (carried away) adds electronic enhancements to Alvear’s guitar and Bondi playing four cymbals. The piece suits their patience and inner stillness, often alternating between the quickly dying tones of the guitar and the rustle of percussion. It spells out a flat, thin sonata made of metallic edges and sounds extended beyond their confortable zones, keeping you alert and wary while never raising its voice. Its companion piece, Santiago Astaburuaga’s grado de potencia #2, adds field recordings which seem to take up the foreground, the musicians introducing brief snatches of speech and sound that appear and disappear in alternation. Time passes in a dreamlike state, with no logical connection or momentum, and so will either soothe, frustrate or disturb you.
Percussion and electric guitar return for Nicolás Carrasco’s sin título #26, a study in stasis that progresses slowly while seemingly making no headway. Alvear plays obstinately reiterated notes that expand into obstinately reiterated chords, counterweighted by a series of recurring percussive noises. The juxtaposition keeps everything slow but taut. Anna-Kaisa Meklin’s Ground in Cis changes things up with the composer adding her viola da gamba to Bondi on harmonium and Alvear’s guitar, making a piece that seems almost rustic by comparison. The three play in harmony over each other before briefly, one by one, breaking into a more florid melody as though allowed to lapse into normal time. It’s all rather charming, particularly as the gentle electric guitar, homely harmonium and sweetly sonorous viola da gamba make such mismatched companions. These recordings were all made in Covid-straitened times last year, with Alvear in Chile added to the other musicians based in Switzerland.
Bondi and d’incise have collaborated on compositions a number of times over the years. The 45-minute Zgodność, made over 2020-2021, is written for a seven-piece ensemble with an accompanying tape part. It sounds a bit different from their earlier pieces, with this one less beholden to processes and with greater variability in its texture and mood over time. In its instrumentation of winds (trumpet, bass clarinet, accordion, harmonium) and strings (viola, cello, double-bass) and its ebbs and flows in texture and dynamics, from faded or frayed high sounds to tutti swells and lugibrious tessitura in the low registers, Zgodność comes across to the listener as a kind of pastoral symphony, in the margin. Stringently compressed in its range and its orchestration, the playing still sounds full and expressive. The tape may play a part, but it does not seem prominent. The seven live musicians are to the forefront throughout – the Blutwurst ensemble, based in Florence, are the orchestra here. Their prowess at interpreting a spare piece to the fullest can also be heard in Emmanuel Holterbach’s Ricercar nell’ombra, a 2018 collaboration which was released on Another Timbre. Holterbach was effusive when describing Blutwurst then, and this recording is further confirmation why.
