Boring Like A Drill.

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 Timbres #1 is an unpublished score from the late 1960s, a pointillistic vignette with clever permutations between each instrument, but everything on a single pitch throughout; a kind of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
No Comments »

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 business and admired how he took a reductive, positivist approach to playing and composing that produced music both questioning and liberating. It took a while to get my head around his talk about shamanism and the use of ritual and esoteric applications of form. In fact, I still don’t fully get on board with it, but hearing how his foregrounding of the intangibles informs and amplifies his use of impersonal structures added a new, complicating dimension to listening to his work.

Ganzfeld Experiment came out soon after: a solo work for electric violin with electronic processing and a video component. The title sums up the parapsychological zone the piece inhabits, where science blurs with mysticism. White noise pulses and phases throughout, at a rate matching the light and dark in the video – I don’t know if the pulsing aims to match or simply reference the alpha/theta wave frequencies used in old biofeedback meditation systems. It definitely recalls Brion Gysin’s Dream Machines and, more particularly, Tony Conrad’s movie The Flicker. Conrad’s violin playing is also recalled, but Veltheim’s approach is more insidious. Starting as faint electronic artefacts trailing from the white noise, it gradually emerges from the pulse with the bleached-out tone of amplified strings, stuttering without apparent concern for aesthetics. At its peak, before receding again, Veltheim’s playing is too florid to be considered minimal, too stern to be psychedelia. It’s a rigour of process in which expressiveness is earned and, presumably, unbidden by the player’s desires. The notes recommend playing with the video in the dark; I’d imagine it’s more effective the louder it’s played, too. How much of it is an experiment on the performer and how much on the listener is a question left to play on your mind.

Ganzfeld Experiment came out before the year of lockdowns, so its self-isolating qualities have become prophetic. It came to mind when listening to Julia Eckhardt’s Time Suspension (Back and Forth) on Cafe Oto’s Takuroku download label. An extended work for solo viola player created during a month of lockdown last year, its frail sounds are built on a foundation of self-reliance, time, memory and place. Improvising each day for a month, trying to repeat from memory what was played the day before with another minute added on the end, the half-hour recording moves backwards and forwards through time, each section opening up to both the recollection of past experience and expectation of the future. There’s a narrative thread, for us to find for ourselves. The room is present, anchoring time to one place as a stationary dérive in which one achieves greater awareness through mentally recapturing a place already visited. As it happens, there is also a video, photos of the sky overhead taken each day. The music’s ending is strangely hopeful, even transcendent.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Erkki Veltheim, Julia Eckhardt
1 Comment »

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, one as download only in binaural stereo. The three new albums share a particularly gratifying theme in these troubled times, that of an artistic retrofuturism that is finally being redeemed. I can’t be the only person who digs up old documents from fertile periods of the avant-garde and marvels at how many great pieces, artists and ideas languish in a dusty bottom drawer of art history. I listened to all three here and felt like some of these threads were being taken up and given new purpose. Catherine Lamb’s wave/forming (astrum) takes her work with synthesisers in a bold new direction. Having previously used them as a type of enhanced resonator, here they become the primary sound source. Two instruments, built and played by Bryan Eubanks and Xavier Lopez, map out harmonic patterns across a defined space. Cycles abound, slowly looping through the harmonic spectrum, across the stereo field and in the overlapping rhythmic pulses that lock in with your theta waves. The pulses, tunings, bright-coloured but soft-edged sounds and extended duration suggest it’s a lost electronic classic from the Seventies. Its constant transformations belie an academic rigor that keeps hippie vulgarity at bay while still making for a long, strange trip. This one’s the binaural recording, so good headphones and any personally administered assistance will get your head spinning out through the long, dark second wave lockdown.

All That Dust have generally liked to mix up old and new in their releases, but the oldest set this time is a selection from Anthony Braxton’s Ghost Trance Solos. My innate aversion to jazz always leaves me approaching Braxton like a fussy child picking the good bits out of a plate of fried rice, so I cling to albums like this where I can fully embrace his approach to music. Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music comprises more than 150 pieces written over ten years or so, straddling the turn of the century. Drawing on concepts from Native American dance and musical practice, he composed modular kits with defined melodic material and entry points for improvisation, subroutines, collage and intertextual cross-references. Three primary works are presented here, each incorporating parts of other Braxton pieces. Kobe Van Cauwenberghe takes a highly inventive and distinct approach to the scores: he plays alone, on electric guitar, augmented with electronics. There is some overdubbing amongst the real-time looping, as well as a hybrid type of overdub in which he cues in samples from pre-recorded takes of the material. The music pursues erratic, discontinuous lines that can drift away into moments of dream-logic, a fantastic beast part Christian Wolff, part John Zorn. The tension between these two forces cracks open new ideas. Each of the successive pieces opens up into something wilder and woolier as Van Cauwenberghe takes the increased rhythmic freedom and adds greater tonal variety and more eccentric techniques. This is true postmodernism, an ecclecticism that retains a clear character throughout, never stooping to pastiche.

I promised to write more about Anthony Pateras’ music last week, having noted his recent tendency to strip back his often frenetic style into something elemental, placing an instrument’s timbre and resonance front and centre as the subject. Duos for Other Instruments is his latest collaboration with fellow provocative musician Erkki Veltheim. Their previous duets – The Slow Creep of Convenience and Entertainment = Control – have been large, monolithic works which confront the listener with the inherent contradictions of ‘minimalist’ music, at once subversive and commodified. The two pieces presented here, recorded in Melbourne in June, are briefer but even more severe. Ersatz is a twenty-minute trill for viola and celeste, Golden Point the same but for harpsichord and mandolin. The pitches never change – there seems to be a Scelsi-like rising of maybe a sixth-tone in the mandolin but that might be my ears playing tricks on me, or the instruments giving out. The quaint, modestly-voiced instrumentation and manageable dimensions might imply these are less ambitious works, with something of the salon concert about them, but their obstinate singularity of material and structure make their passivity all the more aggressive. All of the musical action comes from the inadvertent interplay of the overtones in the instruments’ timbres, a homespun analogue of Lamb’s synthesisers, with Veltheim’s viola in Ersatz blurring into a single, unknowable instrument and the dual protagonists of Golden Point exchanging identities from one moment to the next. The two play with a stamina that is more dogged than perfectionist, preferring to exploit the situation of a fragile collaboration that could turn adversarial.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Anthony Braxton, Anthony Pateras, Catherine Lamb, Erkki Veltheim
1 Comment »

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 sign of validation, instead of using it as a springboard for something new. I’m incapable of hearing that innovation in jazz; I keep hearing these callbacks to the past as a sop to the audience and critics, lest the musos fall from favour for getting too far out of line. Everyone’s playing something really wild and free when somebody just has to throw in a ii-V progression to reassure everyone that they’re still listening to jazz. Self-conscious rock is no fun either.

I’m listening to Guède by a French quartet of Frédéric Blondy, David Chiesa, Rodolphe Loubatière, Pierce Warnecke: piano, double bass, drums, electronics. Two pieces, each bang on 30 minutes. Everything flows and avoids resolution, seemingly without effort. Just as things start to get too cosy, pitched sounds fade away and the group plays on with noises. The pulse remains and nothing breaks the surface of restrained dynamics, a continuum is maintained while the material remains in flux. It’s improvised, so I get fussy and start wondering if it all moves a little too smoothly without a guiding compositional logic.

In some ways, the sound is similar to some of Magnus Granberg’s recent music. Granberg’s pieces are open in form, but still composed. His most recent release, Es schwindelt mir, es brennt mein Eingeweide, is a long work recorded late last year. The sextet’s playing here is more sparse than usual, with the spine of the work formed by isolated notes traded back and forth between Granberg’s prepared piano and Christoph Schiller’s spinet. Other instruments elide between violin and viola da gamba, some percussion and very subtle electronics. At times, the rest of the ensemble retreats to an almost inaudible background haze; there’s a small surprise when the violin finally plays a sustained note. The musicians give shape and structure to an hour of the slightest material, with turns in sound and instrumentation that throws each preceding section into relief.

I’ve talked before about several releases on Anthony Pateras’ Immediata label, but did not discuss North Of North’s 2015 album The Moment In And Of Itself. The nature of the trio – Pateras on piano, Erkki Veltheim on violin and Scott Tinkler on trumpet – set off my anti-jazz snobbery. The combination of instruments threatens a certain level of fussiness but this risk is immediately exploded on the group’s new self-titled album, released on their own label. There are three pieces, each titled ‘Church of All Nations’ after the recording venue. The out-of-sequence numbering of the tracks suggests that they picked out the best bits from their session, as does the strength of the playing and the coherence of the music. It’s improvised and it’s relentless, each musician serving up dense blocks of sound that alternately mesh and clash. The playing focuses on texture and timbre, with their highly developed technique and harmonic sense directed towards a greater artistic statement.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Anthony Pateras, Erkki Veltheim, Magnus Granberg, Scott Tinkler
No Comments »

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; not in the authorial sense. For most of them I could make the argument that these are compositions, not improvisations.

There’s a growing, interesting genre of music that defines, develops and interprets compositional parameters as a joint process between musicians. These pieces aren’t an a priori realisation of a composer’s indeterminate score, nor are they spontaneously improvised. This seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon. Off the top of my head I can’t think of examples of these methods going back as far as “free improvisation” in the 1960s. There was “group composition” but that was just a term for improv musos who had to play art galleries instead of jazz clubs. It’s a sign that the genre is evolving, maturing.

I’ve been working through a rich vein of discs sent from the Another Timbre, Intonema and Immediata labels. Violinist Angharad Davies and pianist Tisha Mukarji recorded a set of improvisations over two days this February, released under the title ffansïon | fancies. In an interview on the website it mentions that the second day of recording was forced by “circumstances”, but this helped the album immensely. Material from the first day was evidently reworked, developed and refined for takes used on the final release. (“It struck me that this is a particularly fruitful way of using improvisation.”) The results show the benefit of additional time for reflection. Each piece reveals a focus on detail without losing sight of an overall direction or shape. Sounds are allowed to develop and change over time without rambling, giving each piece a character that can range from spiky pointillism to deconstructed folk music.

The St Petersburg-based Intonema label finds plenty of room to wander within what appears at first to be a pretty narrow range of music. The wandering is both musical and geographical. Tri presents a state-of-the-art improvisation in electroacoustic music with venerable electric guitarist Keith Rowe and Ilia Belorukov and Kurt Liedwart on various instruments, objects, computer processing and electronics. It documents a live performance and listening at home it’s hard to get too excited about all the technique on display. Sympathy to the guy in track one with the cough.

In contrast, Belorukov’s collaboration with Gaudenz Badrutt on electronics and “objects” and Jonas Kocher on accordion makes for fascinating listening. Rotonda is a live performance inside the Mayakovsky Library in St Petersburg. The musicians note that the space of the rotunda and its specific acoustics makes it “the fourth collaborator” in the piece. A compositional constraint is introduced: “acute attention to silences and extremely careful work with sound”. A slow, deliberately-paced music unfolds over nearly 50 minutes, each performer knowing that the resonance of the space will fill and colour their inactivity. A welcome relief from the horror vacui that affects so many musicians, without ever becoming a dry, didactic exercise in silence.

Tooth Car features Canadians Anne-F Jacques and Tim Olive playing live in the US: two fairly short extracts, which may be all that is needed for audio only. The limitations here are mechanical. Jacques constructs rotating surfaces that are played and amplified, while Olive amplifies other objects with magnetic pickups. The rotating devices provide regular ostinati throughout each piece and the various colours of metallic scraping suggest something close to sound sculpture.

For real group composition, Polis presents a combine, of intentional sounds and unexpected factors. Electroacoustic composers Vasco Alves, Adam Asnan and Louie Rice collaborated by preparing compositions and then mixed them, playing the mix through a car sound system that drove to various locations around the city of Porto. A complex but not impenetrable blending of sounds emerge, with different tracks overlapping each other, elaborated upon by different locations and live sampling of urban spaces. A neat convergence of pure sound, documentary, field recording and spatialisation.

Perhaps more conventional, Volume by the duo Illogical Harmonies on the Another Timbre label clearly identifies itself as a jointly composed piece. The violinist Johnny Chang and double bass player Mike Majkowski improvised together over several months, transcribing, performing and revising until they had sculpted this hour-long suite of five movements. This painstaking process has produced a beautifully restrained and focused performance, which at first sounds like a concentrated study on intonation and tuning but on closer listening reveals beautiful details of refined ornamentation and subtle relief.

Anthony Pateras has built a career out of being both a composer and an improviser, and his own Immediata label has recently produced a series of limited edition CDs of works that lurk in the grey area between the two domains. (Downloads are also available on Bandcamp.) I was going to discuss a couple of these now but I’ve just been listening again to his collaboration with Erkki Veltheim, Entertainment = Control. We’re back to straight violin and piano here and this bravura performance is part lost minimal epic, part social commentary, part virtuosic tour-de-force and part pisstake. I was going to say this disc is ideal if you think The Necks are too fussy or Charlemagne Palestine is too straightlaced, but then I started reading the extensive sleeve notes again. Pateras and Veltheim discuss fascism and sadomasochism, the Marx brothers, punk cabaret and the plague of El Sistema amongst other things and I can see I need to save all this for a separate post.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Adam Asnan, Angharad Davies, Anne-F Jacques, Anthony Pateras, Erkki Veltheim, Gaudenz Badrutt, Ilia Belorukov, Illogical Harmonies, Johnny Chang, Jonas Kocher, Keith Rowe, Kurt Liedwart, Louie Rice, Mike Majkowski, Tim Olive, Tisha Mukarji, Vasco Alves
2 Comments »