Concepción Huerta: No Queda Nada Todo Resuena [Signal Noise]. Oh yeah, thinks me, a nice do-over of Mikrophonie I, all these metallic roaring rumbles with scintillating partials coruscating over the top as the microphone magnifies all these small abrasions on a resonant surface. Then, hold the ‘phone, oh yeah! This ain’t percussion at all, it’s all analogue electronics: Huerta was feeding sound from a vintage Buchla synth onto tape, then pingponging it back and forth on cassettes to create this pair of ruins from the future. The first, No Queda Nada, starts out dirty with fat noisebands and filtered static, but eventually starts to reveal the clinical origins of the sounds when the signals cancel themselves out with neat, eerie fadeouts into complete silence. The use of analogue tape and particularly cassettes acts as another set of filters, which become increasingly aggressive in their instability with each reiteration, making the whole piece come alive in its unpredictability. There’s a process at work, even though it cannot be heard, which gives both pieces a lean form and structure even as the sounds sprawl out and forwards with relentless intensity. No Queda Nada follows the process to steadily filter itself into ringing frequencies, Todo Resuena reveals the non-physical origin of the sounds by dissolving into strange loops and phases of feedback, before suddenly cutting off dead. Huerta cites Daphne Oram as her main influence (and source for the title), discussing entropy and information theory in a kind of metaphysical way. I’d add to this by citing Ron Nagorcka’s “the very essence of electronic media is distortion” and saying that these two pieces reminded me more of early Pauline Oliveros, so I like it.
Ben Carey: Inventions [Hospital Hill]. Carey has also been playing with vintage synth gear, with these six tracks making a compilation of his globetrotting adventures in studios around Europe, North America and Australia. The striking feature that unites these pieces is the depth and the detail, and the abstract flow of large and small sounds contains a wealth of elaborate, but never dense, counterpoint with a great variety of character. The thing about attention to detail like this is that it suggests taste is the primary operating method at work, rather than any conceptual integrity to hold the work together. To a certain extent, this might be true on Inventions, but Carey does have some philosophy to back him up (via Gilbert Simondon), to treat the electronic processes in his equipment as organic functions, and so lets the instruments speak to discover where they may lead his compositional thinking. It works, largely due to Carey’s sensitive handling of the instruments and willingness to listen: moments that seem flashy will titillate the ear without dominating the overall piece, nothing stays still for long and yet never feels like Carey is trying to push things into activity for its own sake. With each successive piece, the presence of an internal logic appears to be more evident, even if this is an illusion. You think you’ve got a bead on his aesthetic and then halfway through the album things suddenly get very crunchy, forcing you to recalibrate. The last track is what I always imagine Autechre should sound like.
Chiyoko Szlavnics: Structures in the Mind’s Eye [Populist]. It’s been too long since I heard anything by Szlavnics. Structures in the Mind’s Eye is a composition from twenty years ago but given new life by Marco Fusi, who plays a viola d’amore for this interpretation. The instrument’s sympathetic strings add another layer of electroacoustic resonance while Szlavnics adds spatialisation to the sine waves that play against Fusi’s bowing. It’s a precise work, with Fusi’s own precision enhancing the complex of real and imagined sounds, produced both directly from their respective sources and indirectly by their interactions. A peculiar transformation takes place, as in the latter half Fusi has his viol subsumed by the pure electronic sounds; his playing takes on the role of activating the inert sine waves and modulates them, adding a ghost to the machine’s cool industrial humming. It’s also strange how this piece never really sounds austere, despite the slow, deliberate motions and discrete phrases neatly separated by silences. This is a binaural recording so use your earbuds not the phone speaker when you play it on the bus.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Ben Carey, Chiyoko Szlavnics, Concepción Huerta, Marco Fusi
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Strings enhanced: Alessandrini, Fusi, Cetilia
Sunday 22 March 2026
Patricia Alessandrini and Marco Fusi: Proximity, Distance [Sideband]. I’m all about using feedback as a musical method, so I’ve been getting to grips with viola d’amore adept Marco Fusi‘s collaboration with Patricia Alessandrini. Alessandrini works with acoustic feedback and electronics, and has spent about the last five years on and off creating with Fusi an elaborate but lucid style of electroacoustic music. The two musicians’ respective instruments form a symbiotic relationship, with Fusi’s violin and viola d’amore acting both as resonant bodies and tone generators, each playing roles which can simultaneously generate and condition the feedback conditions in real time. Alessandrini makes use of amplification, including contact microphones, and the resonance of the recording space to introduce the feedback tones through the speakers. She has also built the “Feedbox”, a collapsible, portable wooden container with transducers fitted to it to act as a surrogate loudspeaker, large viol and small room all at once. Fusi and Alessandrini work together very closely, with a degree of interaction that shows up much live electroacoustic music as little more than a form of accompaniment. The thinking here is beyond instruments-plus-electronic processing, instead harnessing electroacoustic phenomena to create a mercurial compound instrument with a life of its own. The opening piece “Adjoining, Touched” shows this best, in that you quickly give up trying to distinguish one musician from the other as it misses the point. Each of the pieces maintains a serious mood for the album, even as the colour and shading is far from monochromatic; the focus is on producing varieties of tone. On “Squared, Boxed” percussive effects are introduced, either from the Feedbox or one of Fusi’s instruments magnified by amplification (both violin and viola d’amore are used throughout, with one often present passively as an additional resonator). In the later pieces some more obvious bowed and plucked sounds seem to emerge, but these are used as a means to an end, or as another coloration device to the overall sound: the title piece “Proximity, Distance” sounds like an ensemble transformed, while on “Fractured, Undone” the strings seem to function as triggers for different kinds of feedback oscillation. It’s a rare case of an album focused on demonstrating innovative techniques that both succeeds as a musical experience and wordlessly reveals a depth of insights into the ramifications of pursuing this technique. It also makes me sad that I won’t be able to get to Fusi’s solo gig in London this week.
Laura Cetilia: gorgeous nothings [elsewhere]. It can’t be just me who’s thinking there’s been an awful lot of albums in recent years by female cellists who also sing a bit. Not quite as prevalent as solo albums by crossover-type composer-pianists, but still. This is why I initially balked at an album by just such a cellist with the title gorgeous nothings. Forgive me, I forgot she’s also a member of the ensemble Ordinary Affects, whom I’ve heard giving fine interpretations of works by Mangnus Granberg and Michael Pisaro-Liu. Her three works on this album are spare, thoughtful pieces: the title work is indeed for solo singing cellist, but the nothings alluded to are more John Cage than Taylor Swift. It’s a calm, sombre affair: bowed notes are slow, soft and translucent, but within a low, restricted range and in no mood to float. Cetilia’s voice provides harmonic overtones that resonate with or beat against the cello playing. I’d call it melancholy, but then the second piece is titled six melancholies, with Cetilia joined by fellow Ordinary Affects members Morgan Evans-Weiler on violin and J.P.A. Falzone on vibraphone; the percussion is often bowed, acting in a similar manner to Cetilia’s singing in the previous piece. It’s an introspective, self-effacing work, the three performers studying each note, chord or short phrase in isolation, treating each event with close attention before moving to the next. The longer piece soil + stone is a cello duet with Hannah Soren, Cetilia again adding voice very unobtrusively, as coloration and troubling the certainty of the cellos’ pitch. It’s not a heavy piece, neither a drone nor a drag, but it does not deal in trifling lyricism. The two cellists ground themselves with slow descending passages, taking the harder road. The gentle beauty that emerges from their playing comes through as a reward for their efforts, rather than assumed as a premise.
