Andrew Greenwald: A Bridge Between Spaces [Kairos]. You wait ages for a solo viola d’amore album and then three come along at once. All three are by Marco Fusi and released on different labels so I checked for you and thankfully he hasn’t died. It’s not really true that these are strictly solo viola d’amore, not least because all the pieces on the Greenwald disc are for plain ol’ violin. At times you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise: Fusi digs deep into Greenwald’s A Thing Made Whole (heard previously as the opening of a larger cycle of works) to produce deep, rasping breaths and striated tones more associated with mediaeval instruments than the modern concert hall. In my earlier review, referring to Austin Wulliman’s interpretation of the piece, I blithely stated “I can’t imagine how their interpretations could be technically improved, given the consistency in their calm approach to the finicky scores.” Questions of technique aside, Fusi makes the piece an entirely different experience, dispelling any suggestion of spectralism by filling the tones with noisy urgency. The pacing is also urgent, with Fusi whipping through the piece in roughly two-thirds the time given by Wulliman, miked up close to catch every tiny extraneous sound.
Heard in this context, A Thing Made Whole becomes part of a new and different cycle, an intimate but confronting, even claustrophobic soliloquy of throaty harmonics and half-sounded pitch. A Thing is a Hole in a Thing it is Not (VIII) exemplifies the handsy approach Greenwald and Fusi take towards the violin, each bowed sound surrounded by clusters of taps and smudges against the instrument’s neck and body. It resembles the way Fusi and his composer collaborators treat the viola d’amore, as a resonant object more than a simple producer of notes. The opening piece on the album, the title work, is the most violinistic and, at least in the use of pitch, most conventional; it’s permeated with a nervy loquaciousness whose ticks and stutters which become the focus of close scrutiny in the subsequent, although earlier composed, works. (The contrasting Bourrée is a pregnant pause, seeming about a million miles away from the Back movement it echoes.) The solo works are set apart by Frames, the result of inspired improvisation between Fusi on violin and Greenwald on drumkit, the latter releasing the restrained voice of the former while sharing a percussive language, providing both grounding and ventilation to the more rarefied monologues.
Wired Resonances [Huddersfield Contemporary Records]. Fusi’s collaborations with seven composers to produce works for solo viola d’amore are heard here, mostly recent plus one dating back to 2014. That older piece, Zeno Baldi’s Spikes, suffers from the extensive use of electronics which makes it all sound over-processed and less an extension of the instrument than attempt to dress up an unprepossessing subject. Five of the works use electronics, with Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh’s Breathless having the same fault as the Spikes by using the viola d’amore as a means to an end without aparent regard for its particular characteristics. The electroacoustic works by Pierre Alexandre Tremblay and Barbara Nerness take place on a more equal footing, with Fusi performing in duet with the composer. Tremblay adds his own electric bass to his digital augmentations of Fusi’s playing, while Nerness spotlights and backdrops the viola d’amore with electronic treatments and field recordings. The most successful electronically-enhanced piece is Bára Gísladóttir’s ORF (en líka axir og önnur pyntingatæki), a characteristically audacious and pungent work with frailties and vulgarities set against discomfiting sound affects from suburbia. It’s not the only Gísladóttir piece which seems funny at first but gets more disturbing with further reflection – or the other way round, depending on your temperament. I’ll decide when I find out if they in fact have a suburbia in Iceland. Of the straight-up acoustic works, Giovanni Verrando’s Fourth Born Unicorn, rounded version is a brief Lachenmann-like study in the marginal sounds produced by a prepared viola d’amore, but Mary Bellamy’s Shivering Mountain is a substantial and comprehensive work that exploits the resilience of the instrument, with Fusi demonstrating how even the frailest sounds can persist, and revealing a surprising capability for richly coloured multiple stops.
Evan Johnson: dust book [Another Timbre]. Speaking of exploiting the viola d’amore’s acoustic properties, Evan Johnson has Fusi pursue these qualities to their fullest, but in a very different direction. dust book is one long work in six sections, beginning and ending with interludes, each of which are longer than the sections they frame which should tip you off that we’ve strayed far from the conventional. On the first listen you’ll struggle to distinguish one section from another, because you’ll struggle to distinguish any sound at all from the background ambience of your home. Johnson’s predilection for redolent silences and small sounds are pushed to an extreme of sorts, spurred on by the viola d’amore’s dual nature of astringent timbre and surprising resonance. Fusi is given the task of microdosing the sonorous, concentrating everything into small flecks of sound. Some of Johnson’s compositions can enervate, but the tensions at play here arise from the level at detail set amongst the featureless expanse, mixing abundance with formal parsimony. It is ultimately about sound rather than about ideas about sound, contra the Sphinx-like pseudo-profundity found in, say Manfred Werder. Be reassured there’s no earrape with sudden outbursts, so you can safely listen to it cranked up and not miss anything. One section is labelled as “several canons”, as a challenge for the advanced listener.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Andrew Greenwald, Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh, Bára Gísladóttir, Barbara Nerness, Evan Johnson, Giovanni Verrando, Mary Bellamy, Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, Zeno Baldi
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Lost in music: duets
Sunday 16 October 2022
I’ve been listening to a lot of music without having time to write about it, so now I’ve got them all muddled together in my head and I’m trying to sort out what’s what. Some of it’s not doing much for me, so here’s some of the things that got my attention, even if it’s through beating me over the head with extravagant noise like Kyle Motl & Carlos Dominguez’s Field of Fried Umbrellas. Motl plays a double bass through distortion pedals while Dominguez plays a ‘feedback mixer’ which sounds like it has a few extra distortion and modulator pedals plugged into themselves. The album’s blurb throws out some nice theorising behind the music, talking about “acoustic and electroacoustic phenomena” and “interaction between certain modes of bass playing and feedback structures”, which might be why this high-falutin’ excuse for noisy fun hangs together so well for so long without becoming a chore to listen to. For five tracks on an LP-length tape, recorded over one day/night in the hipster mecca of Boca Raton, Florida, Motl and Dominguez keep moving from one idea to another before you can start to analyse them too much. These are crude tactics but they’re used effectively here to keep immediate sonic impressions foremost in your mind.
While sorting through these I’ve just realised that most of them are from Tripticks Tapes and these are all duets. Duets can be the bane of an experimental musician’s livelihood, where bookers keep setting you up on blind dates with random musos and the results are often just as productive. Camila Nebbia (tenor sax) and Tomomi Kubo (ondes Martenot) “first met the day they started recording at Tomomi’s studio in Barcelona” – it doesn’t say who put them up to this, but it all worked out astonishingly well. As wacky a pairing as Motl and Dominguez’s bass/feedback, Nebbia and Kubo’s Polycephaly goes in hard with the psychedelia on the opening tracks, with Kubo’s exuberant streams of sci-fi exotica given a pop-art sheen by Nebbia’s sax licks. Both use loop pedals and reverb, which do a lot of work later on to smooth out the initial roccoco playing into strange and highly evocative textures, moving beyond the initial novelty of the pairing (and, y’know, the ondes Martenot). By the last couple of tracks things have settled down a little, allowing Nebbia some solos while Kubo provides an otherworldly accompaniment in the background.
Besides Motl’s double bass, I’ve got two sets of bass duets here. Both are live performances. Amanda Irarrázabal and Nat Baldwin’s Grips is another first-time meeting in which the Chilean and the American engage in a grouchy but good-natured argument for the better part of half and hour, each one jumping over the other to rebut the other while elaborating their own part. It’s a packed conversation. By contrast, the duet between Bára Gísladóttir and Skúli Sverrisson, recorded at the Louth Contemporary Music Festival this June, pairs two short sets of Gísladóttir’s acoustic bass with Sverrisson’s electric instrument. In Live from the Spirit Store Gísladóttir, whose work I know only from her enigmatic and slightly threatening compositions, lays tropes and embellishments over Sverrisson’s heavy washes of ambient fuzz. The electric part dominates, chorused to provide a kind of slow cantus firmus, while the acoustic adds more poignant overtones and dips into the electric texture for additional shifts in tone and direction. The second set is half as long and offers less of a contrast than a repeat of the first, but cast with a more urgent and confronting perspective.
