Gentle Fire: Further Explorations [Paradigm Discs]. I called Explorations, the first Paradigm issue of Gentle Fire recordings, an example of all that is best in archival box sets, combining historical interest and importance with a compelling and exciting listening experience. Further Explorations extends the previous collection with a single disc of performances recorded by German radio in 1973 and 1974. The group, musician/composers Richard Bernas, Hugh Davies, Graham Hearn, Stuart Jones and Michael Robinson, play a combination of conventional instruments, electronics and home-made instruments. Yeah, they’re British but they also worked closely with Stockhausen (Sternklang) and so their ways of making music are an intriguing hybrid of the empiricist, do-it-yourself methods espoused by the Scratch Orchestra and the abstract or mystical idealism that directed improvisations under the European avant-garde. This permits them more than a single dimension to their playing, allowing for interpretations of these very open scores that question and play with the assumptions upon which these compositions operate, whether expecting rigour or anarchy, high seriousness or sly irreverence: there’s a bit of everything in the way they tackle these pieces, without resorting to making the vehicles for their own ideas. The new face amongst the composers here is the late Erhard Grosskopf, whose Looping 1 begins the album. Composed for the ensemble, the piece is built out of playback of tape loops of filtered electronic tones and speech, which the musicians must match with suitable harmonic relationships. This gives it an unusual consistency, as though the piece is all straight-through playback, with a fixed, minimal texture. The voice fragments are electronically treated and distorted, gradually becoming clearer. The text is, almost inevitably, by Mao Zedong, as period-perfect as a Raleigh Chopper.
Graham Hearn’s Art Must Be Fed sets the musicians randomly-selected tasks to perform, either to play something “badly” or sing, hum or whistle some remembered music from elsewhere. The wonky, humorous nature of the piece is tempered and made more poignant by the gentle pacing of the work, guided by a slow, repeating piano phrase that resembles the beginning of a Satie piece that never gets going, enhancing the atmosphere of melancholy absurdist theatre. Their rendition of Christian Wolff’s perennial Edges is a different performance from the London EMI recording from a few years earlier and shows the group’s interpretative chops in a more conventional light. While very different, both pieces require their performers to make decisions on the fly, where the given instructions are unstable, flexing back and forth between acting as a waypoint and a limit. The two group compositions are striking in the way they take a monolithic premise and then build variations out of it. Group Composition III is made by the ensemble as it goes along, each musician working on a gong tree built by Michael Robinson, using methods roughly similar to those in Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie I. The surfaces are worked over with various mallets and microphones to create an extended abstraction of resonant metallic sounds shaded by reverberation and filtered noise. It’s with this piece that you realise how much modern free composition and improv is still modelled on these performances from over half a century ago. In Music Project V-II, the numbers refer to intervals in the traditional diatonic scale; in short, it’s a pop vamp stretched and stripped to its barest essentials of hovering between dissonance and resolution. Like an early, unexplored path of minimal composition, it takes a simple idea and transforms it by taking it in an unexpected direction, finding strange sounds in a confined harmonic space. The conception of the piece, as something so open and irreducible as to defy authorship, produces something that sounds like something quite different from any other possibly related works from this time.
The sound quality is as good as you would expect from 1970s West German radio production, perhaps a little dry in places, which was the style at the time for presenting new music. None of these recordings have had a legitimate commercial release before now, so this will sound better than that untagged MP3 you downloaded from some blog years ago. The accompanying notes and booklet are again excellent and informative, including the original programme notes from the concerts and a radio talk given at the time by Michael Robinson, in whose memory this album is dedicated. It’s another step towards recovering a past which is still felt today but is not yet fully recognised.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Christian Wolff, Erhard Grosskopf, Gentle Fire, Graham Hearn
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Gentle Fire: Explorations (1970 – 1973)
Tuesday 9 March 2021
Some archival releases are historically important, restoring a significant musical movement to present-day consciousness. Others can throw accepted history into a different light, making the past a deeper, richer source for new inspiration. As a modern musical experience, listening to historic recordings of the avant-garde is often an excercise in intellectual curiosity, or a dark form of amusement: the interpretations and performances are often unpolished or uninformed, at worst incompetent and, even at their best, often drily literal (and sometimes no worse for that). It’s a rare and exciting event when the archaeological trip works equally well as a compelling new release.
Gentle Fire: Explorations (1970 – 1973) is a superlative example of all that is best in archival box sets. Paradigm Discs has form for presenting ‘lost’ music at its most potent; this set has been years in the making and all the work has paid off in spades. In late twentieth century avant-garde music, the British group Gentle Fire is often mentioned but seldom heard. Active in the late 60s and early 70s, they remain best remembered for a small vinyl legacy: their recording of Stockhausen’s Sternklang and a German LP of pieces by the New York School. CD reissues are piecemeal and/or capriciously expensive. Explorations is three CDs of Gentle Fire recordings which, as far as I can tell, have never been publically available in complete form. Even if you are familiar with the 70s LPs, everything’s an ear-opener.
Disc one tackles familiar territory: previously unreleased performances of Cage, Stockhausen, Christian Wolff, Earle Brown and Toshi Ichiyanagi, all from 1970 or 1971. The typically rough-hewn electroacoustic sounds of the period are all present and correct, yet it all sounds less stark or abrasive than other contemporary avant-gardisms, even compared to their own LP. The only repeat here is Brown’s Four Systems, given an ingeniously austere realisation with Hugh Davies applying band-pass filters to a droning string ensemble (other group members Graham Hearn, Richard Orton, Richard Bernas, Michael Robinson and Stuart Jones filling in on whatever instrument is needed). There’s more detail in the Electrola LP, but the recording here is more focused on a coherent musical statement than on numbering off each of the score’s elements. It’s this emphasis on using open scores to produce a fully realised piece of music instead of “exploring possibilities” that sets Gentle Fire apart from other experimental music groups of the time. The disc starts off with a small surprise, with Christian Wolff’s For Jill instructing the performers to concentrate on combinations of selected notes into chords – an unusually traditional material compared to his better-known group realisations. An ensemble of home-made instruments by Davies et al nudges Wolff’s score back into the uncanny.
Two selections from Stockhausen’s Aus den sieben Tagen (Aufwärts and Treffpunkt) show the strength of the ensemble’s musical vision. They’re not afraid to “lead the tone wherever your thoughts lead you” as enjoined by the score, even as Stockhausen heavily directs those thoughts towards convergence. Their idea of “always return to the same place” is a lot more conceptually open and makes the piece soar in unexpected ways. Similarly with Aufwärts, where unlike with at least one other ensemble, they would not agree with, let alone solicit, Stockhausen’s guidance on what “the rhythm of the universe” might be. (Incidentally, there’s a great article in The Wire going over Gentle Fire’s history with the surviving members, including the whole “working with Stockhausen” experience.) Ichiyanagi’s Appearance threatens to get aggressively harsh but never lets up the suspense, with judicious use of ring modulators and sinewave generators creating a bleak, ominous landscape out of trumpet, cello and electric organ. Cage’s Cartridge Music does get appropriately rowdy, amping up small sounds into a cavernous roar. It’s a live recording and the audience is plainly amused by the antics required to produce some of these noises, thus fulfilling Cage’s wish that electronic music be at least as theatrically satisfying as live acoustic performance.
The second two discs are the real revelation, featuring compositions by individual group members and two large “group compositions”, each one shocking in how they interect with both their own time and ours. The pieces bring a healthy dose of the Cagean, Fluxusy extremes of the US avant-garde into the distinctly more genteel British millieu. It was a fertile period, sort of post-Cage but pre-Nyman, and Explorations expands this field hugely, beyond the usual assumed constraints of process music and the assumed freedoms of AMM. That skill for mixing acoustic and electronic comes into its own here. Stuart Jones’ Ruthie’s Piece sounds almost contemporary, using isolated piano sounds with heavy ring modulation against soft cello harmonics to create what could pass for 21st-century ambient. Richard Bernas’ Almanac For September is a more restless work but it also sets muted piano against cello harmonics, using purely acoustic means to alter tone and resonance in ways that resemble electronic processing. In Michael Robinson’s 2 Pianos Piece the composer is joined by Richard Bernas in a lop-sided process of repetition and augmentation that would fit alongside works by John White or Christopher Hobbs. Graham Hearn’s Centrepiece takes a rudimentary idea of “soloist with tape loops” and interprets it as a haunting, evocative soundtrack of muffled organ lost amongst the remnants of run-out grooves on old records. It’s a long, long way from the academic exposition of novel compositional structures.
The two group compositions push into new territories, with performance verging on installation. Group Composition VI (unfixed parities) from 1973 has the ensemble electronically transmitting and modifying speaking voices, filtering and disrupting speech with modified telephone equipment to create a dense, barely intelligible verbal soundscape. Its sonic novelty is ripe with the implications of technology, reproduction and intervention, information overload, alienation and spatial dislocation. As a dispassionately prophetic work, it’s a thrilling and disturbing space for meditation. In fleeting moments it recalls various Alvin Lucier compositions. Group Composition IV originated on the Pyramid Stage at the first Glastonbury festial in 1971 and is here recorded at the Roundhouse in London the following year. It features the gHong, a large assembly of suspended metal rods which can be played collective and coaxed into a wide array of complex sounds, augmented by various additional instruments, including Davies’ own homebrew springboards and a VCS3 synthesizer. This recording takes up the entire third disc, sounding and resounding for over an hour of deeply textured sounds that are simultaneously monumental and delicate. It’s a glorious thing.
Sound quality ranges from good (the concert recordings) to great; the cleanup work is seamless and transparent. The CD version comes in a slick box and a hefty, well-edited booklet with plenty of pictures, full documentation of who did what where and when, and a complete reprint of Hugh Davies’ essential essay Gentle Fire: An Early Approach to Live Electronic Music. Exemplary. I think a second pressing is on the way.
