I’ve been listening to a bunch of collaborative recordings and group compositions over lockdown and meaning to do justice to them, but in my head they started to link up to each other to make a gargantuan meta-piece which I am now struggling to disentangle back into their distinct elements. I’ve heard some of these musicians before, in different combinations, while others are new to me. Patterns for a future human pairs Barry Chabala’s steel-string acoustic guitar with Lance Austin Olsen’s sound collages (the latter credited with ‘field recordings’ and nothing more). The music draws inspiration from Olsen’s folded and layered paintings; for his part, the sounds incorporate broadcasts, electrical sounds and audio documentation of his studio to build up a ruminative montage that opens the mind to speculation. It acts as a drape for Chabala’s guitar, colouring and commenting on his playing, although his solos were played over Olsen’s collages. Chabala plays melodies that quickly break up into fragmentary gestures, as though itself collaged. For the second, longer piece any connotations of folk music have all but disappeared as his playing becomes more halting and disruptive, with melody ever more elusive. It’s a strange mix. There’s a programme ascribed here, as alluded to in the title – the tone is neither optimistic nor pessimistic, only unknowable, if not unrelateable.
I’ve heard Otherwise, a previous release by Hübsch, Martel, Zoubek, but don’t think I wrote about it. I think I had a hard time finding something to say about it. Their new album Ize has made a much stronger impression on me, so I’ll assume it’s an improvement. It can be facile to describe music as being “like Feldman” when it stays in a slow and quiet steady-state throughout, just as it can now be facile to to play in that manner. In this case, the music and the description do the term justice. Carl Ludwig Hübsch’s tuba helps, adding a recognisable timbre to the mix and anchoring the music, making its presence felt equally when it falls silent. The five pieces here turn between tender and sombre, with a similar (but not corresponding) shifting in musical approach between the reductive and the reticently lyrical. This is most strikingly heard in the long track Kolt, which starts with Philip Zoubek’s tentative prepared piano and ends with a long, high pitched drone that sets an oscillator beating against Pierre-Yves Martel’s pitch pipes. There are electronics, but these dissapear behind piano, tuba and Martel’s viola da gamba. The incongruous combination of instruments comes together clearest at the end, when they conclude with an endless, slow-motion falling that also brings out the strongest late Feldman evocation.
There’s a back-and-forth across all these albums, between expressivity and restraint. Guitarist Cristián Alvear, so often the exemplar of Wandelweiser’s parsimonious attitude towards notes, cuts as loose as I’ve ever heard him in this set of duets with fellow guitarist Burkhard Stangl. The Pequeños fragmentos de una música discreta are untitled except for one marked ‘(almost sad music)’. “Almost” comes up several times in the brief cover notes, but they’re being too coy. The music can be proudly described as charming, downright beguiling. Alvear and Stangl share a constantly engaging interplay of instruments that never tries to dazzle the listener with bravado. Even as they lightly touch on allusions to folk and classical guitar, there’s a dignified formality that adds to the charm as each piece reveals its character through confidently employed technique. For each piece with interlocking rhythmic patterns, or gently cascading runs of notes (as in No. 4), there is a contrasting piece such as No. 5, a study in microtonal differences between the two trading harmonics. No. 2 introduces extraneous techniques, with (I presume) Stangl laying down e-bowed notes and rubbed strings as a counterpart to a slowly circling melody. The reticence of the ‘(almost sad music)’ is set against scratchy radio sounds. Bass tones appear in the final part, to end in appropriately melancholy fashion.
Making the Pequeños fragmentos seem florid by comparison, Bow down thine ear, I bring you glad tidings is a brace of works jointly made by Alvear and d’incise that reduces their music practice to base elements. Alvear’s acoustic guitar is paired with percussive “tuned objects” played by d’incise, who subsequently processed their playing in a room different from the one they were in at the time. Alvear’s playing is meticulous, repeating short patterns of clear, single notes at a steady pulse. d’incise’s percussion matches Alvear before straying into adding colouration through resonances and lingering overtones. The use of reverberation, both natural and electronic, provides the majority of the perceptible changes in these two pieces. On the rare occasions the material does change, it seems less momentous than the long-term effects it will have on the prevailing ambience. Both pieces find the musicians working in a highly constricted space, yet making enough room for themselves to make the music develop and flourish. It’s a paradox that strikes the listener as tension, whose lack of resolution becomes its own, slowly earned gratification.
ATRL is a trio of Sébastien Bouhana on percussion, Christophe Berthet on reeds and Raphaël Ortis on electric bass. Written down like that, it sounds like a recipe for jazz, but Inclusio is a set of three concise pieces tied down just as tight as Bow down thine ear. Ortis is credited as composer. Ominously subdued percussion and tapped bass gallops through Contenir, abruptly cross-cut by flat planes of wind tones or faint electrical humming. All three pieces are similarly constricted, bound by a heavy grid of regular pulsations and suddent juxtapositions of static blocks of sound. Renfermer sticks up strident sax drones against mechanistic percussion. Comprendre is a more tractable drone of interweaving horns and whistling, intruded on by a return of the insistent bass tapping from the start. All three play these oblique, alientating pieces with a directness and precision that seems fittingly less (or more) than human.
