Where is the “new” in new music? Some composers work in a style that seems to present something modern, at least on the surface. To what extent is this based on an understanding of the ideas and means of living that are distinct from previous times, and how much of it simply reflects an ear (or an eye) for fashion? Some composers actively try to advance beyond the received idea of concert music, such as Rafał Zapała and his electroacoustic pieces recorded on Futility (Kairos). The blurb describes it as “a provocative album that reimagines the concert experience, fusing music with technology to challenge the traditional performer-audience dynamic”, but then concedes that “this album presents music without interactive layers…. experiencing the full versions is only possible in a live performance”. Neither this nor the “!!! ReadME” file that came with the download push the suggestion that these recordings are alternative versions and thus read more like a disclaimer that we’re not going to hear what this music is really like. No doubt it’s a frustrating situation for Zapała, possibly one that would make a meatier subject for his next project than the gently used concepts presented here. The listener has carte blanche to dismiss the music, as does the composer to dismiss our criticism of it. Members of the Hashtag Ensemble (they’re real) challenge themselves to tricky playing, typically commented on, or guided by, a synthesised voice. Violinist Kamil Staniczek adroitly mimics the intonation of the computer voice in Ablinger-like manner on No Meaning Detected. The voice in these pieces is disappointingly typical of its genre, detached and cynical, superior yet glitched, familiar to everyone through HAL 9000, Max Headroom et al. It rises above the second-remove cyberpunk in certain places with some neat twists in the narrative, such as the title work for the ensemble until the musicians are pressed into some self-conscious acting, and in the final solo (duet?) Scrolling to Zero, where Lilianna Krych plays out a sampler keyboard to fatalistic reductiveness, albeit marred by smug irony. By contrast, Judge Me Again featuring Ania Karpowicz on solo flute with live electronics plays out as a relatively straight and impressively rendered instrumental take-off with deep and crunchy digital processing. The most impressive work is Introverts’ Collective, a piece for ensemble and mobile digital controllers that eschews verbal justifications and presents its cultural dilemma directly, through leading the group into ever-decreasing circles of degenerating loops from which they can only temporarily escape. This one really does seem to touch upon something lurking in today’s polite society, rather than simply assert a received idea. What gives me pause here is that there’s nothing I can hear which suggests how these pieces may come across differently if I heard them live, as intended.
Šalter Ensemble operates on the border between free improvisation and composition (it sez here), so it’s either good or bad that you can guess this from listening to each of the three pieces on their album Tri dela (Bruit Editions). There’s something very much of its time in the way they use a collective approach to composition, in combination with other observed cultural signifiers such as amplification, noise (acoustic and electronic), purported spontaneity and a choppy, quasi-linear approach to time. That last aspect is the main feature of Tomaž Grom’s My Wish Your Command, where rapid changes in texture and material at erratic intervals create the impression of something more controlled than the other two pieces, which each appear to allow a single process to unfold. It’s a late 20th Century conception of modernity – fast, noisy, knowingly irritating, with an increasingly insistent snare drum that steps all over the rest of the group. Interstices / Interferences is jointly credited to Jonas Kocher and Gaudenz Badrutt, both of whom I’ve previously encountered individually (see index). It’s a pointed contrast, with a slow, open texture and varied dynamics. The broad palette of sounds and uncrowded pacing work together to create something ambiguous, if not downright vague, but Šalter maintain a level of energy to sustain momentum and dodge the “listless” tag I’ve used on Kocher’s earlier work, while also perversely working as a composition. The final piece, Elisabeth Harnik’s šum II, is the one that seems most like an improvisation and as such works more as a performance than as a musical statement, with vocalist Irena Z. Tomažin leading the group in a slow crescendo into a loud, impassioned whatever.
Just played Brian Baumbusch’s Polytempo Music (Other Minds) a couple of times and, like with Zapała’s Futility, I’m struggling to hear in the music what’s in the sleeve notes. This is a large, ambitious work for chamber ensemble, ably played by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, which like Futility appears intended to be heard live. Besides the stereo audio version here, there’s also a “virtual reality application” and a phone app (natch) for appreciating the work – it’s immersive, see? I don’t think being immersed would help me as the music rubbed me the wrong way. On the page, it’s technically impressive, with Baumbusch mapping out different tempos and rates for each of the instruments to play through the same material to create multiple polyphonic (and polyrhythmic) textures. Nancarrow and Gamelan are namechecked as expected, as well as minimalism, in its present-day meaning as a synonym for Hollywood. Much of the material is made of simple diatonic arpeggios and ostinati, which makes the performance at least theoretically possible for the ensemble but, even if they nail it as well as they do here (the recording dates imply it’s multitracked), makes for textures with rather threadbare harmony and polyphony, without the rhythmic drive that makes both Nancarrow and repetitive minimal music compelling. The music segues through a dozen movements of different moods, which I assume is the main expressive objective, with the technique a means to an end. If you read the notes and hoped you’d found something to tide over your John McGuire cravings, you’ll be disappointed. Some affecting moments, which seem to be Baumbusch’s true strength, are swamped in reams of aimless roiling for the sake of it. To my ears he’s taken a complex, roundabout route to produce something akin to either John Adams, as a soundtrack for a Virtual Reality app.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Brian Baumbusch, Elisabeth Harnik, Gaudenz Badrutt, Jonas Kocher, Rafał Zapała, Tomaž Grom
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Not Dead Yet
Saturday 12 March 2022
My little world has started to open up again after a couple of years away. Went out to drink in public and hear the latest in Apartment House’s string quartet revivals: Hermann Nitsch’s String Quartet No. 2. Having heard some of Nitsch’s organ music a year ago, I figured a string quartet couldn’t hurt too much. It’s the humour that got me. Over 70 minutes, the opening movements dwelled upon fat slabs of sound as expected, but then things started to get a little more playful with creaking romantic gestures like petrified Schubert and a lop-sided, foot-stomping ländler tune like a ham-fisted Walter Zimmermann. “Hermann Nitsch lives in a castle.” Ultimately it all seemed very meaningful, which, having lived neither in a castle nor in Germany, is not the same thing as having meaning.
For virtual concerts, I’ve heard the LP of Two Duos from cellist Okkyung Lee’s gigs at Oto in 2019. On side one she’s paired with Jérôme Noetinger making real time tape manipulations, side two she’s with Nadia Ratsimandresy on ondes Martenot. Both bits of retro technology add a slightly spaced-out dimension to the cello: Noetinger adds fizz and buzz to the graininess of Lee’s playing before expanding into more overtly electronic obstacles for the cello to dodge around. Conversely, Ratsimandresy’s ondes Martenot starts out in its vox humana register, sounding uncanny against Lee’s enlarged bowing sounds. Again, the second duet takes an initial concept as a base from which to wander in ever more fanciful detours. The pleasure comes from the matching of sounds and the playing being free-spirited without self indulgence. Knowing how and when to stop also helps a lot.
More talk about the overlapping fields of composition and improvisation come up in the notes for Jonas Kocher’s Perspectives and Echoes, “an architectural struc-ture defines the temporal and spatial course of largely indeterminate events”. The electroacoustic ensemble play thick sounds distributed thin and I can’t hear it as much more than a listless group improv. More distressingly, the piece is accompanied by a performance of Luc Ferrari’s Tautologos III tackled with the same languor, so that the consequences of interactions fail to accumulate and events fail to gather significance or momentum. Perhaps the numbing isolation in this rendition is the suburban riposte to Ferrari’s city analogy.
I’ve been soaking in a small pile of intriguing recent releases on the Insub label which I need to address soon. I was going to set aside Louis Laurain’s Pulses, Pipes, Patterns but I keep trying to listen to it in different ways. It sounds like heavily sampled and processed thwacking of PVC pipes, sliced and diced in various ways to eke out an album’s worth of material. Apparently it isn’t, but instead is made from trumpets mostly, plus lots of digital processing and also “birds, white noise, vibrating metal stuff, saws, toads, sine waves…” Heard in one way it still comes across as sound sculpture, although in a highly creative and roundabout way of doing it; the reductiveness becomes admirable. If you turn it up loud and stand further away it sounds like ambient electronica from the Nineties as the conformity and instability battle it out, like another eccentric Pole Imposter.
Missed another Apartment House gig at Wigmore Hall on Thursday because I’d already booked a ticket to see a revival of Lucinda Childs’ Dance at Sadler’s Wells. For me, this was a personal indulgence in nostalgia and revisiting youth, having had a formative experience watching Childs perform in the 1990s staging of Einstein on the Beach in Melbourne. As a new experience, fresh contact with Philip Glass’s Seventies music, Childs’ choreography and Sol LeWitt’s film treatment was sweetly rejuvenating. Good artists learn from the recent past at least as much as from history lessons, taking up the loose threads as yet unfollowed. This was the future once, and it can still offer the promise of a better tomorrow.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Hermann Nitsch, Jérôme Noetinger, Jonas Kocher, Louis Laurain, Luc Ferrari, Nadia Ratsimandresy, Okkyung Lee, Philip Glass
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Serious Listening Weekend
Monday 3 October 2016
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.
