Boring Like A Drill.

“Where’s the music?” is just the sort of thing you should be saying at a contemporary music festival. LCMF was back for 2024 with a programme promising plenty of tricksters and musical shitposting, a prospect which threatened enforced jollity and pre-baked disappointment. At first, it delivered on that promise very nicely with acts heavy on the shenanigans; these are always awkward in an art context, uprooted from the more fertile soil of low culture. A large part of the first evening was given over to Adam de la Cour’s deliberately ham-fisted panto pastiche Groyne ‘n’ Goosed, with an all-star cast. De la Cour is one of a group of British composers who humourously interrogate and deconstruct the cultural mores of music-making in a clever way that has remarkably little pay-off for anyone who chooses to listen to it rather than contemplate it as an intellectual exercise. The mode is comedic, but draws its inspiration from Monty Python at their most obtuse, and leaned heavily on the very limited schtick of Only Pretending To Be Crap. Groyne ‘n’ Goosed‘s muddled premise and extended antics wore thin very quickly; as with Laurie Tompkins’ The Feelmouth Greeny earlier that night, the attempt to play it off as ‘modernist shitposting’ was torpedoed by the amount of visible exertion put into wasting our time and a persistent eagerness to please, so that both works lost confidence in themselves.

A complete contrast in approach, Russell Haswell’s opera the truth is as elusive as ever took an apparently earnest approach to produce something trivial: diverse narrations and narrators suggesting some implied narrative out of a random-association text, strung together with chunks of Haswell’s typical live electronic noise. Musarc was the chorus for this piece, and were required to dress in bin bags and mill about amongst the audience for a bit of minimum-viable-product drama, matching how the work’s ambitions didn’t live up to its aspirations. The night ended with aya reminding us that she’s a girl two or three times while talking about herself more than playing music. I assume I’ll want to know who she is one day but the opportunity to find out why will have to wait, apparently.

These were all world premieres, commisioned by the Festival. Everything was a premiere, if only for the UK, which was admirable. Also on that first night was a new viola duet by Viola Torros, with Catherine Lamb and Johnny Chang sticking out like a sore thumb with their quiet, focused and attentive playing, leading each other through a piece that elusively slipped back and forth between slow contrapunctal melodies and passages of near harmonic stasis, kept on edge by their microtonal intonation. A similar square-peg-in-round-hole effect was created on the second night by Explore Ensemble giving the UK premiere of James Clarke’s 2016-E, eight years after the British composer wrote it. Clarke’s presence on the bill was justified by the power his music has to frighten off most concert programmers in his native country: complex, virtuosic methods to produce sounds that can verge on brutalism. 2016-E is a particularly astrigent piece, juxtaposing violent but controlled bursts of action against a flat frieze of extended, dirty chords. On Friday, Apartment House also played Clarke’s String Quartet No. 7, composed just last year before getting its first airing here. It’s a concise single movement that boils down its expressivity to the most rudimentary gestures, each instrument playing solo descending lines in turn against compressed, flattened chords, yet still articulating turns of texture and mood as though it were a work from the Romantic era, shorn of all extraneous ornamentation to reveal the defiantly melancholic core.

Explore also premiered Laila Arafah’s Sibelius Studies 2: [keeping expectations to the absolute minimum so the disappointment will reciprocate], a title in keeping with LCMF’s premise but whose music in fact delivered much more. Arafah has used the music notation programme Sibelius and its automated playback system to make doodles, filling pages with rapid clusters of notes at impossibly high or low extremes, which the computer’s synth renders as oddly textured buzzing sounds. These scores were projected on screens while Explore added scraps of sound for added colour and eccentric rhythm, with unusual percussive effects adding to the strangeness. Each piece is very short, fleeting like a Webern bagatelle with electronic interference, while really being entirely dependent on computer scribble. Amongst this was more antics and shenanigans, the low point being hypnogirl 24 in which Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster took a pointless story and told it badly. (“It is difficult for me to explain,” she said. We had noticed.) There were some excerpts from Jon Rafman’s COUNTERFEIT POAST videos, made out of cultural trash and debris, much like punk aesthetics from the 80s and 90s but with the ideology inverted: immersing oneself in garbage in search of the uncanny and attempting to make it relatable. An improvised duet by Maggie Nicols and Steve Beresford showed the influence that the 60s/70s school of British free improv still has on contemporary musicians: their stiff, formal japery appeared to capture the spirit of denuded panto at the source.

Around this time it had occurred to me that the LCMF curators Igor Toronyi-Lalic and Jack Sheen might have put together an enormous four-night prank to confront us with the great con we tell ourselves that the reason we all come to these sorts of things is to enjoy music. It’s true that I was feeling a bit jaded by that stage, but I unexpectedly cheered up with the closing set from ∈Y∋ + C.O.L.O. Usually LCMF nights end with a loud set of demotic dance music but Tetsuo Yamatsuka and Yasumichi Miura infused their stage bit with so much harsh-edged, rigourous noise (accompanied by suitably eye-splitting rectilinear projections in stark black and white) that even when the dance beats kicked in they seemed to be an extension of the noise. Better still, they didn’t end it there but just kept moving on to one thing after another until you genuinely wondered where you were all going to end up – something that rarely happens with electronic gigs.

(Part 2 follows tomorrow)

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: ∈Y∋, Adam de la Cour, aya, C.O.L.O., Catherine Lamb, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, James Clarke, Johnny Chang, Jon Rafman, Laila Arafah, Laurie Tompkins, Maggie Nicols, Russell Haswell, Steve Beresford, Viola Torros
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I’ve been catching up on some recent releases by Catherine Lamb, who continues to beguile and mystify in turn. Curva Triangulus [Another Timbre] is the sole work on the latest album, a thirty-five minute octet played most gracefully by Ensemble Proton. This is an outstanding work from Lamb, imbued with a warmth and respiration that her music typically doesn’t like to display on the surface despite its construction being worked out with equal thoroughness. It is, as always, composed for a form of just intonation, combining harmonics and overtones of varying complexity to create a spectral sound; but in this instance any semblance of an unfolding process is obscured by recurring cadences, wandering melodic lines and alternation of contrasting instrumental groups, textures and registers. Without drawing attention to itself, it charms with its odd eclecticism, mixing discrete tuning principles into its modal phrases, the modest ensemble harboring exotic instruments both old (triple harp, clarinet d’amore, a reconstructed microtonal arciorgano) and new (contraforte, lupophone). Whether despite this or because of it, the music nonetheless gives an overall impression resembling 18th Century hymn tunes, steady and serene with a little warping at the seams that only reminds you of the sureness of its purpose.

Three works for voices are heard on parallaxis forma [Another Timbre]. Exaudi and the Explore Ensemble give a luminous rendition of color residua, as I heard them play it live last year. The remaining two pieces feature bravura performances by Lotte Betts-Dean: pulse/shade was written for four like voices but here Betts-Dean overdubs herself to form a strangely precise chorus, even as the vocalise is softened by the lack of consonants. The hocketing effect starts to feel a little forced after a while, even as you’re impressed by the halo of resonant tones that suffuse each stuttering phrase, and it seems a smaller work than its length suggests. Perhaps even more impressive and uncanny is Betts-Dean heard solo in parallaxis forma, for voice and ensemble. Explore Ensemble are the musicians again, producing an aura that surrounds and backgrounds Betts-Dean as her voice ascends, sometimes climbing, at others gliding, at times soaring into something beyond normal. Later, the voice has to drop below the singer’s normal range, hinting at the physical demands this music can make while we’re considering the depth of its abstractions. The sound is beautifully captured, the resonance of St Nicholas’ Church at Thames Ditton providing an almost unnatural sheen as it complements the players.

andPlay is a violin and viola duo, the two musicians being Maya Bennardo and Hannah Levinson. They play natural sounds in a natural way, which can be harder than it seems; it can get a little easier when it’s just the two of you listening to each other and the tuning of your strings, getting into the naturally occurring order of harmonics without any external push back towards the conformity of equal temperament. The two works on Translucent Harmonies [Another Timbre] both date from a concert given by the duo in 2018. Lamb’s Prisma Interius VIII makes another appearance here, having been recorded at least once before in an expanded version for recorder and strings with electronic spectral resonance. As a string duet, minus electronics, this “melodic” version reduces harmonic saturation to a bare minimum, with Bennardo and Levinson plotting out a path through just intonation pitches that bleed into each other by association as much as through superimposition. It returns strongly to some elements of Lamb’s music brought out by Johnny Chang’s solo violin plus synthesiser interpretation of Prisma Interius VII, the folkish traces and simplicity of line (not minimal, there’s a difference) stripped of ethereality and artifice, grounded in guttural strings. Kristofer Svensson’s Vid stenmuren blir tanken blomma was composed for andPlay as a companion piece to their concert presentation of Prisma Interius VIII: it’s a longer work that recalls Duk med broderi och bordets kant his solo violin piece also recorded by Bennardo. Also in just intonation, the piece meanders with a roughness and casualness that makes the Lamb piece appear stuffy. Here, the two instruments shadow each other warily, with melody or counterpoint to be more inferred than directly heard from the brief fragments held together by speculative silences. It differs from the solo piece in forsaking the wistfulness and playful approach for a more contemplative traversal of the trail, it’s also about twice as long, so that over the forty minutes Bennardo and Levinson begin to piece together a kind of intuitive continuity that’s more felt than heard.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Catherine Lamb, Kristofer Svensson
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The Spitalfields Music Festival doubles as a way of visiting some of the historic churches of London, and so last I evening I sat in a pew beside the reposing effigy of Tubby Clayton in All Hallows-by-the-Tower, a church with remaining parts dated back to Anglo-Saxon times, to hear the Explore Ensemble give two premieres by Catherine Lamb and Klaus Lang. (A few streets away is St Mary At Hill, home of next weekend’s Music We’d Like To Hear concerts.) The concert began with a 2021 composition by Lara Agar, titled Ham after the chimpanzee fired into space. It’s a curious piece, with cello, piano, synth and electric guitar dispersed around the nave and side-aisles, musicians bedecked in fairy lights and/or tinfoil hats. With its opinion-column subject matter, abstracted narrative and harmless eccentricities in musical language and presentation, it reminded me of that generation of ‘modern’ Australian composers who felt defensive enough to answer to their audience by using their work primarliy to justify their existence, while also sugaring the pill.

For Catherine Lamb’s color residua, the string players of Explore were joined by three voices from EXAUDI, soprano, mezzo and baritone. It’s a concise work, in comparison to recent pieces I’ve heard by her, but I would have been happy for it to continue beyond its ten minutes. The voices, wordless, non-vibrato, soft even when in registers above or below what you would usually expect, interact with the strings in ways that produce unexpected tones recalling other instruments and pitches, using these effects as a third group of instruments that blends in amongst those present in the hall. It’s a warmer, more tender piece than Lamb’s usual work; she has developed her use of just intonation and harmonic tuning to a point where the psychoacoustic phenomena decisively colours the music without drawing attention to itself, allowing the sounds to flow without an apparent need to direct them to any specific end.

Composer Klaus Lang’s long work march (william morris) was composed for the Explore Ensemble, whose musicians have a talent for taking the most distant and cold material on the page and imbuing it with colour and breath, however faint it may be – a kind of interpreter’s empathy for their subject, no matter how forbidding. Lang himself was there to play the church’s organ for the premiere, with Explore forming a group of piano, flute and clarinet with string trio. I don’t think I’ve been to a live performance of Lang’s music before, but this was not the experience of hearing him in an ancient church that I had imagined. With so much of his music predicated on the inaudible (whether implied or actual), march (william morris) is a multi-movement work filled with sound and activity. Seven parts arranged symmetrically, the piece begins with a steady flurry of high piano arpeggios blurred and reverberated by sustained notes on strings and organ, aided by sporadic flourishes on piccolo and E-flat clarinet. Three slow chorales for ensemble make up the inner movements, interleaved by two interludes for solo piano. The ensemble plays staggered chords that rock and lilt, but never lull the listener into relaxation; the organ renders the instruments amorphous and strange while the piano interjects with pedal points. In each iteration, the tone is lower and darker, with the winds playing bass flute and bass clarinet by the penultimate movement, but the pace is not as ‘glacial’ as the programme notes suggest. The piano interludes, however, are extremely sparse and reticent, pastorales slowed to the point of gaps opening up in the music, pricking the anxiety that some further detail needs to be filled in.

Has Lang gone Hollywood? That would be an overstatement, but in his programme notes he writes about William Morris being the impetus for this new piece, using the stanzas of his poem “March” to guide each of the inner ensemble movements. Lang relates Morris to his own thoughts in his essay “The Return of Craft”, finding parallels between the Victorian era and our own, making art a refutation of the increasing use of cheaply automated manufacturing and digitalisation and the concomitant effect of diminishing our abilities in concentration, patience and skill. While Lang’s own compositional skills are more overtly evident than before in his new piece, it’s strange how his previous music has embodied this refutation of short-term materialism, while march (william morris) is less an exemplar and more an expression of anxiety of his own situation, shifting from object to subject.

All Hallows-by-the-Tower sits just above the old Circle and District tube lines and so their periodic rumble provided an accompaniment throughout the concert, functioning as an extra bourdon stop to the organ in a way that never really seemed out of place with the music.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Catherine Lamb, Klaus Lang, Lara Agar
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After blowing off going to gigs all year I actually made it all the way to Wigmore Hall to hear the JACK Quartet play Catherine Lamb’s divisio spiralis, composed for them in 2019. It’s a long work, just about ninety minutes, punctuated by pauses. The string quartet play with amplification but no other types of electronic processing that Lamb has often used to augment the harmonic space of her music. The quartet plays in just intonation, gradually opening out from a narrow band of frequencies in the higher range, introducing more readily discernible melodic fragments before slowly sinking to the lower depths of their instruments. The melodies and chord changes are plaintive and cadential, particularly as they only briefly rise before gradually tending downwards. The JACK Quartet played this with stoic bravura, using thinned-out, vibratoless tones that nevertheless filled out the sounds with the harmonic spectrum Lamb would have hoped for, with clear ringing pitches, beatings and other (psycho)acoustic phenomena quietly present throughout. Besides its length, it’s a difficult and conflicted work, in which system and sentiment share an uneasy cohabitation. In the moments it evokes rarefied folk music, it renders the surrounding sections indistinct, and never quite balances its apparent wish to be both demonstrative and impassive. This creates a curious state in the listener where you’re never quite certain what you’re hearing at any given moment; you have to keep your ears open and note the strengths and vulnerabilities as you find them. That’s an admirable achievement in itself, but her more recent string duet I heard at Cafe Oto last year resolved these elements into a stronger and more coherent work.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Catherine Lamb
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I’ve been out all week and my brain is fuzzy. Last Sunday it was to see Morphogenesis playing at Cafe Oto, for the first time since 2015 I think. This was touted as featuring the original members but Clive Hall had to drop out and was replaced by Jonathan Bohman. At least this time they were all in the same venue: for their previous gig Ron Briefel preferred to broadcast his part from his car parked out front. This could be taken as a sign that the group has mellowed with age, now that they’re approaching the end of their fourth sporadic decade; however their sound check consisted of them playing out on the street for about an hour, inviting passersby and musos from the matinee show to get amongst it with their equipment.

Their group improvisations, made with a plethora of random objects, electronics and digital/analog interference (also a piano), deftly elude the do-a-bit-of-everything-all-over-the-place performance style that such a setup usually invites and quickly gets tedious. They play with a wealth of detail while maintaining a coherence in mood that is achieved through group activity: each follows their own path without any pressing concern to defer to the others, a novel consensus achived through the simple expedient of letting everyone talk over each other. The gig broke into four distinct pieces, each heavier and more sharply defined than the last. It’s like eavesdropping on a group of awkward middle-aged nerds doggedly pursuing their particular passion: intriguing, colourful and even illuminating, even as you fail to understand the subject. I can relate, as someone trying to learn how to socialise again after an extended reclusiveness.

Back again on Tuesday for Lucy Railton’s long-deferred two evenings, mixing her interests in modern composition, electronics and cello improvisation. The improvisations grouped cello with voices and saxophone (Sharon Gal, Caroline Kraabel, Sophie Fetokaki) and with two basses, electric and acoustic (Farida Amadou and John Edwards). The former was sparse and pure to the point of excess, the latter blunt and busy. The two compositions were a new work by Catherine Lamb and Morton Feldman’s Patterns in a Chromatic Field. The Feldman is a sadistic piece, right out of the gate demanding melismas in harmonics from the cello and octave-leaping chords from the piano, all rapid, all pianissimo. Ten years ago in the same place I heard it played in the most gruelling of circumstances, so by comparison this occasion seemed deceptively benign. Railton and Joseph Houston played it in a plainspoken style, at a pace neither forced nor lugubrious. It was a demystifying performance, which favoured presenting variations in colour and tone over maintaining a single, ambiguous state, even offering moments of surprising brightness.

I didn’t catch the title of Catherine Lamb’s piece, if it was mentioned. It was born out of the two of them working together in Berlin, originally as a solo work for cello augmented by Lamb’s use of resonant spectral synthesis. On this occasion, it was played without electronics, with Lamb instead joining in as second musician on viola. At times I’ve found Lamb’s solo compositions for acoustic instruments excessively plain, but this was not the case here. For the viola part, she extrapolated the overtones implied in Railton’s playing, creating a sort of counter-melody that would emerge and disappear as a distinct entity. They played in relative tuning, Lamb basing her intonation on the harmonics of Railton’s pitch, a kind of sonic tightrope-walk that showed strength and resilience even as the apparent means of support were almost imperceptible.

For the rest of the week I was at the London Contemporary Music Festival, with additional excursions to Wigmore Hall for Apartment House playing John Cage. I’ll get around to these later, for my own sake. After seven days of live music, people and art-venue beers, it’s all been a little too much. In fact, I should be back at LCMF right now but the pull of a night in and a home-cooked meal is too strong. Doubtless I will regret it later.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Catherine Lamb, Lucy Railton, Morphogenesis, Morton Feldman
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“single track is a really arresting piece that appealed to me immediately,” begins the Another Timbre proprietor’s blurb. Same, dude; same. “A seven-part canon which starts fast and gradually slows down over its 45-minute duration:” that’s exactly what it is, no more, no less. Having recently praised the creative use of algorithms in composition, I need to salute Michael Winter’s work here. The linked interview is an instructive example of the challenges in working with such an approach, which would otherwise seem to be nothing more than following a predetermined path. The idea is simple, strong and immediately grasped both when read and when heard, yet the means of make the idea aurally manifest seemed to test the bounds of possibility. It’s an unheard element that often fuels the tension and interest in music like this, where the clarity of conception is at odds with the difficulty of its execution.

Winter sets the ensemble of seven musicians – all biased towards the lower registers – an exhaustive series of permutations of six notes, sequenced in canon. The perky repetitions of harmonically consistent material recall the high summer of minimal compositions and process music, but the freshness of the piece gives it something new to contribute instead of sounding retro. This would seem to originate in the use of mathematical procedures to introduce quirks that would otherwise have been at the mercy of subjective caprice. First listening, I had forgotten that as each new instrument enters the others slow down and wondered if some electronic sustain effect was in use, introducing a halo of prolonged tones over the regular chatter, until that halo steadily engulfed the ensemble as the musicians are transformed from activity to stillness. The musicians are from a Mexican ensemble named Liminar and I understand why Winter speaks so highly of them. Each plays this unbroken span of constantly counter-intuitive moves in coordination with each other in a way that never obscures the conceptual clarity for the listener, yet do so with a solidity that never makes the simple material seem facile.

My previous exposure to Winter’s music is limited to a piece on the West Coast Soundings album with other students of James Tenney, including Catherine Lamb. I’ve discussed Lamb’s music more often, here and elsewhere, but maybe not as much as it deserves. For the past few years, much of the work I’ve heard has made use of spectral synthesis, harmonically enhancing ambient sound in accord with the instruments. Her latest release on Another Timbre, Muto Infinitas, is a long work for two musicians without electronic alterations. It’s strange to hear Lamb’s music again without that resonant aura, here made all the more stark by the severely constricted range of pitches for most of the piece’s length. For a long time, the duet of Rebecca Lane on bass flute and Jon Heilbron on double bass scarcely moves beyond the least noticeable differences in pitch. Both play in just intonation tuning, requiring the use of microtones (Lane uses a Kingma flute capable of quartertones beyond the usual alternative forms of fingering). The most noticeable changes come in overtones and beating frequencies that emerge from the playing, as the microtones and timbral profiles of each instrument interact – sounding like an Alvin Lucier piece.

In the latter stages the pitch range opens up a little and, by the end, a little melody breaks out. Apparently Lamb has been interested in the “long introduction” as a music form for a while, but the piece’s structure also strongly recalls Tenney’s Critical Band. Muto Infinitas has been in one form of development or another for about five years, honed in its composition and its performance practice. It was written for Lane and Heilbron, both experienced practitioners of this musical style, performing and composing. It’s a piece they’ve made their own as much as Lamb’s and this recording may capture just one phase of a continuing evolution. For the listener, this version runs the risk of being too focused on the performers’ experience at the expense of our own. For some people it may fascinate, but I found the prolonged delay in introducing tangible activity, followed by increasingly (relatively) hurried movement made the ending perfunctory and sounding like a destination, displacing the presumed emphasis on the journey. In other words, I wish it were shorter, or paced in some way that didn’t make me feel like it was delaying gratification.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Catherine Lamb, Michael Winter
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They’ve already put out some great stuff this year, but in the last couple of months both Eventless Plot and Catherine Lamb have each released another album. While Eventless Plot’s Another Timbre album Parallel Words showed the trio – Vasilis Liolios, Yiannis Tsirikoglou and Aris Giatas – acting as group composers for a small ensemble, Surfaces places the focus back on them as performers. It’s, basically, percussion: there are electronics at work in there – Max/MSP, that sort of thing – as well as plain old electrical devices, and the sleeve notes assure the listener that there really is an analog modular synth and guitar to be heard somewhere, too. The percussion instruments and associated sounds of small, amplified objects predominate, with the more technically advanced devices being used in a similar percussion-like manner. By ‘percussion-like’, I mean here that the trio takes the approach to percussion described by Vinko Globokar in his essay “Anti-Badabum“, where they treat their instruments “simply to invest each movement, however innocuous it first seems to be, with a meaning.” The technique is akin to James Tenney’s percussion postcard pieces, or John Cage’s later percussion works, alive to the inherent sonic qualities of objects. If there’s a compositional scheme behind this recording, then it’s sufficiently loose to allow for this type of exploration. The title Surfaces describes both their manner of playing and the music they make: passages of sound whose gross attributes appear static while being constantly alive and changing with subtle variations in timbre and texture. Ageing mechanical devices combined with inspired instrumental choices and insidious granular synthesis produce a complex, organic sound. At one critical point, they would appear to leave one piece of equipment running alone, just doing its thing.

Fresh from hearing Catherine Lamb’s vast synthesiser opus wave/forming (astrum), I’m now returned to more familiar turf with her Prisma Interius VII & VIII. The Prisma Interius series is written for live musicians with added harmonic resonance from synthesisers, made by taking sound from outside the performance space as a source for subtractive synthesis. The dynamics and coloration form a kind of harmonic space which contains the musicians inside a rarefied environment, a world that can define its own passing of time. Both pieces here stretch out towards forty minutes without ever feeling long, or even particularly slow. I’ve heard parts of this cycle before, with the same lightness of touch and faint folkish traces, but Prisma Interius VII seems to be the clearest expression in this series yet. Regular collaborator Johnny Chang on solo violin evokes a time and place with a simplicity of melody that’s unobtrusive enough to seem inevitable. The harmonic coloration is faint at first, then grows in your consciousness while never dominating, always an elusive counterpart, a true dialogue de l’ombre double (without Boulez’ crude and distracting manipulations). It has that fusion of form and content as experienced in nature, where you grasp it at once but keep coming back to it differently each time. Prisma Interius VIII expands from solo to the Harmonic Space Orchestra, an all-star ensemble on tenor recorder and low strings. For what it loses in lightness of touch, it gains in a wider pitch spectrum and drama, without stooping to the dramatic. Sometimes, the musicians stop, leaving you to wonder how the silence might reassert itself.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Catherine Lamb, Eventless Plot
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Things to be thankful for: music keeps getting made and the third batch of releases from All That Dust has come through as planned. Two are also available on CD, one as download only in binaural stereo. The three new albums share a particularly gratifying theme in these troubled times, that of an artistic retrofuturism that is finally being redeemed. I can’t be the only person who digs up old documents from fertile periods of the avant-garde and marvels at how many great pieces, artists and ideas languish in a dusty bottom drawer of art history. I listened to all three here and felt like some of these threads were being taken up and given new purpose. Catherine Lamb’s wave/forming (astrum) takes her work with synthesisers in a bold new direction. Having previously used them as a type of enhanced resonator, here they become the primary sound source. Two instruments, built and played by Bryan Eubanks and Xavier Lopez, map out harmonic patterns across a defined space. Cycles abound, slowly looping through the harmonic spectrum, across the stereo field and in the overlapping rhythmic pulses that lock in with your theta waves. The pulses, tunings, bright-coloured but soft-edged sounds and extended duration suggest it’s a lost electronic classic from the Seventies. Its constant transformations belie an academic rigor that keeps hippie vulgarity at bay while still making for a long, strange trip. This one’s the binaural recording, so good headphones and any personally administered assistance will get your head spinning out through the long, dark second wave lockdown.

All That Dust have generally liked to mix up old and new in their releases, but the oldest set this time is a selection from Anthony Braxton’s Ghost Trance Solos. My innate aversion to jazz always leaves me approaching Braxton like a fussy child picking the good bits out of a plate of fried rice, so I cling to albums like this where I can fully embrace his approach to music. Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music comprises more than 150 pieces written over ten years or so, straddling the turn of the century. Drawing on concepts from Native American dance and musical practice, he composed modular kits with defined melodic material and entry points for improvisation, subroutines, collage and intertextual cross-references. Three primary works are presented here, each incorporating parts of other Braxton pieces. Kobe Van Cauwenberghe takes a highly inventive and distinct approach to the scores: he plays alone, on electric guitar, augmented with electronics. There is some overdubbing amongst the real-time looping, as well as a hybrid type of overdub in which he cues in samples from pre-recorded takes of the material. The music pursues erratic, discontinuous lines that can drift away into moments of dream-logic, a fantastic beast part Christian Wolff, part John Zorn. The tension between these two forces cracks open new ideas. Each of the successive pieces opens up into something wilder and woolier as Van Cauwenberghe takes the increased rhythmic freedom and adds greater tonal variety and more eccentric techniques. This is true postmodernism, an ecclecticism that retains a clear character throughout, never stooping to pastiche.

I promised to write more about Anthony Pateras’ music last week, having noted his recent tendency to strip back his often frenetic style into something elemental, placing an instrument’s timbre and resonance front and centre as the subject. Duos for Other Instruments is his latest collaboration with fellow provocative musician Erkki Veltheim. Their previous duets – The Slow Creep of Convenience and Entertainment = Control – have been large, monolithic works which confront the listener with the inherent contradictions of ‘minimalist’ music, at once subversive and commodified. The two pieces presented here, recorded in Melbourne in June, are briefer but even more severe. Ersatz is a twenty-minute trill for viola and celeste, Golden Point the same but for harpsichord and mandolin. The pitches never change – there seems to be a Scelsi-like rising of maybe a sixth-tone in the mandolin but that might be my ears playing tricks on me, or the instruments giving out. The quaint, modestly-voiced instrumentation and manageable dimensions might imply these are less ambitious works, with something of the salon concert about them, but their obstinate singularity of material and structure make their passivity all the more aggressive. All of the musical action comes from the inadvertent interplay of the overtones in the instruments’ timbres, a homespun analogue of Lamb’s synthesisers, with Veltheim’s viola in Ersatz blurring into a single, unknowable instrument and the dual protagonists of Golden Point exchanging identities from one moment to the next. The two play with a stamina that is more dogged than perfectionist, preferring to exploit the situation of a fragile collaboration that could turn adversarial.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Anthony Braxton, Anthony Pateras, Catherine Lamb, Erkki Veltheim
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I’m listening to people playing instruments, making music. Are they playing with, or on, their instruments? It’s a trickier question here, as the musicians are performing scores composed for them by other people. If the playing here is to be understood as exploration, then it comes from the composer’s curiosity and from the musician discovering what can be made from the composer’s vision. Making music like this becomes largely a question of possibilities, balanced against the need for some level of restraint.

Both are solos, but augmented. Catherine Lamb’s piece, Point/Wave, is for guitarist. Accompaniment comes from the ‘Secondary Rainbow Synthesizer’: amplified ambient sound filtered into resonant frequencies. This is apparently the first piece she wrote using the device, which has since formed the basis of her Prisma Interius series of works. The sounds in Point/Wave are more clearly defined and separated here than in the later works; this would be partly due to the sole performer and to the bright, clear attack and decay of the guitar. The piece is conceptually clear, but with harmonic sophistication. The guitarist Cristián Alvear plays a cycle of chords over, or against, the passing harmonic clouds of the ambient synthesizer. Whether the two relate or not is a moot point: the interaction is one of two processes at work, each producing sounds of alternating clarity and complexity. The synthesizer’s changes are governed by the outside world; for the guitar, Lamb has composed an “infinite cycle” of chords related to smaller and larger prime numbers. Acoustic phenomena are explored and demonstrated, but in a lyrical, non-dogmatic way, rather like Alvin Lucier’s later works combining instruments with pure tones. I like that Lamb expresses her frustrations with the guitar through the piece, with the awkward tuning and quick decay turned into a virtue that adds extra colour to the sound. The piece was written for Alvear, a guitarist who has a knack of finding the space for potential shading and texture in the most seemingly reductive scores. He gives the piece warmth and presence, using a classical guitar to speak clearly, in a way Lamb thought would only be possible with steel strings.

Any play in James Weeks’ windfell is of a more serious nature. This hour-long solo for violin is also augmented: the musician is expected to sing vocalise from time to time. The piece was written for Mira Benjamin, so presumably her high, clear vocal tones are a requirement for anyone else attempting the piece. The inner sleeve of the CD warns listeners that the first five minutes or so are almost inaudible. The sounds are the most rudimentary type, the kind of inadvertent noises made in preparation to play. The home listener, already slightly apprehensive of what might follow (“resist the impulse to turn up the volume”) is then led through an open labyrinth, in which the path is marked but the ultimate direction never clear. After several hearings, it’s still hard to remember exactly where this path led. The piece doesn’t exactly build up from its near-silences, but transforms itself in ways which never seem a sudden divergence yet always efface the memory of what passed immediately before. Damndest thing. Pauses mark changes of direction; each section carries a tension with it, but the gestures are never hurried. Sounds are frequently sustained and repeated, with a restraint that always refuses to indulge the listener. Changes are marked by difference in pitch and intonation, rather than gesture and registration – just enough to be heard as new. The voice joins in at times, or whistling to blend in with the harmonics. Sometimes the voice provides three-part harmony with the double-stops – by this point in the piece, the music has become strongly present, perhaps even loud. Later, you notice things have become quieter again. Weeks (married to a violinist) demonstrates a deep understanding of the instrument, doubtlessly aided by Benjamin’s performance, a mixture of calmness and absolute control, the kind of heroic qualities that come from balancing contradictory impulses, as heard in her previous performances.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Catherine Lamb, James Weeks
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When I got back to town, people told me I’d missed a great gig, with Johnny Chang and Catherine Lamb playing at St Mary at Hill. At the end of the year, I received a new batch of CDs from Another Timbre, including a double album of works by Chang and Lamb. I’ve been spending a lot of time with these discs over the past month.

The gig and the album centred on the music of Viola Torros. Interviews with Chang and Lamb and other promotional material offer up all sorts of details about Torros as an historical figure, all of which may be safely disregarded without any impediment to appreciating the fine music to be heard here*. The background reading doesn’t prepare the listener or shed any additional light on the music as such, which is all the better for being heard on its own merits outside of a putative back story. Viola Torros, mediated through these ‘augmentations’ is at most a strong example of the Third Mind at work, producing music that owes something to both and neither creator simultaneously. On the first CD, we hear the second and third of these interpretations, effectively creating a diptych that invites comparisons and contrasts.

The focus is on the two violas of Chang and Lamb playing in tandem. Their playing is expressive, employing a range of gestures, but highly restrained in pitch range, to the point where only microtonal adjustments in intonation are audible. The music recalls Cage’s description of the sound he wanted in his last, microtonal works, “melisma, florid song”. The listener’s attention focuses on the grain of the violas’ sound, the rasp of bow on string made sonorous by emphasising the lower registers of the instrument. It takes longer to tune in on the resonances used to enhance the violas, electronics that add subtle but indelible colours. Then the voices come in and the small, new world the violas have created is transformed again.

As with V.T. Augmentations II, so is V.T. Augmentations III. The approach is the same but the methods employed take on a different attitude. The viola playing is starker, with a range that is greater but lower, often singling out one player at a time. The exposed playing, without its resonant halo, creates a more sombre mood. When electronics do appear, the aded reverberation is more prominent, like a shadow. The voices, when they appear, are now exclusively female, giving the shape of the piece its own distinct turn.

The second disc presents two more pieces, each a solo work by one of the collaborators. Chang’s Citaric Melodies III forgoes electronics for a larger ensemble. With greater instrumental colouration, winds and electric guitar to supplement violin and viola to construct a varied but translucent web of overlapping sounds. The piece is brighter and more varied than the preceding works. As a stand-alone, it can feel more superficial in comparison with the other pieces, but in context it provides a pleasing contrast.

Finally, Lamb’s Prisma Interius VI (for v.t.) continues the series of works she has made from mixing live musicians with synthesized processing of external ambient sound. The initial theme of the album is resumed, with only the two violas and a cello playing within an ambient space of harmonised environmental sounds. It’s an urban environment, which can sometimes intrude harshly. The grey, unstable drone of city sounds and reduced instrumental colours create a piece that feels like the Viola Torros pieces with further layers stripped away. It’s never quite ‘nearly nothing’; the musicianship throughout is almost folkloric at times, but it’s folklore removed to a distant, half-remembered time and place. I’d have loved to have heard it live, but the CDs will do nicely.

* Fictional artists are a bugbear of mine, along with imaginary movie soundtracks. Both make me reflexively anticipate a conceptual smokescreen to mask an artistic deficiency.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Catherine Lamb, Johnny Chang
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I think I’ve ragged on Wandelweiser a few times recently, finding fault with its apparent sense conformity and complacency. It’s not completely true, of course, and as it happens I was just sent a copy of the new Edition Wandelweiser release West Coast Soundings, a double CD which makes an excellent case for the whole Wandelweiser aesthetic and the musical thinking behind it.

This album was crowdfunded last year under the name “Cage’s Grandchildren” (this title still comes up in the CD metadata). It might well have also been called “Tenney’s Children”: James Tenney is the only featured composer from a preceding generation, and his Harmonium #1 dates from 1976 while all the other works are less than 10 years old. Most of the composers here studied with Tenney, or at Cal Arts. Harmonium #1 isn’t the point of origin for all the music here and the album makes no such claim, but the work appears later on Disc 1 as a touchstone for this genre of music.

Like John Cage, Tenney produced a bewilderingly diverse body of work which opened up so many potential new paths of discovery. West Coast Soundings takes Harmonium #1 as a reference point for one particular set of ideas: a focus on the qualities of sound itself as a subject, listening in the present without narrative context, an emphasis on process and structure, but aimed towards elaboration of the sonic content, not teleological development.

Having complained about Wandelweiser’s output getting too samey, this collection is beautifully varied and balanced, presenting different facets of the above mentioned musical concerns while still maintaining an overall mood. I’ve played it in various situations and, for twelve pieces over two hours, surprisingly it’s never felt like an endurance test. More “typical” works – long-held tones blending together, a gentle but implacable aimlessness – are given a distinct identity by being thrown into contrast against music like the sinuous electronic drone of Chris Kallmyer’s Between the Rhine and Los Angeles. Liam Mooney’s 180°, in which performers press triangles against dry ice, recalls Cage’s interest in finding new sounds, Tenney’s percussion music, sound sculpture and Fluxus happenings.

The smaller, slighter works play an important role. Mark So’s brief segue makes a mysterious introduction to the album, with cellist Anton Lukoszevieze acting as the text’s reciter. Casey Anderson’s possible dust can’t add more to Cage’s works for multiple radios, but is sequenced here as a distinctive palate cleanser before Michael Pisaro’s quietly powerful A single charm is doubtful (Gertrude Stein).

After being disappointed with Catherine Lamb’s material/highlight last month, I was very pleased to find her piece Frame for Flute the highlight of the two CDs. Written for (not so fast!) grand bass recorder and cello, the two instruments echo off each other. The sonorous notes played by Lukoszevieze and recordist Lucia Mense merge and diverge, creating rich but subtle differences in tone that often sound as though they were electronically manipulated.

Brian Olewnick’s blog gives a good summary of all the pieces played and who plays them. West Coast Soundings turns out to be one of the best kind of surprises, one that is satisfying instead of sensationalistic, when you were only expecting more of the same.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Casey Anderson, Catherine Lamb, Chris Kallmyer, James Tenney, Liam Mooney, Mark So, Michael Pisaro
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I’ve been getting to know Catherine Lamb’s music. Listening to the CD of her trio three bodies (moving) from Another Timbre has been one of the year’s high points, along with her vocal work Dilations and recent orchestral piece portions transparent/opaque. The immediate point for comparison is Morton Feldman’s music: apart from the obvious preoccupation with a similar soundworld of hushed stillness, there are similar concerns with the contradictory impulses towards feeling and form and the tension in maintaining a balance between the two. She also says, rather reassuringly, “I am open to the bland”. There’s this quality many composers have struggled to define, of impassive beauty in stasis, non-demonstrative; the quality Feldman sought when he “tried not to push the sounds around”, that Cage praised in Satie wanting to make Socrate “white and pure like antiquity”.

Last Thursday Konzert Minimal played Catherine Lamb’s material/highlight at Cafe Oto, so I had to be there to hear it live for myself. They also played Antoine Bueger’s meinong nonets, which I was eager to hear for a different reason. I wrote a bit about hearing Beuger’s en una noche oscura last year and how it left me unimpressed. Sadly the second chance at hearing Beuger live only reinforced my opinion. I described last year’s exposure as “stilted and precious, disappointingly inert” and came away with much the same impression this time.

The Lamb piece didn’t work for me on the night, either. There’s bland and then there’s bland. Worse still, material/highlight, which was played first, sounded pretty much as what I remembered the Beuger sounded like, which the subsequent piece then confirmed. I’m looking at the reviews of three bodies (moving) and I find this: “a feeling of richness and harmonic depth that separates Lamb from most of the music of the Wandelweiser composers.” It’s a pity that distinction is missing from material/highlight.

I’ve got a problem with Wandelweiser (of which Beuger is a co-founder). I’ve got a problem with any art movement really (a sure sign of lots of distracting chaff), but what I’ve heard of Wandelweiser that impresses me the most is the way so many composers have found so many ways to write music that sounds the same. Long, soft tones. Pauses. It’s not just those stilted, precious, inert qualities that in themselves make the music uninteresting; it’s the sense that everyone’s working very deep within a comfort zone, that nothing is open to risk of any sort. It’s like a collective failure of nerve that’s permeated music over the past few decades: holy minimalists, lower case glitch musos, post-Feldmanites, Wandelweiser, all struck dumb in awe of their meagre materials, held in abeyance for fear that a false move is worse than no move at all.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Antoine Beuger, Catherine Lamb
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