Eldritch Priest: Too, So Like Nothing [Halocline Trance]. Three piano pieces by Eldritch Priest, played by someone else. …soot?aporia from 2005 begins with a stutter and seems to be breaking down before it’s even begun, and the fleeting, fragmentary nature of the piece carries on from there, finding the most unlikely continuity out of the abrupt positioning of stumbling chord sequences, delicate arpeggios and unequal phrases of unexpected tenderness. The someone else playing is Roger Admiral, who interprets EP’s jostling, angular movements with supreme felicity and tact. All three pieces share a louche, hazy nocturnality under Admiral’s hands as he finds the undercurrent of cool late-night jazz beneath the surface agitation. In …soot?aporia he sounds like Milton Babbitt playing a cocktail lounge: the textures are more relaxed but shares the phrasing that seems erratic disguises a canny understanding of the flow of time against rhythm. nape…wrinkle…linger is a shorter work from 2002, more open in its texture and so more tractable for the listener’s sense of direction. Admiral plays it all with a loving touch and delicious sensuality; he insinuates jazz impressions out of supple technique, even more than the compunded harmonies do. The title piece is a later work from 2020: the same tricksy energy is less obvious, but still present in a more refined form. On the album, it seems to find a balance between the two preceding tracks, and Admiral still manages to rhapsodise at fascinating length upon recondite musical language.
Linda Catlin Smith: The Complete Piano Solos (1989-2023), Volume 2: The Underfolding and Early Works [Redshift]. After Volume 1, dedicated to the recent, hour-long The Plains, Cheryl Duvall turns her attention to Smith’s earlier pieces: The Underfolding is from 2001 and the remaining eight pieces are short works from the last century. These are generally less well-represented on record than her later stuff, so to hear a collection of them gathered together affords a glimpse into a world of inspirations and influences which have shaped her present work. Some time ago, it took me a while to get a bead on where Smith was coming from; as heard in this collection, she spent the Nineties trying to find a clarity of language, which I had first assumed was a pose of folksy simplicity. That clarity is produced in different ways: Poire is deconstructed Satie, Iceberg isolates rising arpeggios from one of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The earliest work here is Zart, a homage to Feldman by way of Schoenberg, making use of touch, attack and decay to dwell upon clotted harmonies; the surprising variety of dynamics and cut-off of resonances also appear in 1990’s Music For John Cage, clarified both in technique and harmonic language. Duvall plays these pieces with a directness, even bluntness, the stark dynamics and clean attacks giving it an unvarnished sound – that may seem like I’m gearing up to use ‘folksy’ again but that doesn’t apply here. Duvall’s directness takes on the appearance of attempting to explicate Smith’s various methods, but in fact conceals questions of compositional technique behind the need to show the unity of a common goal which unites these works. 1999’s For Udo Kasemets is another tribute piece, where Smith honours the dedicatee by adopting a system of permutations and yet she and Duvall produce a piece which sounds warm and intuitive; the earlier Bloom is also dedicated to Kasemets and shares qualities with Smith’s pieces for Feldman and Cage. In all of this experimentation, it’s really only The Surroundings from 1995 which left me cold, sounding a little too stark and formulaic in this company. The key work to understanding Smith’s later music is The View From Here, a 1992 composition that eschews direct references, systems and intellectual querying to instead rely on personal experience, not as a means of self-expression but as a means of contemplation. The assimilation of all these tendencies can be heard in The Underfolding, which slowly roils and churns through successions of dense chords for 22 minutes, maintaining an internal calm even as it never reaches a point of balance or stability. At times the pace slows or pauses, lingering on a particular sonority before continuing as before. The tension and relaxation in the piece feels like an organic process, yet still leaves the listener with the memory that the piece was more difficult and disturbing than it seemed at the time. Duvall’s head-on approach comes through here, neither overstating nor soft-pedalling the confrontations contained within the piece.
Emilie Cecilia LeBel: Landscapes of Memory [Redshift]. I described LeBel’s earlier field studies as admirably spare in places but susceptible to moments of fussiness. The two halfhourish pieces on Landscapes of Memory are both composed for piano with e-bow drone. Ghost geography, played by Wesley Shen, focuses on a figure which articulates a repeated chord, followed by a high single note. This gets elaborated upon, but gently. The bowed piano string acts as pedal point and sounding board for the decaying chords and pitches, giving additional colour to each iteration of the chords. Later, there is a dramatic flourish, characteristic of LeBel, with loud arpeggiated chords and then some hushed inversions of the opening motif. The dramatic effects sought after by the composer are based in sonority more than any direct theatrical reference and so appear more focused and coherent than in the previous collection I’ve heard. Pale forms in uncommon light was composed a year later (2023) and is played by Luciane Cardassi. It’s equally slow and deliberate, as you would expect in making the overtones heard against the drone. The bowed string is a higher pitch and the figures played by Cardassi are a bit less reticent, allowing a hint of chord progressions, cadences or melodic fragments to appear; as such, this piece is in five named sections which explore each of the immplicit facets a little further. They’re not the easiest pair of compositions to get along with, each being very sombre throughout, but they are two serious attempts to make expressive music out of psychoacoustic phenomena, without resorting to cheap drama.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Eldritch Priest, Emilie Cecilia LeBel, Linda Catlin Smith
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The Spectre of Taste: Lebel, Lind, Demoč
Saturday 15 July 2023
You don’t have to be original to be good, but the experimental allows a certain leeway while anything that tends to the conventional in substance runs the risk of setting down its foundations on the shifting sands of taste. I’ve been listening to field studies, a collection of pieces by composer Emilie Cecilia LeBel, and while much of the writing is admirably spare (in evaporation, blue the pianist adds notes on a harmonica in lieu of detail to fill out the bare structure of the piece) or impressively sonorous (even if nothing but shapes and light reflected in the glass conjures up a moody horn section from solo alto flute and baritone sax, aided by tranducers attached to drums), I kept hearing moments where the music tripped over itself. It sounds like LeBel wants her music to be expressive, but then feels obliged to justify that impulse with dramatic flourishes to rationalise the seriousness of her intentions. These flourishes follow popular taste and so resemble moments of movie music, probably meant to be stirring but serving more as distracting lapses in the work’s solidity.
Or I’m just not a very sophisticated listener and I need novelty as a hook on which to hang my perceptions. At the All That Dust launch concert a few weeks back I heard Mark Knoop performing a realisation of Rósa Lind’s piano cycle Trente, completed (or at least last added to) early this year. Trente is itself part of a larger cycle of four compositions (so far?) collectively titled Kandinsky Kunstwerke, three of which are recorded on Lind’s new All That Dust CD. I’d listened to Knoop’s recording of Trente once before the concert and several times since, and I’m only just starting to hear what’s in it. Made from thirty short movements taking up a little under forty minutes, their number, brevity and variability of ordering imply a kaleidoscopic array of highly changeable moments without a focal point; yet there’s a fixity in the overall composition, attributable jointly to Lind’s conceptual framework and Knoop’s holistic comprehension of the forces in play. I read the sleeve notes and came away bamboozled by the invocation of Kandinsky and the immediate association with Galilean astronomy throughout each piece. My understanding was of little more than the music having been produced through extensive labours on a conspiracy board of themes, with what we hear being a manifestation of a highly concentrated tangle of allusions oversaturated with meaning to the point that comprehension becomes extremely difficult, or perhaps impossible. Lind manages to subsume the ontological stress of her subject with a musical language that appears relatively untroubled, even as it is highly charged: not as jarringly discrete as Messiaen’s piano cycles, nor as outlandish as Georges Lentz’s cosmological divinations; which is another way of saying, surprisingly tasteful.
The other two pieces from the Kandinsky Kunstwerke cycle presented here were recorded in Australia about ten years ago. They are also solos, but with additional electronics. Cellist Geoffrey Gartner gives a lean but ominous tone to Extrema: A Galilean Sarabande and Laura Chislett gives what resembles a character piece in the tightly virtuosic flute solo Courbe dominante. I’ve focused more on Trente here as it provides a key to interpreting the other works, but the two shorter works are more immediately accessible, conveying urgency through a compressed lyricism. The electronic and other elements are inaudible for the most part, with both pieces experiencing a sudden, anomalous disruption. Each piece makes a self-evident case for requiring repeated listening; having earned my respect I’ve started to become intrigued and may even be warming to them.
Over the last few years Adrián Demoč has been building up an impressive body of work on record. It’s entirely deserved, with each newly-heard work revealing more facets and shades of an individual, consistently beautiful compositional voice. There’s that appeal to taste again; Demoč appears to follow a muse of highly cultivated simplicity, in the manner of Howard Skempton or Morton Feldman but mimicking neither. Neha is his third CD on Another Timbre and presents two works for orchestra, allowing us to hear how he handles larger forces. As may be expected, it’s with a light touch. In both works the sound is soft and translucent, reducing the number of instruments wherever possible and still sounding intimate in the moments when playing tutti. The title of the 2018 work Neha in fact means ‘tenderness’. It holds a single moment and lingers over it for us to appreciate, seemingly in repose yet sustained by as little movement as necessitated by breathing. The unisons between instruments as they play simple chords gain a faint complexity by Demoč employing the differing timbres and means of producing notes to makes the edges of the pitches fuzz and leach out as the differing overtones mingle; a kind of micro-microtonality. The Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra (Marián Lejava conducting) respect the composer’s urge for delicacy and calm in this live recording. The later work is Popínavá hudba, composed for the Ostrava New Music Days 2022 and heard here in a live recording with Petr Kotík conducting the Ostrava New Orchestra. It begins with a short, rising melodic fragment, particularly reminiscent of late Feldman, but follows its own path by quietly asserting its presence in a more organic than structured fashion, using subtle changes in colouration to motivate the nascent melody through almost imperceptible transformations. The orchestra maintains the same presence as a chamber ensemble would, but with much greater complexity below the surface. Towards the end there is a turn, and although it’s unexpected it still feels like it’s part of the larger design at work.
