Tim Parkinson: The Projects [untitledwebsite]. I had something smart to say here but I forgot it so I’ll start over. I think I’ve previously described Parkinson’s music as acting like a non-sequitur to something never said. The four pieces presented on The Projects are all very different but try to convince you that they’re all alike. Siwan Rhys neatly trips through the piano piece untitled 2021a in a way that at first reminds of Christian Wolff’s later music, but the tonal language used here is less rarefied and deceptively sophisticated. Rhys spins the piece with a jazzy, insouciant breeziness that suddenly pulls up short at unexpected moments. The following pieces find other ways of being lulling and nagging simultaneously, leaving everything momentarily balanced but still unstable. Project 3 is a duet between Travis Just on saxophone and Parkinson on a motley assortment of keyboards. Across five movements Just plays two- or one-note riffs over obtuse, wandering keyboard lines and low-tech drum machines, with the sax managing to sound as affectless as a free MIDI instrument patch. The po-faced directness starts to accumulate arbitraty collisions between the instruments until it all ends on the verge of chaos; an even-tempered chaos, but still. Parkinson’s keyboards double piano and MIDI piano on the solo piece untitled 2021b, which seems to follow some sequence or process that chases its own tail, looping through harmonic circles while counting down to a preordained endpoint. Skipping ahead to Project 9000, we hear something that sounds programmatic but is entirely baffling. Rhys returns to bang out sporadic piano clusters, eventually joined by percussionist George Barton on various tasks of musical carpentry, all while Parkinson grandiloquently rhapsodises on an otherworldly Mighty Wurlitzer. It’s enough to make Kagel scratch his head. I don’t want to trivialise this album by asserting there’s a point to it all, but nevertheless Parkinson presses upon our assumptions and our anxieties that subconsciously play out when we listen to music, digging into the cognitive dissonances of misapplied logic that can amuse or frustrate us, to instill responses in the listener that are complex and strongly personal.
Okkyung Lee: just like any other day (어느날): background music for your mundane activities [Shelter Press]. Okkyung Lee dispenses with the cello and makes an album entirely of home recordings with electronic keyboards, computer and a cheap cassettee recorder. Ten pieces that are gnomic but fully realised. The setting and pervading mood of comforting melancholy recalls the convalescent feeling produced by the “lockdown aesthetic” of a few years ago, but the music here is more definite and complete. The keyboards hearken back to the clean synth sounds of the early 1980s, here brightly coloured but not strident, mellowed by a soft VHS burr of nostalgia. The slightly lo-fi sounds evoke the domestic form of techno-optimism from that period, when home computers were new and suggested boundless potential, simultaneously futuristic and quaint. Each of the ten tracks evokes a mood while also suggesting a quiet wit operating behind its pithiness. I mentally bracketed it with Tim Parkinson because it seems to share the peculiar combination of being friendly but aloof. The pieces are charming and seemingly trivial, too candid to be ambient, too obliging to be musique d’ameublement, but as with The Projects this music has an oblique way of acting on the senses.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Okkyung Lee, Tim Parkinson
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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.
