After being knocked out by Timothy McCormack’s mine but for its sublimation last year, I have now been blown away by the two pieces on The Hand is an Ear: an immense string quartet and a stringent violin solo. Both demand a fresh vocabulary to do them justice so let me get back to you on that asap. Speaking of brilliant follow-ups…
Sylvia Lim: Flare [Another Timbre]. It’s good to hear some more music by Sylvia Lim, having first heard her Sawyer Editions album back in 2022. On Flare you can hear her quietly individualistic style taking shape, resisting easy definition. Her compositions show an interest in acoustic decay and a peculiar method for exploring it. There’s no apparent system at work, relying on her curiosity and imagination to discover new ways of hearing instruments. The title work is for piano solo, played by Ben Smith: the instrument is treated as a resonator, using muted strings to eke out overtones from two keys, repeatedly struck in a trill. The substance of the music comes from the sonority, articulated by rhythm and phrasing, creating a piece made of shadows and echoes, a translucent projection of music. The small, intimate things we overheard is aptly named, a discordant congregation of clarinet and bass clarinet, violin and percussion passes by the ear as though partly concealed. The piece is played by various Apartment House alumni, as is shadowfolds, a recent piece for five musicians made in an attempt at polyphony; this manifests itself in compound, heterogenous changes in timbre. As shown in the piano piece flare, there’s a reductive approach taken in a number of Lim’s works: the Miyabi guitar duo of Hugh Millington and Saki Kato play the diptych same but different with one string prepared, snapping and buzzing against the others as the guitarists pluck single notes with only small variations in pitch, working their way down to one repeated, naked sound treated with minute attention. It’s striking how the reductionism never comes across as cold or affected, seeming to be born out of a strong affection for even the simplest sounds. Grafting, a trio for bass clarinet, violin and cello played by Mira Benjamin, Heather Roche and Natasha Zielazinski, might be the most completely realised composition here, with languidly winding melodic fragments surfacing briefly amongst slow, droning notes that are both tender and remote; it ends with a coda that recapitulates the material as a frail impression of its former self. By the time you reach the last piece Field of Play you become aware that the range of sounds has reduced down to a small, softly-lit space, reaching a minimum with this suite for prepared cello. Natasha Zielazinski, credited as co-composer, adds a single object to the strings for each section, muting the pitch and opening up a complex of frictional noise. All sorts of deep sub-tones and hoarse upper partials emerge from Zielazinski’s bowing, sounding as though barely above a whisper but recorded so closely as to seem immense, adding suspense that the delicate sounds may suddenly break. It’s common to describe a work as explorative, but this hushed work comes from a gentle but intense focus on a single spot.
Eldritch Priest: dead-wall reveries [Another Timbre]. A collection of three more pieces by Eldritch Priest, including the promised recording of his string quartet dust breeding performed by Apartment House. When I heard them play it live I was struck by the way each of the seemingly incongruous threads that make up the piece seem to frequently end up chasing their own tails, likening it to “a complex knot, slackened to the point where you can’t tell if grabbing one end will pull it tight or unravel it completely.” Hearing it again now, the emphasis on harmonics and fast, heavily ornamented playing suggest that the work is an alternative interpretation of the string quartet form, transposed to a different order. The high, floating sounds add colour while removing the substance of the pitch, hinting at something transparent which is nevertheless obscured by the layers of filigree. dormitive virtue is a piano piece from 2001, recorded by the composer in his apartment around that time. It’s been heard before as a short track for solo electric guitar on his same-titled album, a collection of “wistul, bluesey jazz rumination”. Here the jazz is less in evidence, as the piano version takes a much longer time, lingering over phrases and repeating chords as though they were echoes, pausing before ready to move on to the next section. Strangely enough, its the earlier, longer take which is the fully composed version; the guitar’s improvisation is a distillation of certain motives and mood. The introspective nature of the solo piano carries over into the other works to some degree. dead-wall reveries continues in his style of angular, discontinuous melodies and antimelodies to construct an ergodic composition that would otherwise seem typical for him, except that in this work the music is cast in a more mellow and vulnerable mien than the usual bluff statements that take on mystifying twists and turns. An ensemble of clarinet, vibraphone, violin, cello and piano (played here by the ensemble Arraymusic) picks its way through a confounding course of contradictory conversation; yet even as it does so seems to reflect upon itself – it never resolves, of course, but it does seem to be reaching some sort of understanding of the situation and adapts its behaviour accordingly. The violin part is the most frequently active, loosing off fast melodic passages charged with nervous energy, or cutting across the other instruments with electronic distortion. All three works find new ways of elaborating upon knots; self-interfering structures that feed upon entropy. Apartment House will also be playing his long, earlier work pleasure drenching… in London later this month.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Eldritch Priest, Sylvia Lim
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Block Rockin’ Summer Slam, Part 1
Monday 8 August 2022
When you listen to a lot of new stuff at once you start lumping pieces together, which is great for developing an authorial conceit, not so good for the music, and very bad for ever finishing writing about it. It’s best to remember that music never ends.
Last time, I was thinking too much about newness; now I’m thinking about purity. Since the late 20th Century a narrative has emerged, of schools of composers working under the thrall of lessons learned from minimalism by way of Morton Feldman, with an insidious spiritual imperative, either religious (Pärt) or secular (Wandelweiser). Material reigns supreme (sez Feldman), construction is kept at a minimum. The material is always ‘on camera.’ There’s a difference between purity and authenticity, but when that spiritual imperative meets digital audio the two can get confused. The lingering minimal influence becomes a way of transmitting authenticity with as little artifice as possible. Listening to the pieces discussed here reminds you that lack of artifice is not the same as lack of skill.
Well, really, Ian Power’s pieces ain’t all that pure. The collection Maintenance Hums begins with a duet for piano and percussion that clatters about with obtuse, single-note arpeggios dogged by a lone cowbell that eventually takes over with numbing hammering. There’s a sly humor in the three pieces here that, depending on your musical taste, either teeters on the edge of grating on your nerves or just shoves you over that edge immediately and keeps on plowing ahead. aspirapolvere, sega, spettro, tenere, possedere is a trio for accordion, saxophone and guitar that emphasises mechanical apparatus while trying to make each instrument sound like a cheap melodica combating blasts of distortion and feedback. Power himself plays the solo BUOY (after Laurence Crane) with what sounds like an organ coerced into life by a vacuum cleaner, except the organ here is in fact electric (und Kagel und Hoffnung sind auch dabei). For his Edition Wandelweiser release, Diligence, he smartens himself up to appear more reverent, but the two solo works presented here still have messy edges to their slow, widely-separated and often repeated sounds. The cello piece occasionally triggers obscuring smears of electronic schmutz, while the clarinet piece makes its material and development from periods of ragged note-bending, smudged attacks and self-conscious repetitions that come across much as rehearsals.
Some of Power’s music, with its aesthetics of deconstruction and warped pedagogy, reminded me a little of Tim Parkinson. Deconstruction really isn’t a fair term for Parkinson, despite external appearances of pieces like his opera Time With People. For his solo and chamber pieces, the musical language isn’t overtly self-referential, except through the tacit admission that musical language is itself arbitrary. As I listen to more of Parkinson’s music, the more it changes, as with the new collection of recordings by Apartment House, put out by Another Timbre under the revealing title an album. The previously discontinuous-sounding phrases and patterns have started to take on a sort of internal logic, inscrutable to observers. This is not a function of maturation: the phenomenon can be heard in both violin and piano piece 1998 and violin and piano 2017. The latter makes fuller use of chorale-like sounds while the former leans towards sparse, high notes – a critic could draw a line of development from one to the other in either direction, were they to confuse which was which. A lot of this may be down to Apartment House, here specifically violinist Mira Benjamin and pianist Siwan Rhys, whose attentive playing captures both the delicacy and the indifference, like a work of nature. That wayward and arbitrary phrasing that once sounded like Wolff now more resembles Wolpe. So this is really reconstructive music, although Parkinson is building something new out of the old, rather than something old in his own image.
Sylvia Lim is a younger composer who is developing her own idiosyncratic language, a mix of pure acoustic phenomena with peculiar methodology. In her album of five pieces, Sounds which grow richer as they decay, the opening track is unfortunately the dullest, with her Piece for three tuned cowbells never becoming more than an inert set of studies in timbre and rhythmic texture. In the shorter vignettes that follow, things get promisingly weird. The piano piece flicker, played in Texas by Alvin Leung, takes a quirky approach to muted strings, ornate yet artless. Cellists Christopher Brown and Natasha Zielazinski played the duet Reordering the Unconsumed in London, producing strange sounds that fall away into electronic-like reverb. The title work is most striking, using a beaten harp and two trombones to extend noise into held tones, producing a grotesque of Scelsi at his most hieratic. The unlikely acoustic combinations are less bizarre in the longer Colour Catalogue: Whites, where flute, bass clarinet and cello produce overtones of each other, alternating in pairings in a succession of fading panels. This last piece suggests we can look forward to imaginative ways of forming more complex works in the future.
I’ve been catching up on some large releases on Elsewhere this year. Most recent is a double-decker by composer/clarinetist Germaine Sijstermans. Betula is a collection of ensemble pieces that emerged from her recent performance practice with a close group of fellow musicians. This kind of practice can lead to development into elaboration or refinement into purity; Sijstermans has taken the latter path. The ensemble, recorded here over a few days in September 2019, is an all-star band of performer/composers who take a like-minded approach: besides Sijstermans’ clarinet there is Antoine Beuger on flute, Rishin Singh on trombone, Johnny Chang on viola, Fredrik Rasten on guitar and Leo Svirsky on accordion. On the seven pieces ranging from seven to thirty-one minutes in length, “the six musicians’ sounds overlap with each other while slowly moving forward in parallel.” On the first listen, everything seemed so refined and pure that each piece sounded the bloody same. On the second hearing, it all opened up and each piece took on a distinct character, with a marked difference in timbre and coloration, even when the instruments stayed the same. What’s most surprising about this change was not that it happened but that it took place so quickly. I want to go into more detail about Betula but this will have to wait until next time.
