Yes I fell off the posting wagon again and now I’m going through the pile of stuff I’ve been meaning to write about and gosh there’s a whole lot of stuff with guitars. I’m not going to cover all of them: this is just a selection. There’s a solo improv live set from Eldritch Priest, which you would kind of expect but also not expect if you heard his Omphaloskepsis from a little while back. Dormitive Virtue [Halocline Trance] is a neat little album of electric guitar which promises to be an informative but derivative curiosity, only to turn into an informative but beguiling curiosity. You know the drill: one-off solo show in small venue, “a friend cajoled him into releasing” yada yada and the album starts out with a typically abrasive, discontinuous riff on discordant melodies from this composer. Except it’s not typical; after the opening fake-out comes a wistul, bluesey jazz rumination which sets the tone for the rest of the album. When distorted sounds reappear, they gain a reverberant sheen of moody atmospherics; the shorter improvisations are endearingly charming or endearingly playful. The pre-composed pieces focus on melody alone, retaining a gentle feel even at their most angular. His take on Wayne Shorter’s Iris makes room for small asides as elaboration, providing an insight into his own compositional ideas.
I heard Francesco Serra’s close study of empty space Guest Room a few years ago and was taken by it’s use of resonance and sympathetic vibrations. His new work Personal [i dischi di angelica] is a work of similar protracted research in a given space, but this time the focus is on solo acoustic guitar. Nothing fancy, just plucking and strumming that thing with no apparent direction or purpose. It would appear that the focus is meant to be on the sound of the guitar, but the playing style doesn’t reorient the listener’s attention to the acoustics; it just trundles along in a familiar way until it’s just hanging around in the background. The use of resonating snare drums comes later but it feels a little like a forced intervention to make things more interesting. Things actually do get a little more interesting when the guitar disappears, leaving a quiescent field recording that eventually acquires an overlay of buzzing e-bowed strings. This would work as a mysterious, shadowy counterpart to the first half of the album if the whole setup hadn’t been so protracted and innocuous.
Maybe it’s because I’ve also been listening to Varvara [self-released], a solo work by guitarist/composer Àlex Reviriego. The presence of a steel-stringed acoustic is also the central force here, but its role is much more complex. The crystalline acoustic sounds are sampled, apparently, and become the motivator for a deeply-textured web of drones and unpitched noise. The use of feedback loops and empty circuits play an important role here, creating evocative backdrops which assume greater prominence as the guitar fades away, with an inherent instability that nudges the wash of sound into darker and more disturbing moods. When the guitar reappears in part two, it has become enmeshed within the electronic noise, partly driving the drones while also acting as an armature for the increasingly alien soundscape. Despite this, the plucked strings never sound incongruous with the heavy synthesised sounds, thus making the resultant work even stranger. If that’s not enough for your to chew on, remember that this is only the second volume of Reviriego’s projected tetralogy of guitar pieces “inspired by the virgin martyrs of the early Christian church”.
Erica Dawn Lyle’s cassette for Notice Recordings also captures her working through some stuff. The two parts of Colonial Motels are extreme studies on the use of the amplifier’s tremolo knob. Once again, improvisations with single unedited takes, using looping effects to build up layers of choppy sounds which are then sculpted on the fly into quasi-melodic squalls before gusting into walls of torrential noise. The strange overall effect is the way it skips and skitters along, propelling itself through the obnoxious loudness without ever resorting to rocking out to retain each performance’s shape or momentum.
Yaron Deutsch titling his album Soul, Soul, Soul, Sweet Soul. [self-released] really doesn’t prepare you for the music here. As with Lyle and Serra, Deutsch is working out some ideas here, taking his work with other musicians as launch-points for solo excursions. Sanen Song began as a solo played over a sound installation piece by Helena Persson; Sub_Current is Deutsch’s solo part for an electric guitar concerto by Stefan Prins spun off on its own; Greetings from Astridplein takes a recording of Deutsch and Tom Pauwels playing a duet by Matthew Shlomowitz and cuts in urban field recordings. Sanen Song begins with atmospheric high drones before becoming increasingly busy with fiddly little arpeggiations and capricious pitch-shifting, while Sub_Current throws distorted power chords into a blender of pitch-bending and tone-switching, restlessly hopping between swatches of slowed-down white noise and cartoonish bendy-stretchy pedal work. Both works show invention, but their emphasis on technique suggests that they would be of more interest to other guitarists than listeners in general. Greetings from Astridplein is a nice little vignette that makes me want to hear Shlomowitz’s piece in its original form: it’s titled Hocket for Dylan & Alan.
On the other hand, Lauri Hyvärinen and Jukka Kääriäinen’s guitar duets on Pulled Apart by Horses [Bokashi] are just as relaxed and soothing as the title would have you believe. First of all, the prospect of an album of two electric guitars and nothing else should be enough to set your teeth on edge. It does, but in the most delightful way: the five tracks here are shot through with freewheeling exuberance and malicious glee. Hyvärinen and Kääriäinen maintain a knife-edge balance of calculated spontaneity, coming up with a dizzying array of sounds that never stick around too long as they careen from one idea to another without sticking in one place too long. It’s bracing but it’s more fun than most of these types of excursions.
There’s been much deserved attention for Jules Reidy’s latest album Ghost/Spirit, which makes last year’s Instants & Their Echoes [Hospital Hill] seem slept on by comparison. It’s the most surprising of the lot here, not least because of the relative absence of Reidy’s trademark guitar. A pair of self-similar works, commissioned by the brass trio Zinc & Copper (Hilary Jeffery, trumpet and trombone; Elena Kakaliagou, French horn; Robin Hayward, tuba), Instants & Their Echoes is a real ear-opener, one that reveals a new perspective on Reidy as a composer. The brass plays softly, in just intonation, building up overlapping harmonies into gently separated moments, set within a web of slowly cascading electronic tones. Reidy’s guitar can also be heard on occasion, deep in the mix to add to the glistening electronic timbres. Sounds have been extended and lowered in pitch to create reflections and imitations, that disorient while also implying a loose canonic structure that holds the piece together. It’s very spacious, in a floaty, dreamy way, as brass and gutar will periodically drop away and let the electronics sustain the mood in self-contemplation. There’s a confidence in the way the music starts and ends, twice, tinting the air and the time it takes with its sound and then withdraws without the need for justification, leaving a deep aural after-image in the mind.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Àlex Reviriego, Eldritch Priest, Erica Dawn Lyle, Francesco Serra, Jukka Kääriäinen, Jules (Julia) Reidy, Lauri Hyvärinen, Yaron Deutsch
1 Comment »
Strings (1), mostly plucked
Saturday 16 September 2023
Last month I got to hear Julia Reidy play live for the first time in a while (for me, not her). Her way of playing solo guitar with electronics has developed into something more integrated and organic, even as she moves away from basing her sound on the acoustic instrument. Her interest in microtonality has led to her playing with an electric guitar fitted with a just intonation fretboard, with the electronics providing treatments to the guitar more than adding atmosphere. It’s a far cry from the Branca/Chatham axis of retuned guitars, with a refreshingly dirty approach to microtonality: any expectations for strictly controlled structures or micromanagement of harmonies got wrecked early on when she arbitrarily twisted the dial on her pitch-shift effects box. Later on, there were tweaks made on the fly to the tuning pegs. Reidy used the guitar as a vehicle for harmonic complexity and resonance, with loops, heavy reverb and delays to build up sustained passages of sonority with tonal ambiguity, watching for where the harmonic pull of the resultant masse of sound would lead her, negotiating a balance between the strange and familiar.
It was a useful reminder that there is still a lot you can do with guitars. The guitar-with-digital electronics setup is also used by Eldritch Priest on his album Omphaloskepsis released last year, but to a completely different end. A suite in eight slightly differentiated movements that lasts damn near an hour, Priest’s musical concept is that of an angular, endless line that never quite resolves to a melody or a conclusion. It’s like he took inspiration from those guitar duets that pop up on Captain Beefheart albums and tried to turn it into Mahler. The electric guitar is doubled throughout by various fuzzbox treatments, synth patches and various MIDI instruments moving in imitation, which change in number and colour as unpredictably as the guitar’s mode or metre. The unwieldy length contributes to the piece’s baffling power, ratcheting up the tension as it continues to burn through new material without ever exhausting itself. Too self-aware to be grandiose, too oblique to be bombastic, Omphaloskepsis carves an anti-pattern out of the warm corpse of prog.
There is still a lot you can do with guitars, but that gets a lot less obvious when you start dealing with real composers. The Finnish electric guitar quartet Sähkökitarakvartetti (Juhani Grönroos, Lauri Hyvärinen, Jukka Kääriäinen, Sigurdur Rögnvaldsson) has released a collection of five new-ish pieces by various composers on what I presume is their third album, Sähkökitarakvartetti III. It illustrates the cul-de-sac that composers often find themselves in when writing for the instrument, retreading the patter of Reich’s Electric Counterpoint or throwing in some polished rockisms using distortion or the wah pedal to illustrate it’s “potential” for sonic novelty. The more daring pieces will throw in a little of both. Sergio Castrillón’s 12 Miniatures breaks this up by focusing on the fringes of standard playing techniques, allowing odd timbres and textures to predominate – all assisted by the composer himself joining in with some gravelly cello playing. Pauli Lyytinen’s Särmiö opens the set, composed just last year but most firmly entrenched in the comfort zone of the previous generation’s Reich’n’Roll. Hafdís Bjarnadóttir’s Hyrnan IV begins promisingly with gnarled bursts of noise on damped strings only to unfold into an increasingly relaxed tour through the guitar’s tropes in popular music. There is at least a contemplative context to be understood from this progression (regression?), unlike the stale rock riffs that intrude halfway through Kalle Kalima’s Ajan Haju and never quite go away. It’s interesting that, along with Castrillón, the other composer with the most fully realised work here is quartet member Juhani Grönroos: Orb (2020) makes heavy use of effects throughout but keeps the focus on contrasts in texture, never fully resorting to noise but keeping clarity of pitch and tone at a distance, creating something distinct in shape but ambiguous in its contents.
It’s easy to overthink all this, both when playing and listening. It may after all be better just to play, except that you need to remain aware – not necessarily of what you’re doing, but at least what you are capable of. Braintrust of Fiends and Werewolves is an album of duets by guitarists Alan Courtis and David Grubbs, which on paper seems like two mismatched talents thrown together randomly by a gig promoter – this set was all recorded on one date last November. I haven’t bothered to look up their past history together because it doesn’t matter: these are poised, solidly conceived duets which reveal more and more of their inherent depth and beauty with each listen. It’s hard to believe each of the six pieces here were put together on the spot, as they vary so greatly in approach, method and atmosphere. The long opening track is an examplar of how to do the slow build without being monolithic or monotonous, with an ear for compositional nuance that lifts it above the expression of a simple idea. The following shorter pieces surpass this for their subtlety and delicacy, with the title work casually dropping repeated gestures to keep its pastoral ramble in check, followed by “Room Tone of One’s Own”, a rustic study in folk guitar melancholy. “Song of a Fence Grown through a Tree” reverts to electric distortion and smeared drones, before the gentle “Varsovia y Esparta” tenderly picks its way through a sparely detailed adagio with restrained elegance. The second long work that bookends the album is more elaborate in its development through various changes in its character, making use of more than just its size to create a piece that can’t be “got” in a single hearing but rewards each return visit.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Alan Courtis, David Grubbs, Eldritch Priest, Hafdís Bjarnadóttir, Juhani Grönroos, Jules (Julia) Reidy, Kalle Kalima, Pauli Lyytinen, Sergio Castrillón
2 Comments »
Rocktober! (Part 1): Mamer, Julia Reidy
Wednesday 20 October 2021
It must be the time of year because I’ve been getting a lot of stuff involving electric guitars and suchlike lately. The Takuroku download project is entering its final stage and they’ve been releasing a lot of interesting albums of music more or less derived from pop, which I won’t talk about much mostly because I fear being exposed to ridicule as a clueless old fart. The various détournements of songforms heard there range from intriguing to charming to perplexing, but I’m going to stick to something safe and review a set of solo guitar improvisations (“Oh boy, another one!”). Mamer’s set of fifteen short tracks Freeze Wizard is a bit better than the usual stuff inasmuch as it has the self-control to stay in one place, even as he plays around. The hype-sheet would like you to think that he ‘explodes’ stuff but the strength comes from each segment complementing the last, building up an identifiable but increasingly complex tone throughout the album. Digital effects are used to create and eerie, hyperreal aura to the instrument, with harmonics or faint loops droning over the strings or pitch-shifting to create the impression of a faulty tape deck. The last four tracks feel out of place with a sudden recourse to hyperactive scrabbling which breaks the mood, but by the end this busyness has been sublimated enough to work as a sort of coda.
Speaking of sublimation, Julia Reidy’s latest release How to spot a rip features four electric guitars playing simultaneously while unplugged. I’m assuming e-bows are used to create the uninterruped tones that sustain throughout the piece’s sixteen minutes. I’ve mentioned Reidy only in passing before, noting how she’s taken steel-string acoustic playing techniques and applied them to larger structures, transcending the boundaries of the instrument’s idiom through duration and through electronic manipulation. That transcendence becomes pure here, in tone and structure. The guitars’ clear drones are tuned to pitches in a 13-limit scale (conventional Western tuning is based on ratios using prime numbers no bigger than 5, so the addition of 7, 11 and 13 to the mix pushes consonance outside of our usual experience) and move further apart from each other during the piece, with attendant overtones and beating frequencies as each of the guitars’ trajectories intersect. Reidy retunes the guitars during the piece and notices how the harmonic space can suddenly ‘break’ while the pitches slowly change. This effect is augmented by the otherwise imperceptible complications of acoustic vibrations, even with the thin timbre of an oscillating steel string. The tension in the piece is underscored at times by the characteristic sound of a string slipping on a tuning peg, reminding you of just what you’re hearing. A remarkable piece for both guitar and tuning nuts, especially for people who need more James Tenney in their music.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Jules (Julia) Reidy, Mamer, Takuroku
No Comments »
Debasing the Coinage of Popular Usage: Alan Courtis, Diatribes
Monday 1 April 2019
After hearing so many stripped-back works for solo guitar, it makes a fun change to get sent a guitar album that is cranked and processed halfway to heaven. Alan Courtis’ (bloke from Reynols) solo album Buchla Gtr mashes together one of those 80s-retro Steinberger headless electric guitars with a 60s-retro Buchla modular synthesiser into a seamless whole. The recordings were made over a week at EMS in Stockholm back in 2014 and then reworked over the next few years. As a double LP, each side presents a contrasting tableau of drones and buzzes that morph from ecstatic to sinister and from chilly to decadent. It’s a salutary lesson that the grey area between amplified guitar sounds and electronic oscillation is to be embraced rather than feared. If you were a spotty teenager who got off on Metal Machine Music, (No Pussyfooting) and Sonic Youth’s EPs then this album is a useful affirmation that your youthful tastes didn’t always suck.
Still speaking of guitars: I was at a Julia Reidy solo gig a while back and started thinking about how popular music gets used as material these days. Once, tropes from rock or jazz would be incorporated into other musical styles to act as a signifier of that genre; now, the substance is reworked into new forms. Reidy strummed a 12-string acoustic with live processing and drones provided by the laptop at her side. Chords were prolonged, removed from conventional structural function, sense or context. The point of focus became the tension between the sound in the moment enjoyed for its own sake and the potential for where it might turn next.
I don’t want to use the term ‘deconstructed’ to describe this style as it’s too often used as the smokescreen for ill-conceived pretentious food and even more pretentious music. I’ve just checked again and thankfully the blurb for Diatribes’ new release Echoes & Sirens doesn’t use it either. Here, the subject is dub, filleted and collaged into something that is decidedly not dub, however much one may be struck by a passing resemblance from time to time. No guitars here, except for the bass. A real horn section, with organ, drums and electronics that largely behave in the expected manner. The four tracks, each ten minutes long, imply that some other game is being played here, as does the fact that Diatribes is the duo of Cyril Bondi and d’incise, whom I have reviewed in various guises before.
There is a concept at work, according to the sleeve notes. Each track takes a classic of early 80s dub as a starting point and reworks elements of each by adopting techniques used on sound systems by MCs at the time. I have no authority to judge how successfully the album may be “considered as four imaginary moments of a sound system night” but that’s not the point as far as I’m concerned. While the material and technical concepts may be borrowed from popular music, the method by which they are adapted and applied to a new situations sounds entirely original and the whole thing sounds fresher when heard free of expectations to be true to an imagined model. Or, perhaps this is less an act of collage or d-d-deconstruction and more a cubist representation, incorporating time and subjective experience to move beyond simple mimicry. Each track focuses on a different approach, building up a chorus of echoing brass in ‘Dub fire will be burning’, stringing everything along a line of hi-hats on ‘Tell me, what do you see’, or chopped fragments in stuttering loops on ‘Continually’. A lot of these manipulations sound like they were captured in performance with a lesser degree of electronic manipulation later on, which is pleasing.
