Teodora Stepančić: Transparent Duo [Cloudchamber Recordings]. I dismissed Stepančić’s O A | F G as “precious”, accusing it of “silences, hushed tones, reverential playing and exquisite delicacy”. Transparent Duo reveals her bravado and commitment to this seemingly unrewarding aesthetic by producing a work of forbidding harshness and austerity, even as it is almost imperceptible. Composed for two string instruments with field recordings and written on transparent paper, the score’s pages either indicate towards a direction and length of glissando, or otherwise towards bowing style. The two sets of instructions may therefore combine to form an ephemeral but definite structure and substance. The realisation here is for two cellos, played by the n/ether duo of Laura Cetilia and Hannah Soren, heard recently in Cetilia’s own soil + stone. If you expect this combination to produce a warmer, fuller sound than the meagre materials suggest, you will be disappointed: Stepančić’s score admits that the glissandi played will be “mostly inaudible”. What is heard is whatever seeps through, however faintly, almost by accident; tentative silences open up and then persist, and as they do so become harder to dispel. The sounds lightly scratch upon the ear, as though carried by wind. This sensation is matched by the interludes of field recordings, open air with distant rural sounds. It’s all incredibly sparse, but it is not precious; it’s saved by the heiratic formality that arises from the piece’s conception, where raw but unconfronting sounds are studiously interspersed with silence, human and natural sounds separated, all arranged through impersonal, non-hierarchical means. The two cellists of n/ether exemplify concentration and seriousness of purpose in the extreme reticence with which their playing may be heard; as though to hammer the point home, the unyielding strictness of this realisation produces what sounds like a recapitulation at end.
Andrew McIntosh: Fixations [Kairos]. McIntosh, who composed A Moonbeam Is Just A Filtered Sunbeam and who we recently heard as violist on Ian Power’s Brace and various bits of Jürg Frey, returns with three compositions for strings, without electronic processing, extended techniques or field recordings. The strings are retuned throughout, in just intonation. Besides the inherent resonances of the tuning McIntosh makes the perceptual tension, between our brains hearing it wrong while our ears hear it right, integral to the fabric of his music. The title work, a thirty-minute string octet, alternates between brief melodic passages on individual instruments with passages of stillness where a couple of harmonies float back and forth irresolutely. They act on the piece’s supposed momentum as though time were suspended, but that suspension of time and lack of movement becomes the subject. As observed in Moonbeam, “either the time is filled with greater complexities of tone and colour, or even less happens than before, depending on the attitude you take while listening”; Fixations has a more defined structure and as such those complexities arising from apparent insensibility become the focus of attention, more than the moments of activity. In other words, these pieces have a curious effect on the listener, being indisctinct but tough. The musicians are an ensemble called Wild Up, including McIntosh himself on viola and Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick on cello. Duo for viola and cello, with any number of violins features the duo tracing out faint patterns against an even fainter halo of the higher strings in shallow relief. All play in a similar range, rising up gradually until the soloists reach harmonics. The patterning is vague and subtle enough to make you forget the notes as such and remember only the translucent timbre of the work, until a sudden flourish of rapid, elegant arpeggios towards the end. The opening track is a brief amuse-oreille titled 434.6, played by the Aperture Duo of Adrianne Pope on violin and Linnea Powell on viola. A small secret is revealed here, as to how McIntosh uses his melodic material: the phrases are blunt and even simplistic, but played with great delicacy and refinement. To keep things suitably oblique, the booklet doesn’t contain notes on each work but a transcript between McIntosh and Cassandra Miller, which begins with the former questioning the latter.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Andrew McIntosh, Teodora Stepančić
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Cruel, But Unfair
Thursday 26 June 2025
I don’t like writing bad reviews, not least because it seems too easy and feels like I’m trying to pander to readers. The stuff I write about is typically worth considering and engaging with, even if the outcome proves to be negative. The writing’s slowed down a bit in the past year so there’s a backlog of worthy music, plus a bunch of stuff that I need to take off the listening pile so I can stop kidding myself I’m going to be motivated to think about it seriously. Here’s some mental housekeeping.
Yan Jun; cut-off; FJE Trio: The Brunt; Kieran Daly: Two pieces for fixed media pitched instruments voice zero build; Takuma Kuragaki: cleave [Party Perfect!!!]. Party Perfect, why have you forsaken me with this string of clunkers? These albums annoy because they sound like audio documentation of performance art, where the sound is one of several essential components or entirely incidental. Yan Jun gives a great personal history of clandestine pop music CD distribution in communist China, as context for him rolling CDs across the floor. You don’t need to hear this. The FJE Trio is an electroacoustic improv gig by Joe Foster, Bryan Eubanks and Jean Paul Jennkins which we have to assume seemed cool if you were in the audience. Kieran Daly has put a lot of research into his pieces for intoning voice and guitar: it takes a lot of academic rigour to make music simultaneously grating and tedious, with any residual humour firmly beaten flat. Takuma Kuragaki’s casual scattering of occasional electronic clicks might be the exception here, as a second listening to individual tracks suggests a subversive artfulness behind the sterility.
Neil Luck: Eden Box [Accidental]. I was sent this last year and meant to write about it, as Luck is part of this curious school of British composition which presumes to question the cultural and social underpinnings of contemporary music by taking an approach that continually flirts with mistaking demystification with self-deprecation. As concepts go, it’s a refreshingly tangled one, but then I lost my copy in a hard drive crash and hadn’t backed it up. Sorry, Mr Luck.
Mary Kouyoumdjian: Witness [Phenotypic Recordings]. I’m old enough to remember when the Kronos Quartet were content to play music without having to make everything into A Project. Also old enough to be over the collecting of worthy and earnest recordings of authentic testimony and ethnography mixed in with movie music so we know how to feel about it. More documentary than art, and all the less powerful for it, as emotional depth is sacrified for appeals to veracity, with an emoting string quartet acting as a surrogate for our empathy.
Teodora Stepančić: O A | F G [Another Timbre]. I’ve been waiting for the moment when Another Timbre releases some music that flies a little too close to the cold, distant sun – where the silences, hushed tones, reverential playing and exquisite delicacy finally lapse into something than can be summed up in a word as precious. This is an ideal candidate: two works for small ensembles played by Ordinary Affects with just enough extended pauses and repetitions to appear arch, mixed with just enough inconsitency in pacing and phrasing to appear indecisive.
Giuliano d’Angiolini: )))((( [elsewhere]. Speaking of Another Timbre, I meant to write about Giuliano d’Angiolini’s 2020 album Antifona, a set of curious concert hall pieces for everything from piano to orchestra, but evidently I did not. Elsewhere has since put out the helpfully titled )))(((, a collection of three pieces for a combined total of forty-seven multitracked flutes plus six clarinets. Manuel Zurria is the flautist, assisted by Paolo Ravaglia on the reeds. I’ve wanted to make good for Antifona but I’ve listened to these flute pieces half a dozen times and I still can’t remember a thing about them. Mi dispiace, signiore d’Angiolini.
Antoine Läng: Lâcher les chiens tant qu’on y est [Insub]. Every generation or so someone brings up with the idea of making an entire album with nothing but Jew’s harps and it always works out about the same.
