Ensemble Pamplemousse: Brightness Drifts [Ensemble Pamplemousse]. Heard that name somewhere before and… well, this isn’t what I expected. Pamplemousse are the ensemble who recorded Andrew Greenwald’s A Thing Made Whole III a while back and it turns out they’re as much a composer collective as a chamber ensemble. I wasn’t counting on these four pieces being so perky, with an emphasis on electronics. Natacha Diels’ What Do You Want to See Today? is one of those existential reflections on “the modern condition” that plays out as an attention-deficient satirical romp but, as happens all too often in these cases, the light-touch irreverence borders on whimsy. Nevertheless, it’s one of the better examples, aided by the musicians’ rapid-fire timing, some genuinely striking effects and the composer’s nous to keep the material as semantically empty as possible to put the emphasis on nebulous unease rather than tempt fate by suggesting specific cause. David Broome’s Luminosity II (from the Hertzsprung-Russell Project) is also playfully frenetic, using photoelectric cells to trigger synth sounds and drum machine samples to produce aural stroboscopic effects. Either the cheesy instruments are subverted by the impartial manner of their disposition, or the technical interest in the piece’s stop-go flow is offset by the trivial synth patches, I’m not sure. Bryan Jacobs’ Envelope En En is the most successful of the electronicky pieces here, using modern day low tech to emulate the effects of early electronic high tech: sophisticated, complex textures and timbres are produced by the ensemble operating “chirp toys”. Not exactly sure what these are – Google suggests either a cat toy or a wine pourer – but evidently they are put to use here as pulse generators, bubbling along and buzzing around like a reincarnation of the glory days at Westdeutschen Rundfunk. Odd percussive noises and vocal sounds may or may not be from “field recordings”, but they all add to a quirky, exotic atmosphere that suggests a well-intentioned but incongruous attempt at recreating natural sounds. The sole acoustic work is of David Broome playing Andrew Greenwald’s piano piece Facets. Greenwald’s usual contested thickets of sound receive a necessarily cleaner and neater appearance when expressed on the keyboard: Broome sounds unnervingly precise in his rapid, scattershot bursts of notes that build up a portrtait of nervous energy, manic episodes counterpoised with tentative periods of studied inaction. Didn’t find a mention of this piece anywhere else on the web, so I think it’s either new, or else very old.
Pareidolia: Far Away Worlds [Dissipatio]. Saw the cover and assumed it was one of those improv/fusion things I usually ignore but read the blurb and saw that this is a duo one half of which is Marta Zapparoli, so I’m interested. Quick recap: she works with radio waves, using various antennae and devices to intercept broadcasts and natural electromagnetic phenomena alike. Pareidolia pairs her with Liz Allbee, exponent of the quadraphonic trumpet – which is not as depicted in the cover art but an equally fantastic electroacoustic gizmo. It’s sort of like if you first heard a Jon Hassell record at someone’s party while on shrooms. As a pair, they’re all you’d hope they’d be and more. The album grabs your attention with the thunderous opening track in which Allbee makes full use of extreme pitch bends and amplification, gleefully matched by Zapparoli electrical spikes and manipulated static. The subsequent pieces are less interested in showing off and more about world-building, creating alien aural landscapes that are ripe with allusions and implications. You’d expect the wildness of Zapparoli’s earlier work in the medium to be tempered somewhat by the somewhat more tractable nature of Allbee’s beast and to a certain point it is, but the collaborative effort is channeled into establishing an overall tone through echoing sonar booms and crackling atmosphere. A science-fiction theme seems almost inevitable here and while the duo suggest retrofuturist overtones they never get cute about it. Nerdier listeners will appreciate the shortwave transmissions and that there’s a track titled “Number Stations”.
Erik Hall: Solo Three [Western Vinyl]. I sometimes wonder if certain musicians seek out novelty for the sake of it. Hall evidently has a vocation for arranging compositions for multi-tracked keyboards and guitars, then performing all the parts himself. As the title advises, he has two previous albums in this vein, tackling Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and Simeon ten Holt’s Canto Ostinato, neither of which I wish to hear albeit for differing reasons. This third effort follows the same compositional thrust but appears more palatable as it’s made up of shorter pieces by four different composers. He begins with Glenn Branca, perversely selecting one of his orchestral scores for the guitar/keyboard treatment; his take on the opening movement of The World Upside Down must be the gentlest Branca ever committed to disc, even as the source is relatively mild itself as far as Branca goes. Charlemagne Palestine’s Strumming Music is domesticated to a tidy fifteen-minute essay, with the overdubbed harmonic ramifications sounding decorative more than organic and the monadic form of the piece stripped of its obsessive forcefulness. There seems to be potential in a human interpretation of Laurie Spiegel’s A Folk Study, one of her pioneering works in digital synthesis and sequencing, but Hall sticks to keyboards and produces an interpretation that seems faithful but lacks the incongruity of the original. I was just wishing this piece used strings instead. By contrast, his version of Steve Reich’s Music for a Large Ensemble is unusually effective, taking advantage of a reduced palette of instrumental sounds to produce something crisp and propulsive out of Reich’s busy polyphony, with enough substance in the writing to stop it from coming across as trivial. It’s the one piece here which does let you hear the music afresh.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Andrew Greenwald, Bryan Jacobs, Charlemagne Palestine, David Broome, Ensemble Pamplemousse, Erik Hall, Glenn Branca, Laurie Spiegel, Liz Allbee, Marta Zapparoli, Natacha Diels, Pareidolia, Steve Reich
No Comments »
In the field: Ahti & Ahti, Marta Zapparoli, Michael Pisaro-Liu
Thursday 30 November 2023
Marja Ahti and Niko-Matti Ahti created this piece for radio in 2020. Nokivesi (it means ‘soot-water’) is a musique concrète montage of domestic and natural sounds, deftly treated with electronics and some synth work, threaded through with fragments of spoken dialogue. It tells a fragmented story of some sort, which is lost on me as I don’t speak Finnish. Even though deprived of a clear meaning, it’s effective in the way it conveyed an impression of rural isolation without me needing to look that up in the sleeve notes. Even though sober tales of the ruminative and bucolic kind aren’t really my thing, I – wait, is that an electric kettle boiling near the beginning? The same kind of sound I was admiring in Ryoko Akama & d’incise’s No register No declare? Maybe they heard Nokivesi on the radio and made an homage, or it’s a happy coincidence, but for the record the Ahtis got there first.
I’ve probably ranted enough about my hangups with field recordings (tl;dr you gotta be good) so it’s nice that Dissipatio has found a novel twist on the genre. Marta Zapparoli’s field recordings are of magnetic fields, specifially those produced by the Aurora Borealis. Her Interdimensional Generated Space is a half-hour composition made from these electromagnetic emanations, captured by her on a variety of devices, including a homebrew crystal radio. It’s evidently the result of a lengthy period of field research, notable for the variety found in the thin but densely detailed sounds collected here. Zapparoli has produced something just stable enough to present a coherent listening session, yet filled with disruptions and breaks that underline the mercurial nature of the phenomenon, reflecting that their aesthetic delights (visual and aural) can be captured but not controlled. Further details emerge on re-listening. Also, props for releasing a digital download in original one-track mono instead of a dump of the CD master.
This is close to miraculous. Michael Pisaro-Liu’s A room outdoors is a 2006 composition lightly scored for harmonium, any sustaining instrument and field recordings. In this piece, the field recordings bring the outdoors, indoors, to create a imagined space for the musicians to play. These two substantial realisations published by elsewhere feature Guy Vandromme and Adriaan Severins on keyboards and synthesizer, recorded in Brussels in April 2020 (lockdown time) and a version from Cremona this summer, played by Luciana Elizondo on viola da gamba with Vandromme on Indian harmonium; Fabio Gionfrida mixes the field recordings here. The playing is sublime, recalling the subdued simplicity of Ferrari’s Presque rien, but given deeper colouring and shade by Vandromme and Severins, neither musician intruding to comment but only augment the sound into an evocative pastoral without a narrative. The Cremona realisation, with Vandromme switching to a rougher instrument and Elizondo’s string playing, adds a sharper relief of acoustic sounds to the mix, with more to direct the listener’s attention without either musician being so crass as to demand it. Each is notably different in their intepretation while staying true to the piece, with the musicians both offering a richly satisfying evocation and contemplation of landscape, much in the same way that landscape itself presents form and subject as one.
