{"id":10836,"date":"2026-04-25T18:12:15","date_gmt":"2026-04-25T17:12:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/?p=10836"},"modified":"2026-04-25T18:12:15","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T17:12:15","slug":"listening-in-opstad-toraman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/2026\/04\/listening-in-opstad-toraman.html","title":{"rendered":"Listening In: Opstad, Toraman"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/span>James Opstad: Drift<\/em><\/a><\/strong> [Another Timbre]. I knew the name James Opstad from his frequent appearances as a double bass player with Apartment House on numerous Another Timbre albums, but didn’t realise he’s also a composer. None of the five pieces on Drift<\/em> use bass, so I can’t help listening with one ear open for what makes him tick as a musician. Nymphaea<\/em> is a duet for piano and vibraphone composed in 2020, composed for and played here by the eminently capable GBSR duo<\/a> of Siwan Rhys and George Barton. It seems simple, with antiphonal exchange of chords between the two intruments, sometimes changing, sometimes not, sometimes matching, sometimes not – this movement is sufficient to produce an elusive delicacy, with GBSR’s tactile use of dynamics making music that avoids lapsing into a cycling of processes. The idea of cycles lurks behind all of these pieces, never exactly audible but suggested or at least implied. The two short Studies<\/em> for string quartet, played by the musicians of Apartment House, unfold like canons and they probably are, of a sort, having read the accompanying interview with the composer. Opstad uses forms of mensuration so that the instrumental voices move independently in their own time, echoing each other without forming a consciously recognisable pattern – a haunting hall-of-mirrors effect. This comes out even more strongly in the longest and most recent work, Drift<\/em> itself. It started as another duet for GBSR, but then Opstad added a clarinet part, again played by Roche. Roche’s part adds small, wistful lyrical commentary to Rhys’ spiralling, labyrinthine piano continuo, augmented by Barton on low woodblocks. The piano part resembles some of Bryn Harrison’s<\/a> pieces in the eating-its-own-tail aesthetic, but each musician follows their own little circular trajectory, always sounding the same while never quite being the same. It takes a while to seep in that the piece is gradually slowing down, both lower and slower, prolonging time in a Clementi (A.) dreamlike state. The oldest piece here is Eluvium<\/em> from 2018, showing Opstad’s interest in live electronics. Clarinettist Heather Roche weaves together lines in higher and lower registers, fed through a time delay and played back into the room. A tam-tam hung in the room acts as a resonator, filtering and reinforcing certain overtones. A halo of pure tones gradually enhances and then engulfs the clarinet and I’m sure towards the end Roche has stopped playing altogether, leaving only the enduring resonant waves to wind around each other. It’s an uncanny effect, drawing from techniques used by Lucier and Tenney but given its own poignancy by the initial quiet lyricism which takes on a transformative purposefulness.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/span>Zeynep Toraman: a lifetime of annotations<\/em><\/a><\/strong> [Sawyer Editions]. No foreknowledge of Toraman or her work, and Sawyer make a habit of keeping their sleeve notes terse. I was originally going to pass on reviewing this because at first it sounded like more of the same, although the same what I’m not sure of exactly. Two works for small groups of strings, each using faint bowing of slow, elongated tones. Regular readers will get a familiar feeling. It may share a common style, but there is something distinctive in the way Toraman works and puts her pieces together. The String Trio: a lifetime of annotations<\/em> omits viola for two violins and cello; played by veterans Clara Levy, Biliana Voutsckova and Judith Hamann, they take a melodic line and extend it for half an hour, multiplying it with some unexpected harmonies to create a diffuse counterpoint that emerges and evolves throughout the piece, starting out somewhat remote but settling into a pensive mood. Slow Poem (v.2)<\/em> is a duet for violin and viola performed by andPlay, the duo of Maya Bennardo and Hannah Levinson previously heard playing<\/a> Catherine Lamb and Kristofer Svensson. As you may expect, it’s a bit more astringent without the cello’s range, made moreso by their frequent use of very high harmonics, but it doesn’t become abrasive. What makes this piece is a sensitive combination of composition, interpretation and recording that makes the frailness of the sounds intimate, for music that is vulnerable instead of affected and aloof. Even as the sounds become thinner towards the end, they seem more settled than in the more fully-voiced opening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Opstad: Drift [Another Timbre]. I knew the name James Opstad from his frequent appearances as a double bass player with Apartment House on numerous Another Timbre albums, but didn’t realise he’s also a composer. None of the five pieces on Drift use bass, so I can’t help listening with one ear open for what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,44],"tags":[809,808],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10836"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10836"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10847,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10836\/revisions\/10847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}