{"id":10857,"date":"2026-05-09T22:15:51","date_gmt":"2026-05-09T21:15:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/?p=10857"},"modified":"2026-05-09T22:15:51","modified_gmt":"2026-05-09T21:15:51","slug":"some-older-stuff-i-had-saved-but-forgot-about-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/2026\/05\/some-older-stuff-i-had-saved-but-forgot-about-1.html","title":{"rendered":"Some older stuff I had saved but forgot about (1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/span>John Cage: Chamber Works… 1943-1951<\/em><\/a><\/strong> [Another Timbre]. I can remember a gig with Kerry Yong playing a selection of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes<\/em> on an electronic keyboard, for which he had substituted the original piano preparations with a lurid array of samples. It was blasphemous, it was hilarious, it was godawful, it somehow worked on its own crazy terms. It also strongly reminded me of Messiaen. There’s nothing sacrilegious in this fine selection of pieces from the intriguing transitional phase of Cage’s career, but Yong’s irreverence and dry wit must play a role in him rescuing In A Landscape<\/em> from the realm of New Age rack jobbers. Treading firmly where others have been fey and floaty, he rediscovers the shocking reductionism of the piece and gives it a simple, big-boned elegance of movement. Similar treatment is given to Dream<\/em>, which in this version has an added cello part played by Anton Lukoszevieze – the embellishment is understated and not where you expect it would be. Yong also gives us the seldom-heard Haikus<\/em> from 1950-51, as oblique and elusive in their fleeting gestures as the Six Melodies for Violin and Keyboard<\/em>, played here with Mira Benjamin. I don’t think it’s possible to have too many recordings of the sublime String Quartet in Four Parts<\/em> and the version is more than welcome: Benjamin and Lukoszevieze are joined by fellow Apartment House cronies Gordon MacKay and Bridget Carey. They all play without even thinking of vibrato, which makes the muted sounds appear perversely wholesome rather than anaemic. They dance through the deceptively tricky rhythms and make the slow movement seem positively glacial, in a way which makes it all the more compelling.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/span>Weston Olencki: Solo Works<\/em><\/a><\/strong> [Creative Sources Recordings]. Four pieces for solo brass, each that wears its experimentalism on its sleeve. This is raw, bare-boned music that grapples at length with fundamentals of instrumental sound. From the start, seven stones (parallax)<\/em> hits like a soprano vacuum cleaner fed through a ring modulator. The album is, however, all-acoustic and the instrument being played is in fact a bass trumpet with preparations, using a snare drum as a resonator. The bass part becomes apparent when the pitch suddenly plumments to the abyssal depths before snapping back into its usual frequency band of noise. On all four pieces, silence used as compositional device, abruptly marking off boundaries for each monolithic aural block. The longest work is the most elaborate, capacity<\/em> for unadulterated trombone, alternating compound tones with stuttering bursts of percussive sounds, gradually opening up into long braids of buzzing multiphonics, a brutalist sound sculpture in granite. The modified euphonium in bisected mass<\/em> hisses electronically and builds up into the sound of grinding machinery and a clipping microphone caught in a gale.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/span>Astasie-abasie: Vestigial Gamelan<\/em><\/a><\/strong> [Shame File Music]. Stupid me overlooked this one, even though I enjoyed Ian Andrews’ previous release Elliptical Gamelan<\/a><\/em>. I guess this is the third in a trilogy, collecting recordings made between 2021 and 2023. The M.O. is as before: amplified small objects motivated by electrical devices, so each pretty short track is made up of layered loops and cycling sounds. As with Elliptical Gamelan<\/em> (less so on the preceding Molecular Gamelan<\/em>), the range and quality of sounds that Andrews elicits from his instruments bring the conceptual conceit to life. Each piece is less defined in form, unlike the preceding album, but gains from additional textural and timbral depth. By continuing to work with these devices, he’s moved beyond getting things to simply sound different and reached a level of understanding where the sounds can share similarities but complement each other. This time, the pieces are distinguished by presence of lower-pitched sounds and less-traceable looping patterns, suggesting something more organic than mechanical. The variety of sounds continue to surprise through the album and each track functions as a tableau, working as either background of foreground. The evocation of nature also comes from the way the pieces now succeed in avoiding any obvious human intervention without seeming to run on rails.<\/p>\n

\"Alex<\/a><\/span>Alex Paxton: Happy Music for Orchestra<\/em><\/a><\/strong> [Delphian]. Really, really did not enjoy Paxton’s Music for Bosch People<\/a><\/em> album a while back, so I was really, really surprised when I braced myself for this follow-up album and ended up loving pretty much the whole thing. It felt like there was something wrong with me, I got into it that much. Everything that Bosch People<\/em> got wrong Happy Music<\/em> gets right. Where the old one felt stiff and forced and trying to signal that it’s funny, the new one feels loose and spontaneous and actually is funny without any apparent effort. (Bosch People<\/em> did seem to improve in the places where the sounds get more free.) It’s rare to hear genuinely funny music but the six pieces on Happy Music<\/em> pull it off though a lightness of touch and a consistent silliness, where the incongruous instrumentation, styles and levels of competence make no attempt to justify themselves and so remain defiantly, self-assuredly ridiculous. This time around, you don’t have to think about why the music could be considered comedic, you just know it by listening. Instead of sounding obnoxious, Paxton’s goofy trombone soloing comes across as good-natured and well-intentioned, just a little misguided.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Cage: Chamber Works… 1943-1951 [Another Timbre]. I can remember a gig with Kerry Yong playing a selection of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes on an electronic keyboard, for which he had substituted the original piano preparations with a lurid array of samples. It was blasphemous, it was hilarious, it was godawful, it somehow worked on […]<\/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":[394,531,134,650],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10857"}],"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=10857"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10893,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10857\/revisions\/10893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}