{"id":10869,"date":"2026-05-10T14:27:36","date_gmt":"2026-05-10T13:27:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/?p=10869"},"modified":"2026-05-10T14:27:36","modified_gmt":"2026-05-10T13:27:36","slug":"welcome-returns-1-sylvia-lim-eldritch-priest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/2026\/05\/welcome-returns-1-sylvia-lim-eldritch-priest.html","title":{"rendered":"Welcome returns (1): Sylvia Lim, Eldritch Priest"},"content":{"rendered":"

After being knocked out by Timothy McCormack’s mine but for its sublimation<\/a><\/em> last year, I have now been blown away by the two pieces on The Hand is an Ear<\/a><\/em>: an immense string quartet and a stringent violin solo. Both demand a fresh vocabulary to do them justice so let me get back to you on that asap. Speaking of brilliant follow-ups…<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/span>Sylvia Lim: Flare<\/em><\/a><\/strong> [Another Timbre]. It’s good to hear some more music by Sylvia Lim, having first heard her Sawyer Editions album<\/a> back in 2022. On Flare<\/em> you can hear her quietly individualistic style taking shape, resisting easy definition. Her compositions show an interest in acoustic decay and a peculiar method for exploring it. There’s no apparent system at work, relying on her curiosity and imagination to discover new ways of hearing instruments. The title work is for piano solo, played by Ben Smith: the instrument is treated as a resonator, using muted strings to eke out overtones from two keys, repeatedly struck in a trill. The substance of the music comes from the sonority, articulated by rhythm and phrasing, creating a piece made of shadows and echoes, a translucent projection of music. The small, intimate things we overheard<\/em> is aptly named, a discordant congregation of clarinet and bass clarinet, violin and percussion passes by the ear as though partly concealed. The piece is played by various Apartment House alumni, as is shadowfolds<\/em>, a recent piece for five musicians made in an attempt at polyphony; this manifests itself in compound, heterogenous changes in timbre. As shown in the piano piece flare<\/em>, there’s a reductive approach taken in a number of Lim’s works: the Miyabi guitar duo of Hugh Millington and Saki Kato play the diptych same but different<\/em> with one string prepared, snapping and buzzing against the others as the guitarists pluck single notes with only small variations in pitch, working their way down to one repeated, naked sound treated with minute attention. It’s striking how the reductionism never comes across as cold or affected, seeming to be born out of a strong affection for even the simplest sounds. Grafting<\/em>, a trio for bass clarinet, violin and cello played by Mira Benjamin, Heather Roche and Natasha Zielazinski, might be the most completely realised composition here, with languidly winding melodic fragments surfacing briefly amongst slow, droning notes that are both tender and remote; it ends with a coda that recapitulates the material as a frail impression of its former self. By the time you reach the last piece Field of Play<\/em> you become aware that the range of sounds has reduced down to a small, softly-lit space, reaching a minimum with this suite for prepared cello. Natasha Zielazinski, credited as co-composer, adds a single object to the strings for each section, muting the pitch and opening up a complex of frictional noise. All sorts of deep sub-tones and hoarse upper partials emerge from Zielazinski’s bowing, sounding as though barely above a whisper but recorded so closely as to seem immense, adding suspense that the delicate sounds may suddenly break. It’s common to describe a work as explorative, but this hushed work comes from a gentle but intense focus on a single spot.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/span>Eldritch Priest: dead-wall reveries<\/em><\/a><\/strong> [Another Timbre]. A collection of three more pieces by Eldritch Priest, including the promised recording of his string quartet dust breeding<\/em> performed by Apartment House. When I heard them play it live<\/a> I was struck by the way each of the seemingly incongruous threads that make up the piece seem to frequently end up chasing their own tails, likening it to “a complex knot, slackened to the point where you can\u2019t tell if grabbing one end will pull it tight or unravel it completely.” Hearing it again now, the emphasis on harmonics and fast, heavily ornamented playing suggest that the work is an alternative interpretation of the string quartet form, transposed to a different order. The high, floating sounds add colour while removing the substance of the pitch, hinting at something transparent which is nevertheless obscured by the layers of filigree. dormitive virtue<\/em> is a piano piece from 2001, recorded by the composer in his apartment around that time. It’s been heard before as a short track for solo electric guitar on his same-titled album<\/a>, a collection of “wistul, bluesey jazz rumination”. Here the jazz is less in evidence, as the piano version takes a much longer time, lingering over phrases and repeating chords as though they were echoes, pausing before ready to move on to the next section. Strangely enough, its the earlier, longer take which is the fully composed version; the guitar’s improvisation is a distillation of certain motives and mood. The introspective nature of the solo piano carries over into the other works to some degree. dead-wall reveries<\/em> continues in his style of angular, discontinuous melodies and antimelodies to construct an ergodic composition that would otherwise seem typical for him, except that in this work the music is cast in a more mellow and vulnerable mien than the usual bluff statements that take on mystifying twists and turns. An ensemble of clarinet, vibraphone, violin, cello and piano (played here by the ensemble Arraymusic) picks its way through a confounding course of contradictory conversation; yet even as it does so seems to reflect upon itself – it never resolves, of course, but it does seem to be reaching some sort of understanding of the situation and adapts its behaviour accordingly. The violin part is the most frequently active, loosing off fast melodic passages charged with nervous energy, or cutting across the other instruments with electronic distortion. All three works find new ways of elaborating upon knots; self-interfering structures that feed upon entropy. Apartment House will also be playing his long, earlier work pleasure drenching…<\/em> in London later this month<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After being knocked out by Timothy McCormack’s mine but for its sublimation last year, I have now been blown away by the two pieces on The Hand is an Ear: an immense string quartet and a stringent violin solo. Both demand a fresh vocabulary to do them justice so let me get back to you […]<\/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":[593,501],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10869"}],"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=10869"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10869\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10902,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10869\/revisions\/10902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}