{"id":10939,"date":"2026-05-31T18:56:26","date_gmt":"2026-05-31T17:56:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/?p=10939"},"modified":"2026-05-31T18:56:26","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T17:56:26","slug":"music-wed-like-to-hear-again-eldritch-priest-jurg-frey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/2026\/05\/music-wed-like-to-hear-again-eldritch-priest-jurg-frey.html","title":{"rendered":"Music We’d Like To Hear (again): Eldritch Priest, J\u00fcrg Frey"},"content":{"rendered":"

A “mongrel array” of musicians were conducted by Jack Sheen in a performance of Eldritch Priest’s pleasure drenching…<\/em> last Thursday<\/a>. The piece was written in 2003 and this was its second(?) airing. The difficulty comes from several sources: its instrumentation (electric guitar, lap steel guitar, organ, piano, clarinet, harmonium, assorted strings, percussion and bass), its length (about ninety minutes) and its scoring (combining notation of various precision and suggestion). The angular melodies and lopsided meters heard in other Eldritch Priest works are present, but smoothed out into a sort of dissolute lounge jazz that moons about as though to fill up time before something else happens. The lap steel, organs and vibraphone add an oily sheen to the smoothness and insinuate a sinister aspect lurking in the background. A demotic drum kit of cymbal mounted on snare erratically rapped out the absence of a consistent beat. Everyone seems to drift in their own reverie, more or less together. There are pauses, then everything resumes apparently much as before. And so, questions of orientation, direction, structure and form steadily become irrelevant, replaced by a simple sense of scale. As the music drifts, so does it gradually drift apart. The suggestion of an ominous presence occasionally rears back into consciousness – a sudden snare strike, a louder chord – but the foreboding imprints itself more through absence, as the established elements drop away, not always to return. For much of the time it’s all ensemble playing, before breaking out into smaller groupings; but once that has happened the full ensemble never really seems to return. Solos become precarious. At one point the music dwindles away to a lo-fi recording played into a mute room of musicians. The cymbal finally stops but then you wonder why it never comes back. More and more, your attention comes to what is missing. Chatting to someone afterwards, he described it as hearing smooth jazz slowly bleed out. The overall character of haunted loucheness was expertly conveyed by the ensemble, an expanded form of Apartment House, including Sam Cave on guitar and EP himself on the lap steel, which had the last word. I do hope someone can get together a good recording of this piece, sooner rather than later.<\/p>\n

The following night had the UK premiere and second performance of J\u00fcrg Frey\u2019s Clarinet Quintet<\/em><\/a>, played by the same musicians as in the first peformance last week on Bologna and in the recording. I won’t add much to what I’ve already said, except to comment on the difference between hearing a recording and hearing it live. For the recording I wrote “I suspect the listener\u2019s responses to it will alter a little each time it is heard”, which will obviously be the case when hearing a live performance, but this time I picked up more on the aspects of Frey’s earlier styles that have been retained in his new work, such as when the quintet gives way to the viola plucking a single note, lingering over this moment before moving on. There was also the more general difference in that in a recording you listen for what has happened, but when live you listen for what will happen. The different anticipatory sense drew attention to what seemed a slightly more hesitant opening to how the piece was played, which made the Apartment House quintet’s interpretation on the night seem more fragile and their accomplishment more earned than taken for granted, with the piece’s strength to be found in the course of its performance rather than assumed from the start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A “mongrel array” of musicians were conducted by Jack Sheen in a performance of Eldritch Priest’s pleasure drenching… last Thursday. The piece was written in 2003 and this was its second(?) airing. The difficulty comes from several sources: its instrumentation (electric guitar, lap steel guitar, organ, piano, clarinet, harmonium, assorted strings, percussion and bass), its […]<\/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":[593,31],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10939"}],"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=10939"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10939\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10941,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10939\/revisions\/10941"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}