Boring Like A Drill.

Rebecca Bruton + Jason Doell: a root or mirror, blossom, madder, cracks; together [Collection CQB]. The two pieces on this disc have been pleasantly doing my head in; they’re enigmatic just by existing. Both works were created for Quatuor Bozzini and junctQín keyboard collective, who perform them here with the understated clarity you would expect. What makes these pieces stand out from the usual repertoire for string quartet with piano six hands? Well, Rebecca Bruton’s The Faerie Ribbon is a guilelessly titled work by a composer I know only from her work as half of a goofy vocal duet with Angela Rawlings. There are small vocalisations in this piece, too, slipping out here and there amongst the knotwork of superimposed melodic elements that make up the first movement. Things then break down into a sequence of vignettes: a short, wistful and wordless chorale for unaccompanied voices, a pensive interlude for piano that dwindles away to almost nothing. Things eventually rebuild into a more coherent and stately reconstruction of the opening thematic material, but the transformation is more enigmatic than a conventional resolution: an interpretation is implied but never revealed. Jason Doell’s to carry dust & breaks through the body sounds stranger than it is when you remember his altered piano pieces in becoming in shadows ~ of being touched. Strings and piano wend their way through a slow processional of restrained polyphony that pauses from time to time to remind you that the whole piece exists provisionally, held in suspense by a quivering after-image of resonant overtones and a soft low drone. The drone steadily, but almost imperceptibly, descends, and as it does the Bozzinis adjust their intonation in accord. As though unconsciously, the harmonies between the instruments stretch apart, as though threatening to break: the immobile tuning of the piano starts to sound out of kilter, even electronically altered, while all the while staying the same. The musicians maintain perfect calmness as the atmosphere grows icy.

Saviet/Houston Duo: a clearing [Marginal Frequency]. I’ve heard violinist Sarah Saviet on two sets of guttural pieces for solo instrument, and pianist Joseph Houston play composers ranging from Lamb, C. to Simaku, T. a clearing is a set of pieces jointly composed by the musicians themselves, when duetting in 2022. As you might expect, there’s a lot of exploration of timbre and technique in here, but the five pieces presented do prioritise compositional thinking and succeed as intimate, self-contained chamber works. The recording is close, detailed and stark, and Saviet and Houston know how to leave plenty of space around them when needed. For the first half, each track focuses on detailed studies of touch and decay, with small piano sounds matching fleeting violin runs, teasing out differences in sustained chords, maintaining an austere impression overall while relishing the variety of sounds they can articulate in dialogue. For the final, long track Houston switches to e-bows on the piano strings and produces drones that merge with Saviet’s held notes, mapping out degrees of warmth and cold to be found within each harmonic complex.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Jason Doell, Joseph Houston, Rebecca Bruton, Sarah Saviet
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Yes I fell off the posting wagon again and now I’m going through the pile of stuff I’ve been meaning to write about and gosh there’s a whole lot of stuff with guitars. I’m not going to cover all of them: this is just a selection. There’s a solo improv live set from Eldritch Priest, which you would kind of expect but also not expect if you heard his Omphaloskepsis from a little while back. Dormitive Virtue [Halocline Trance] is a neat little album of electric guitar which promises to be an informative but derivative curiosity, only to turn into an informative but beguiling curiosity. You know the drill: one-off solo show in small venue, “a friend cajoled him into releasing” yada yada and the album starts out with a typically abrasive, discontinuous riff on discordant melodies from this composer. Except it’s not typical; after the opening fake-out comes a wistul, bluesey jazz rumination which sets the tone for the rest of the album. When distorted sounds reappear, they gain a reverberant sheen of moody atmospherics; the shorter improvisations are endearingly charming or endearingly playful. The pre-composed pieces focus on melody alone, retaining a gentle feel even at their most angular. His take on Wayne Shorter’s Iris makes room for small asides as elaboration, providing an insight into his own compositional ideas.

I heard Francesco Serra’s close study of empty space Guest Room a few years ago and was taken by it’s use of resonance and sympathetic vibrations. His new work Personal [i dischi di angelica] is a work of similar protracted research in a given space, but this time the focus is on solo acoustic guitar. Nothing fancy, just plucking and strumming that thing with no apparent direction or purpose. It would appear that the focus is meant to be on the sound of the guitar, but the playing style doesn’t reorient the listener’s attention to the acoustics; it just trundles along in a familiar way until it’s just hanging around in the background. The use of resonating snare drums comes later but it feels a little like a forced intervention to make things more interesting. Things actually do get a little more interesting when the guitar disappears, leaving a quiescent field recording that eventually acquires an overlay of buzzing e-bowed strings. This would work as a mysterious, shadowy counterpart to the first half of the album if the whole setup hadn’t been so protracted and innocuous.

Maybe it’s because I’ve also been listening to Varvara [self-released], a solo work by guitarist/composer Àlex Reviriego. The presence of a steel-stringed acoustic is also the central force here, but its role is much more complex. The crystalline acoustic sounds are sampled, apparently, and become the motivator for a deeply-textured web of drones and unpitched noise. The use of feedback loops and empty circuits play an important role here, creating evocative backdrops which assume greater prominence as the guitar fades away, with an inherent instability that nudges the wash of sound into darker and more disturbing moods. When the guitar reappears in part two, it has become enmeshed within the electronic noise, partly driving the drones while also acting as an armature for the increasingly alien soundscape. Despite this, the plucked strings never sound incongruous with the heavy synthesised sounds, thus making the resultant work even stranger. If that’s not enough for your to chew on, remember that this is only the second volume of Reviriego’s projected tetralogy of guitar pieces “inspired by the virgin martyrs of the early Christian church”.

Erica Dawn Lyle’s cassette for Notice Recordings also captures her working through some stuff. The two parts of Colonial Motels are extreme studies on the use of the amplifier’s tremolo knob. Once again, improvisations with single unedited takes, using looping effects to build up layers of choppy sounds which are then sculpted on the fly into quasi-melodic squalls before gusting into walls of torrential noise. The strange overall effect is the way it skips and skitters along, propelling itself through the obnoxious loudness without ever resorting to rocking out to retain each performance’s shape or momentum.

Yaron Deutsch titling his album Soul, Soul, Soul, Sweet Soul. [self-released] really doesn’t prepare you for the music here. As with Lyle and Serra, Deutsch is working out some ideas here, taking his work with other musicians as launch-points for solo excursions. Sanen Song began as a solo played over a sound installation piece by Helena Persson; Sub_Current is Deutsch’s solo part for an electric guitar concerto by Stefan Prins spun off on its own; Greetings from Astridplein takes a recording of Deutsch and Tom Pauwels playing a duet by Matthew Shlomowitz and cuts in urban field recordings. Sanen Song begins with atmospheric high drones before becoming increasingly busy with fiddly little arpeggiations and capricious pitch-shifting, while Sub_Current throws distorted power chords into a blender of pitch-bending and tone-switching, restlessly hopping between swatches of slowed-down white noise and cartoonish bendy-stretchy pedal work. Both works show invention, but their emphasis on technique suggests that they would be of more interest to other guitarists than listeners in general. Greetings from Astridplein is a nice little vignette that makes me want to hear Shlomowitz’s piece in its original form: it’s titled Hocket for Dylan & Alan.

On the other hand, Lauri Hyvärinen and Jukka Kääriäinen’s guitar duets on Pulled Apart by Horses [Bokashi] are just as relaxed and soothing as the title would have you believe. First of all, the prospect of an album of two electric guitars and nothing else should be enough to set your teeth on edge. It does, but in the most delightful way: the five tracks here are shot through with freewheeling exuberance and malicious glee. Hyvärinen and Kääriäinen maintain a knife-edge balance of calculated spontaneity, coming up with a dizzying array of sounds that never stick around too long as they careen from one idea to another without sticking in one place too long. It’s bracing but it’s more fun than most of these types of excursions.

There’s been much deserved attention for Jules Reidy’s latest album Ghost/Spirit, which makes last year’s Instants & Their Echoes [Hospital Hill] seem slept on by comparison. It’s the most surprising of the lot here, not least because of the relative absence of Reidy’s trademark guitar. A pair of self-similar works, commissioned by the brass trio Zinc & Copper (Hilary Jeffery, trumpet and trombone; Elena Kakaliagou, French horn; Robin Hayward, tuba), Instants & Their Echoes is a real ear-opener, one that reveals a new perspective on Reidy as a composer. The brass plays softly, in just intonation, building up overlapping harmonies into gently separated moments, set within a web of slowly cascading electronic tones. Reidy’s guitar can also be heard on occasion, deep in the mix to add to the glistening electronic timbres. Sounds have been extended and lowered in pitch to create reflections and imitations, that disorient while also implying a loose canonic structure that holds the piece together. It’s very spacious, in a floaty, dreamy way, as brass and gutar will periodically drop away and let the electronics sustain the mood in self-contemplation. There’s a confidence in the way the music starts and ends, twice, tinting the air and the time it takes with its sound and then withdraws without the need for justification, leaving a deep aural after-image in the mind.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Àlex Reviriego, Eldritch Priest, Erica Dawn Lyle, Francesco Serra, Jukka Kääriäinen, Jules Reidy, Lauri Hyvärinen, Yaron Deutsch
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Is this drone? No, it’s not; but it’s slow and sombre throughout. Lugubrious, even. That fits, as the seven pieces that make up Sarah Davachi’s cycle The Head As Form’d In The Crier’s Choir [Late Music] all relate to and draw inspiration from the Orpheus myth. The theme of grief – of the solemn, stoic kind – is ever present, as each piece in succession rolls out at the same slow pace and low register, for a litle over ninety minutes in total. The immediate distinction to be made between each work is in its timbre, but the bourdon of the pipe organ is a defining characteristic throughout. Davachi has recorded her performances on four church organs, heard either solo, in combination or with other instruments; besides multitracking, she uses other analog electronics and tape effects. With time, each piece gains its unique identity in its harmonic and textural construction, with pieces alternating between monody and antiphony, even at one point venturing a sepulchral introit melody on synthesiser. When other instruments are added (ranging from viola da gamba to trombone) they serve to expand upon the organ’s tone rather than seek to introduce contrast. One work is entirely electronic and introduces sounds that are more translucent and less weighted down; it’s preceded by a quintet for wind instruments in which Davachi is absent as a performer (the musicians here are Rebecca Lane, Sam Dunscombe, Michiko Ogawa, M.O. Abbott and Weston Olencki). There’s been a recent trend of musicians assaying various organs in a kind of field survey, but this is the first set of pieces I’ve heard where the organs are a means to an end, with each composition having been thoroughly and solidly constructed, unencumbered by any documentary obligation that might have distracted from the overall artistic goal. This is why each piece and the entire cycle can be appreciated with each fresh hearing, as first impressions give way to admiration for the craft, which in turn reveals more artstic depth, despite Davachi having set herself the narrowest of ranges in which to work.

Clara de Asís and Rebecca Lane had worked on their piece Distances Bending [Discreet Editions] for a couple of years or maybe more by the time of the recording heard here – it’s “their long-term project, which takes different forms in specific contexts and configurations in their exploration of harmonic and time proportions”. The version heard here was recorded in Berlin in May 2023 and besides de Asís on synthesizer and Lane on quarter-tone flutes, they’re joined by Sarah Saviet on violin and Deborah Walker on cello. The pacing makes the Davachi album sound brisk, as the four musicians create a music of severe austerity, adding and removing each note with great deliberation. For the listener, it comes across as a prolonged meditative action, with each small, slow step coming from inner immobility rather than tentative fragility. Even when all four are playing, they consciously produce a sound that is consciously thin, favouring closer harmonies and melodic stasis. Flute, cello harmonics and a pure synth patch yield very small differences in timbre, with only the characteristic rasp and edge of Saviet’s bowing providing obvious colouration. It’ll take at least one hearing with patience and undivided attention for the music’s purpose to make an impression on you, but once you’ve got it you’ll probably keep getting it on later listenings in less strenous circumstances.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Clara de Asís, Rebecca Lane, Sarah Davachi
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Is this grunge? I don’t mean it’s amped-up distorted but it sure sounds dirty. Laura Cocks’ solo flute bears no resemblance to the typically bright and shiny instrument we all know, more like it’s just been dug up from a burial ground with clumps of dirt still between the keys. On FATHM [Relative Pitch / Out Of Your Head], Cocks stalks through the nine pieces all sneerin’ and a’smearin’, starting with a strangulated wheeze and then a quick gasp for air before plummeting into the abyss. Muddied sub-tones predominate throughout, with the usual ‘free’ repertoire of shrill outbursts and anguished vocalisations kept to the barest minimum, giving everything a dense, vegetative vibe that verges on claustrophobia. The blunt and murky sound works as a discordant contrast with the restlessness of Cocks’ playing style. Well-placed rough breath and grubby fingering blur every pitch into something organic, like nature operating at its grimiest level. A few tracks play out like a standard improviser’s-frenzy of running the instrument through its paces, but then you get tracks where Cocks takes the flute’s more improbable sounds to create something truly unique. A marsh wren lands on the ear like an uncomfortably close-miked field recording, FAVN is a soliloquy of low, wordless bellowing. YARN somehow manages to sound like a collage of musique concrète in its material and construction. The smaller servings offered here make this less formidable than last year’s duet SLUB with Weston Olencki but show that her aesthetics haven’t mellowed: if you buy the CD, the hand-made packaging uses “natural elements” that will degrade over time. “Do not worry, that is the nature of things.”

Speaking of obstinacy (which I kind of was, indirectly), cellist Matthias Lorenz and pianist Miroslav Beinhauer have recorded a set of three duets by Petr Bakla. Beinhauer was the soloist on Bakla’s Late Night Show album and also contributed a few Fluxus interpretations on that Stolen Symphony comp a while back. At the time, I referred to Mieko Shiomi’s Imaginary Garden No. 3 as “charming” without noting that obstinacy was also present, combining attention-deficit flightiness with left-brained obsessiveness. That’s a good enough reference point for Bakla’s Cello & Piano [Octopus Press], although there’s nothing flighty in the way Bakla puts his music together. There appears to be a system at work, or the impression of a system, even as it defies analysis. In Two Instances from 2016, the two instruments intertwine in a staggered arpeggio, cello pizzicato and piano muted una corda to create a muted, idle strumming. For Eduard Herzog is the earliest work, from 2006, and drops a clue to Bakla’s influences, invoking dodecaphonic rows and deploying them with febrile tremeloes and glissandi that both embrace and deride the means of the avant-garde from days of yore. The personal opinion is more overt here, as is the brittle, self-aware construction that recalls Ablinger or Spahlinger. The new piece dominates, not only because it’s nearly twice as long as the other two put together. Eight Notes, composed last year, beguiles with its reductive title. There’s a grand total of two pitches in the piece, a minor third apart in the bass clef: each may be held for one beat or two, played either as loud or as soft as possible. Bakla’s score meticulously rings the changes on how the two instruments combine these elements, cello and piano repeatedly exchanging between foreground and background, implying antiphony and dialogue out of what should be monotony. A lowkey masterpiece of the minimal, it’s mesmerising, it’s maddening, it’s compelling, kind of funny in a way, relentless, inevitable.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Laura Cocks, Petr Bakla
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While I get back up to speed, there’s been a whole lot of praise for Another Timbre’s latest Linda Catlin Smith collection. I’ve got no argument with that. Flowers Of Emptiness pulls together eight chamber works spanning nearly forty years – it’s quietly astonishing to think of how she’s created such a substantial body of work. As you would expect, the dimensions of each piece are modest (two exceed ten minutes, another stretches to nearly twenty) but they all establish an immediate presence and profundity through being contemplative without ever settling into passivity, combining seriousness of intent with lightness of touch. The gentleness of harmonies and dynamics in her language initially suggests a superficial resemblance to the current fashion in modern music for the polite and inconsequential, but where the latter typically resolve the tensions of their work into the lulling certainties of melody or vague folklorism, Smith turns those same elements towards abstraction, offering up emotion without interpretation. The musicians of Apartment House play this music with an authority that now imparts interpretative leeway; in the works for string quartet the silences and pithy fragments here resemble John Cage on the cusp of finding Zen.

The batch of three discs released by Another Timbre late last year are all repeat appearances by old favourites of the label, each featuring performances by members of Apartment House. Zamat is their fourth release by Adrián Demoč, a set of three new chamber pieces. Each is an exquisitely worked study in instrumentation, with Demoč reducing the substance of each piece down to the state of almost monody, articulated by subtle differences in colouration and texture with just enough variation to keep up the appearance of forward motion. The title work, for clarinet, bass clarinet, viola and cello, moves back and forth on the spot between a handful of notes, plucked strings hedged amongst the guttural effect of low clarinets, producing a complex, ambiguous tone. Gebrechlichkeit is a pensive string quartet that broods over several frail chords of close clusters, moving from one to another only when the strings’ various methods of attack have been exhausted. “…o protón jasu…” repeats the same instrumentation as Zamat, only with both clarinets in the upper register and evrything played in high treble, a loose gathering of thin harmonics. The sound here is naked and astringent, reminding me that Demoč’s music is not always as comfortable as it first appears.

Eden Lonsdale has had only one previous Another Timbre release from about a year earlier but apparently it’s already sold out. Dawnings is a double-disc of five longer pieces, in which longer durations allow Lonsdale to stretch out into elongated chorales like Cloud Symmetries (four violins played by Mira Benjamin, Chihiro Ono, Amalia Young and Angharad Davies) and Shedding (the seven violas of Ensemble Ipse). Each of the above pieces use strongly constricted pitch ranges to focus on timbre and small changes found within stasis. In my review of last year’s Sawyer Editions release, I talked about “hazy washes” and “thick, roiling textures”; in these works those elements appear more starkly, with less obvious direction point from one state to another. The large ensemble work Constellations, perfomed by Oerknal and conducted by Hardy Li at the 2023 Gaudeamus Muziekwiek, is almost too rich and roiling as it luxuriates in antiphonal layers of instrument groupings threaded through with organ chords. Most remarkable is the title work, in which Heather Roche on clarinet and Kerry Yong on piano seamlessly transform back and forth between figure and ground, always spare and unhurried yet always moving while appearing to be in the same place. There’s no melody as such, nor any particular direction of travel, but somehow you listen and at one moment one is high and the other low, then the other is high and one is low without any apparent intervention.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Adrián Demoč, Eden Lonsdale, Linda Catlin Smith
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(Continued from Part 1)

There was more to the London Contemporary Music Festival than I previously let on, such as Melinda Maxwell playing an improvisation on an aulos and Kurdish songs sung by Dengbêj Ali Tekbaş with accompaniment on duduk by Murat Savaş, which open up a different perspective on the events overall. As supposed totem for this year’s festival, the Trickster gradually emerged over the four nights as a figure offering more substance than simple misdirection. The third night featured the LCMF Orchestra, which couldn’t help but appear more substantial. They began the evening with Yves Klein’s Monotone-Silence Symphony, a notorious work typically more contemplated than heard. In a reversal of much of the first two nights’s performances, something often mistakenly considered as a conceptual work was revealed as a piece that’s at least as impressive as a musical experience as it is as an idea. Inside Hackney Church, the orchestra made the air come alive with both the presence of sound and its absence, first playing a D Major chord for twenty minutes before resolving into a resonant silence of equal duration. The boldness of its structure creates a tension that plays upon our expectations and anticipations, while also signalling a number of musical attributes that would gain currency in the half-century or so following its composition: drones, diatonicism, steady dynamics, silence. It held the punters, partly thanks to conductor Jack Sheen’s valiant effort to stand still with his arms extended for forty minutes.

Not much later, Sheen was also required to throw shapes and then add spoken narration to the premiere of Maggie Nicols’ work for voices and orchestra Our Wits About Us, one of the cross-disciplinary events LCMF likes to try out. As on most other occasions, it was a fun and curious experience but ultimately ephemeral in a way that makes it better considered as a good old-fashioned Happening than as a composition. Looking back over the programmes for the last two nights I’m shocked to find that I’m struggling to remember a bunch of the pieces which I heard barely a week ago. This wasn’t a problem for the first two nights; possibly it’s true after all that it’s better for art to irritate than amuse.

That being the case, I’m going to jump ahead to the end of the Festival (not quite: there’s another event in January) when the Christmas lights went up on the balcony railings and Charlemagne Palestine was let loose on the Hackney Church organ to play SCHLINGENNN TRICKSTERRR BLÄNGENNN!!!!!!!! Palestine had played at the first LCMF and so ending this year’s festival seemed to close a circle; he addressed the crowd before playing, repeating a small ritual with two brandy glasses and saying he hoped to make our ears tingle. In a way, it was a fitting counterpart to the Klein symphony that opened the previous night: he filled the space with long chords that he would periodically adjust on the keys or the stops for varying harmonic density and brilliance, creating moments of contrast by throwing himself foward onto the manuals to produce dense clusters, then relaxing and letting harmony return. He might even be mellowing in old age, as towards the end he began working in some brief cadential motives in the bass, with some upper movement that could have been prodded into melody.

Besides James Clarke’s string quartet mentioned last time, the Sunday concert also featured Apartment House performing the premiere of Laura Steenberge’s I Only Have Eye For You. It’s a peculiar but mesmerising work, taking her signature blend of acoustic sound and dissasociated theatrical activity but on this occasion producing something that seemed to unfold as a single, integrated action, curiously purposeful even as it seemed to defy interpretation, in spite of the programme note alluding to Greek mythology. A string trio present but never quite complete, each member rotating between instruments while also attending to a funnel filled with sand cascading into a plastic pail, exchanging pails to ensure the funnel remained filled. The strings provided fragile continuity to the near-inaudible but constant backdrop; the percussion throughout the piece acted as both stabiliser and disruption at once, with knotted fabrics and a cymbal used in various ways to provide small, almost inadvertent sounds later on as the piece continued to evolve.

Focusing on the music-music, on Saturday night Lisa Streich’s KIND for prepared acoustic guitar, play by Jacob Kellermann, seemed to almost get lost in all the bustle: it makes itself seem smaller and thinner than it is. Streich requires metal strips and a small wire grill to be attached to the strings and soundboard, rendering much of the piece’s Spanish-influenced classical gestures to sound as tiny, high-pitched chimes, while other notes are filtered through to sound at normal register, but blurred and distant. The LCMF Orchestra’s premiere of Sofia Jernberg’s The murals in Quinta del Sordo was game in its evocation of rough textures in a disjointed series of tableaux, but the piece suffered from a recurring use of awkward stage business which added a comedic element that detracted from the music. Jernberg also suffered from her piece inadvertently following both Our Wits About Us and Laurence Crane’s Composition for Orchestra no. 5, with which it happened to share several distinctive elements. It could come across better given different staging in another context.

Which brings us to Crane’s Composition for Orchestra no. 5 ‘In Hackney’: the piece is a stunner. It begins in a strikingly uncharacteristic way, with the orchestra members all playing small, untuned, hand-held percussive objects. You think it’s a nice little opening gesture, but it keeps going. The gentle noise rises and falls in calm antiphony, amid repeated fake-outs that the real music is about to begin. It’s entirely unlike anything I’ve heard from Crane before, to the point you wonder if the piece and the title are some big Fluxus-inspired feint, in keeping with the Festival’s theme. Just as you’ve accepted the piece as a well-crafted essay in orchestrated white noise, a big Haydn-type cadence swells up. There’s no follow-through and the gentle noise continues. You’re now convinced the piece is a witty postmodern spoof; soon after you begin to realise you were wrong again. It’s just occurred to me that Crane’s method here resembles that of Lutosławski: you’re getting into the music when he suddenly reveals that he’s just been laying out his basic materials, and then he really goes to town. ‘In Hackney’ is utterly different yet entirely in keeping with Crane’s aesthetic, while pushing that line of clear musical thinking into new territory with more complex cognitive ramifications for the listener.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Charlemagne Palestine, Laura Steenberge, Laurence Crane, Lisa Streich, Maggie Nicols, Sofia Jernberg, Yves Klein
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“Where’s the music?” is just the sort of thing you should be saying at a contemporary music festival. LCMF was back for 2024 with a programme promising plenty of tricksters and musical shitposting, a prospect which threatened enforced jollity and pre-baked disappointment. At first, it delivered on that promise very nicely with acts heavy on the shenanigans; these are always awkward in an art context, uprooted from the more fertile soil of low culture. A large part of the first evening was given over to Adam de la Cour’s deliberately ham-fisted panto pastiche Groyne ‘n’ Goosed, with an all-star cast. De la Cour is one of a group of British composers who humourously interrogate and deconstruct the cultural mores of music-making in a clever way that has remarkably little pay-off for anyone who chooses to listen to it rather than contemplate it as an intellectual exercise. The mode is comedic, but draws its inspiration from Monty Python at their most obtuse, and leaned heavily on the very limited schtick of Only Pretending To Be Crap. Groyne ‘n’ Goosed‘s muddled premise and extended antics wore thin very quickly; as with Laurie Tompkins’ The Feelmouth Greeny earlier that night, the attempt to play it off as ‘modernist shitposting’ was torpedoed by the amount of visible exertion put into wasting our time and a persistent eagerness to please, so that both works lost confidence in themselves.

A complete contrast in approach, Russell Haswell’s opera the truth is as elusive as ever took an apparently earnest approach to produce something trivial: diverse narrations and narrators suggesting some implied narrative out of a random-association text, strung together with chunks of Haswell’s typical live electronic noise. Musarc was the chorus for this piece, and were required to dress in bin bags and mill about amongst the audience for a bit of minimum-viable-product drama, matching how the work’s ambitions didn’t live up to its aspirations. The night ended with aya reminding us that she’s a girl two or three times while talking about herself more than playing music. I assume I’ll want to know who she is one day but the opportunity to find out why will have to wait, apparently.

These were all world premieres, commisioned by the Festival. Everything was a premiere, if only for the UK, which was admirable. Also on that first night was a new viola duet by Viola Torros, with Catherine Lamb and Johnny Chang sticking out like a sore thumb with their quiet, focused and attentive playing, leading each other through a piece that elusively slipped back and forth between slow contrapunctal melodies and passages of near harmonic stasis, kept on edge by their microtonal intonation. A similar square-peg-in-round-hole effect was created on the second night by Explore Ensemble giving the UK premiere of James Clarke’s 2016-E, eight years after the British composer wrote it. Clarke’s presence on the bill was justified by the power his music has to frighten off most concert programmers in his native country: complex, virtuosic methods to produce sounds that can verge on brutalism. 2016-E is a particularly astrigent piece, juxtaposing violent but controlled bursts of action against a flat frieze of extended, dirty chords. On Friday, Apartment House also played Clarke’s String Quartet No. 7, composed just last year before getting its first airing here. It’s a concise single movement that boils down its expressivity to the most rudimentary gestures, each instrument playing solo descending lines in turn against compressed, flattened chords, yet still articulating turns of texture and mood as though it were a work from the Romantic era, shorn of all extraneous ornamentation to reveal the defiantly melancholic core.

Explore also premiered Laila Arafah’s Sibelius Studies 2: [keeping expectations to the absolute minimum so the disappointment will reciprocate], a title in keeping with LCMF’s premise but whose music in fact delivered much more. Arafah has used the music notation programme Sibelius and its automated playback system to make doodles, filling pages with rapid clusters of notes at impossibly high or low extremes, which the computer’s synth renders as oddly textured buzzing sounds. These scores were projected on screens while Explore added scraps of sound for added colour and eccentric rhythm, with unusual percussive effects adding to the strangeness. Each piece is very short, fleeting like a Webern bagatelle with electronic interference, while really being entirely dependent on computer scribble. Amongst this was more antics and shenanigans, the low point being hypnogirl 24 in which Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster took a pointless story and told it badly. (“It is difficult for me to explain,” she said. We had noticed.) There were some excerpts from Jon Rafman’s COUNTERFEIT POAST videos, made out of cultural trash and debris, much like punk aesthetics from the 80s and 90s but with the ideology inverted: immersing oneself in garbage in search of the uncanny and attempting to make it relatable. An improvised duet by Maggie Nicols and Steve Beresford showed the influence that the 60s/70s school of British free improv still has on contemporary musicians: their stiff, formal japery appeared to capture the spirit of denuded panto at the source.

Around this time it had occurred to me that the LCMF curators Igor Toronyi-Lalic and Jack Sheen might have put together an enormous four-night prank to confront us with the great con we tell ourselves that the reason we all come to these sorts of things is to enjoy music. It’s true that I was feeling a bit jaded by that stage, but I unexpectedly cheered up with the closing set from ∈Y∋ + C.O.L.O. Usually LCMF nights end with a loud set of demotic dance music but Tetsuo Yamatsuka and Yasumichi Miura infused their stage bit with so much harsh-edged, rigourous noise (accompanied by suitably eye-splitting rectilinear projections in stark black and white) that even when the dance beats kicked in they seemed to be an extension of the noise. Better still, they didn’t end it there but just kept moving on to one thing after another until you genuinely wondered where you were all going to end up – something that rarely happens with electronic gigs.

(Part 2 follows tomorrow)

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: ∈Y∋, Adam de la Cour, aya, C.O.L.O., Catherine Lamb, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, James Clarke, Johnny Chang, Jon Rafman, Laila Arafah, Laurie Tompkins, Maggie Nicols, Russell Haswell, Steve Beresford, Viola Torros
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Just when I thought I was in, they pull me back out. I’m sorry there’s been no activity here lately, but new music took a back seat during an enforced upheaval of living arrangements, then with hassles connecting to the internet and, just as I was settling down at my desk with the hi-fi set up nicely in the new digs… poof! The hard drive disappeared. Not literally; I can see it right now, sitting there on my desk, completely inert. My computer, however, says it doesn’t exist and in a philosophical way it’s correct because only the hard drive’s corpse remains while everything that made it what it was has departed: the thing’s dead as a doornail.

Of course I usually keep backups but of course that also took the crowded back seat over the past few months and of course I was just about to make a new backup when… poof. I had a bunch of cool things to write about but it feels a bit dismissive to write reviews of them based on my hazy memories at this time. In the meantime, people have been sending me interesting-looking stuff which I haven’t got around to yet.

The recovery plan is as follows: Step 1, go on holiday. Step 2, go back through my emails and see what I can still recover for review, while also playing catch-up on what people have been trying to tell me while I was out to lunch – this may start while I’m still on holiday as I do happen to enjoy it after all. Step 3, actually write and publish some reviews.

Thanks to all the artists who have been sending me music: I will be following up on as many of these as I can. It may take a while, as it always has (in the past I’ve left some things for up to two years before I took notice of them). Regular updates will resume as I start to get amongst it. My big lesson from all of this (besides the need to buy more hard drives) is that your music is important to me and I hope it’s not just me who benefits when I publicly engage with and respond to it.

Filed under: Music, Reviews, Self-promotion, Stupidity by Ben.H

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I’ve been catching up on some recent releases by Catherine Lamb, who continues to beguile and mystify in turn. Curva Triangulus [Another Timbre] is the sole work on the latest album, a thirty-five minute octet played most gracefully by Ensemble Proton. This is an outstanding work from Lamb, imbued with a warmth and respiration that her music typically doesn’t like to display on the surface despite its construction being worked out with equal thoroughness. It is, as always, composed for a form of just intonation, combining harmonics and overtones of varying complexity to create a spectral sound; but in this instance any semblance of an unfolding process is obscured by recurring cadences, wandering melodic lines and alternation of contrasting instrumental groups, textures and registers. Without drawing attention to itself, it charms with its odd eclecticism, mixing discrete tuning principles into its modal phrases, the modest ensemble harboring exotic instruments both old (triple harp, clarinet d’amore, a reconstructed microtonal arciorgano) and new (contraforte, lupophone). Whether despite this or because of it, the music nonetheless gives an overall impression resembling 18th Century hymn tunes, steady and serene with a little warping at the seams that only reminds you of the sureness of its purpose.

Three works for voices are heard on parallaxis forma [Another Timbre]. Exaudi and the Explore Ensemble give a luminous rendition of color residua, as I heard them play it live last year. The remaining two pieces feature bravura performances by Lotte Betts-Dean: pulse/shade was written for four like voices but here Betts-Dean overdubs herself to form a strangely precise chorus, even as the vocalise is softened by the lack of consonants. The hocketing effect starts to feel a little forced after a while, even as you’re impressed by the halo of resonant tones that suffuse each stuttering phrase, and it seems a smaller work than its length suggests. Perhaps even more impressive and uncanny is Betts-Dean heard solo in parallaxis forma, for voice and ensemble. Explore Ensemble are the musicians again, producing an aura that surrounds and backgrounds Betts-Dean as her voice ascends, sometimes climbing, at others gliding, at times soaring into something beyond normal. Later, the voice has to drop below the singer’s normal range, hinting at the physical demands this music can make while we’re considering the depth of its abstractions. The sound is beautifully captured, the resonance of St Nicholas’ Church at Thames Ditton providing an almost unnatural sheen as it complements the players.

andPlay is a violin and viola duo, the two musicians being Maya Bennardo and Hannah Levinson. They play natural sounds in a natural way, which can be harder than it seems; it can get a little easier when it’s just the two of you listening to each other and the tuning of your strings, getting into the naturally occurring order of harmonics without any external push back towards the conformity of equal temperament. The two works on Translucent Harmonies [Another Timbre] both date from a concert given by the duo in 2018. Lamb’s Prisma Interius VIII makes another appearance here, having been recorded at least once before in an expanded version for recorder and strings with electronic spectral resonance. As a string duet, minus electronics, this “melodic” version reduces harmonic saturation to a bare minimum, with Bennardo and Levinson plotting out a path through just intonation pitches that bleed into each other by association as much as through superimposition. It returns strongly to some elements of Lamb’s music brought out by Johnny Chang’s solo violin plus synthesiser interpretation of Prisma Interius VII, the folkish traces and simplicity of line (not minimal, there’s a difference) stripped of ethereality and artifice, grounded in guttural strings. Kristofer Svensson’s Vid stenmuren blir tanken blomma was composed for andPlay as a companion piece to their concert presentation of Prisma Interius VIII: it’s a longer work that recalls Duk med broderi och bordets kant his solo violin piece also recorded by Bennardo. Also in just intonation, the piece meanders with a roughness and casualness that makes the Lamb piece appear stuffy. Here, the two instruments shadow each other warily, with melody or counterpoint to be more inferred than directly heard from the brief fragments held together by speculative silences. It differs from the solo piece in forsaking the wistfulness and playful approach for a more contemplative traversal of the trail, it’s also about twice as long, so that over the forty minutes Bennardo and Levinson begin to piece together a kind of intuitive continuity that’s more felt than heard.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Catherine Lamb, Kristofer Svensson
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What are the sounds of nature? You think that’s an easy one but then you remember you’ve spent your whole life trying to see what’s in front of your eyes before forgetting to look and replacing what you see with what you’ve learned should be there. It’s harder still for us urbanised folk for whom all contact with nature is mediated in one way or another, before or after the fact. The term “nature” immediately calls up images of pastorals or writhing, quasi-organic forms as seen on the front cover of composer Amy Brandon’s album Lysis (New Focus Recordings). There are eight pieces collected here, mostly short, written between 2018 and 2023, which employ a variety of esoteric techniques to produce music that sounds more excavated than constructed. The album shocks with the opening flute solo microchimerisms, a fleeting vignette in which flautist Sara Constant implausibly hocks up deep aqueous rumbles that evoke the discovery of organisms in a soil sample. The Chartreuse String Trio make threads sound larger than it is, the three instruments drawing upon a wide range of timbres and registers in a piece which exemplifies Brandon’s strange but sophisticated approach to composition. She makes use of microtonality, geometry and rhythmic modulation purely as a means to an end, forgoing any impulse to demonstrate these principles to the listener to focus on producing music that resembles natural phenomena in their manner of operation. Thus threads weaves a counterpoint of irregular, unpitched sounds and complex noises finely differentiated by density and texture, while in the title piece Quatuor Bozzini begin with faint, voiceless string sounds that transform into thick harmonies made of tunings that sound arrived at in the process, rather than decided in advance. Some works definitely use electronics (Intermountainous pits ominous whooshes against Julian Bertino’s retuned 10-string guitar) while others sound like they do, such as the Bozzini’s pairing with Paramirabo and returned keyboards on Tsiyr. Dynamics and intonation are used to ferocious effect, making the music advance and retreat, snapping in and out of focus as though under a zoom lens. The odd one out in this set is the longer and larger Simulacra for cello and orchestra, with soloist Jeffrey Zeigler and Symphony Nova Scotia conducted by Karl Hirzer. The larger forces allow for more dramatic gestures and overt lyricism, but these outbursts are made more effective by sudden, striking gestures whose abruptness and inventiveness make any poignancy feel earned. Brandon’s talent for cutting such moments short also shows her awareness of nature’s indifference in practice.

The Normal Sounds (Moon Glyph) on Lia Kohl’s album aren’t exactly natural but they are real. Each of the seven pop-sized tracks is built out of pairings of field recordings, overlaid with Kohl’s cello and synthesizer ambience. (Ka Baird and Patrick Shiroishi contribute some flute and sax, too.) It has a cool quality throughout, not quite detached, even as it bases each track out of sounds considered at least inadvertent or else straight-up intrusive (alarms, electrical hums); then again, snow sounds are also used, so we can’t really call this a pointed interrogation of modern life. Kohl’s music plays both with and against the found sounds as it best suits her, repurposing for her own needs, leaving the listener to do whatever intellectual work they care to apply in discerning her motives. At times the premise adds more texture than grit, such as occasional distant car horns behind the sax solo (uh huh). Best of all is that the sleeve notes talk about other stuff but never tip you off to the running gag on which the album really is based: Kohl’s choices of keyboard samples and patches are now a greater part of our sonic landscape than the field recordings themselves.

Anthony Vine’s Sound Spring (Kuyin) is a film soundtrack album, but not one that would interest Sony Classical. There is a daxophone, played by Daniel Fishkin, but I don’t think Sound Spring is a horror flick, where this instrument usually seems to find its home. Vine on electric guitar and Fishkin are joined by Maya Bennardo on violin, Will Lang on trombone and Ryan Packard percussion to play along with with field recordings of natural sounds from within, and around the making of, the movie. In its own way, it becomes a reflective documentary, shifting the focus from action on-screen to location and process. As such, the nine tracks do blend into each other in an ambient haze where specific details remain indistinct. Sounds of running water predominate, with faint snippets of conversation occasionally in the background – I feel like this has become something of a trope for audio verité. It is all superbly balanced, with the instruments becoming part of the landscape, playing as much within the natural sounds as over the top of them. I think they should take it as praise that you forget there’s, say, violin and trombone in there.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Amy Brandon, Anthony Vine, Lia Kohl
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Where is the “new” in new music? Some composers work in a style that seems to present something modern, at least on the surface. To what extent is this based on an understanding of the ideas and means of living that are distinct from previous times, and how much of it simply reflects an ear (or an eye) for fashion? Some composers actively try to advance beyond the received idea of concert music, such as Rafał Zapała and his electroacoustic pieces recorded on Futility (Kairos). The blurb describes it as “a provocative album that reimagines the concert experience, fusing music with technology to challenge the traditional performer-audience dynamic”, but then concedes that “this album presents music without interactive layers…. experiencing the full versions is only possible in a live performance”. Neither this nor the “!!! ReadME” file that came with the download push the suggestion that these recordings are alternative versions and thus read more like a disclaimer that we’re not going to hear what this music is really like. No doubt it’s a frustrating situation for Zapała, possibly one that would make a meatier subject for his next project than the gently used concepts presented here. The listener has carte blanche to dismiss the music, as does the composer to dismiss our criticism of it. Members of the Hashtag Ensemble (they’re real) challenge themselves to tricky playing, typically commented on, or guided by, a synthesised voice. Violinist Kamil Staniczek adroitly mimics the intonation of the computer voice in Ablinger-like manner on No Meaning Detected. The voice in these pieces is disappointingly typical of its genre, detached and cynical, superior yet glitched, familiar to everyone through HAL 9000, Max Headroom et al. It rises above the second-remove cyberpunk in certain places with some neat twists in the narrative, such as the title work for the ensemble until the musicians are pressed into some self-conscious acting, and in the final solo (duet?) Scrolling to Zero, where Lilianna Krych plays out a sampler keyboard to fatalistic reductiveness, albeit marred by smug irony. By contrast, Judge Me Again featuring Ania Karpowicz on solo flute with live electronics plays out as a relatively straight and impressively rendered instrumental take-off with deep and crunchy digital processing. The most impressive work is Introverts’ Collective, a piece for ensemble and mobile digital controllers that eschews verbal justifications and presents its cultural dilemma directly, through leading the group into ever-decreasing circles of degenerating loops from which they can only temporarily escape. This one really does seem to touch upon something lurking in today’s polite society, rather than simply assert a received idea. What gives me pause here is that there’s nothing I can hear which suggests how these pieces may come across differently if I heard them live, as intended.

Šalter Ensemble operates on the border between free improvisation and composition (it sez here), so it’s either good or bad that you can guess this from listening to each of the three pieces on their album Tri dela (Bruit Editions). There’s something very much of its time in the way they use a collective approach to composition, in combination with other observed cultural signifiers such as amplification, noise (acoustic and electronic), purported spontaneity and a choppy, quasi-linear approach to time. That last aspect is the main feature of Tomaž Grom’s My Wish Your Command, where rapid changes in texture and material at erratic intervals create the impression of something more controlled than the other two pieces, which each appear to allow a single process to unfold. It’s a late 20th Century conception of modernity – fast, noisy, knowingly irritating, with an increasingly insistent snare drum that steps all over the rest of the group. Interstices / Interferences is jointly credited to Jonas Kocher and Gaudenz Badrutt, both of whom I’ve previously encountered individually (see index). It’s a pointed contrast, with a slow, open texture and varied dynamics. The broad palette of sounds and uncrowded pacing work together to create something ambiguous, if not downright vague, but Šalter maintain a level of energy to sustain momentum and dodge the “listless” tag I’ve used on Kocher’s earlier work, while also perversely working as a composition. The final piece, Elisabeth Harnik’s šum II, is the one that seems most like an improvisation and as such works more as a performance than as a musical statement, with vocalist Irena Z. Tomažin leading the group in a slow crescendo into a loud, impassioned whatever.

Just played Brian Baumbusch’s Polytempo Music (Other Minds) a couple of times and, like with Zapała’s Futility, I’m struggling to hear in the music what’s in the sleeve notes. This is a large, ambitious work for chamber ensemble, ably played by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, which like Futility appears intended to be heard live. Besides the stereo audio version here, there’s also a “virtual reality application” and a phone app (natch) for appreciating the work – it’s immersive, see? I don’t think being immersed would help me as the music rubbed me the wrong way. On the page, it’s technically impressive, with Baumbusch mapping out different tempos and rates for each of the instruments to play through the same material to create multiple polyphonic (and polyrhythmic) textures. Nancarrow and Gamelan are namechecked as expected, as well as minimalism, in its present-day meaning as a synonym for Hollywood. Much of the material is made of simple diatonic arpeggios and ostinati, which makes the performance at least theoretically possible for the ensemble but, even if they nail it as well as they do here (the recording dates imply it’s multitracked), makes for textures with rather threadbare harmony and polyphony, without the rhythmic drive that makes both Nancarrow and repetitive minimal music compelling. The music segues through a dozen movements of different moods, which I assume is the main expressive objective, with the technique a means to an end. If you read the notes and hoped you’d found something to tide over your John McGuire cravings, you’ll be disappointed. Some affecting moments, which seem to be Baumbusch’s true strength, are swamped in reams of aimless roiling for the sake of it. To my ears he’s taken a complex, roundabout route to produce something akin to either John Adams, as a soundtrack for a Virtual Reality app.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Brian Baumbusch, Elisabeth Harnik, Gaudenz Badrutt, Jonas Kocher, Rafał Zapała, Tomaž Grom
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Paolo Griffin’s not as easy to pin down as he first seems. The three pieces on his debut album Supports & Surfaces were recorded in England, Canada and Finland. Each piece shares a common approach to composition, but it’s not the one you immediately think it is. The Purpose of an Empty Room seems simple enough: David Zucchi plays his alto saxophone into a delay loop system, playing two notes slowly in succession, repeating and moving to the next pair, as the texture quickly builds up to a thick but smooth layering of see-sawing harmonies. The inexorable logic of the delay loop is exploited to introduce some more esoteric harmonisation at times, threatening dissonance without hoping to achieve it, or more intriguingly to settle into an uneasy monotony. It all seems pretty familiar, right down to the fade-out. The second piece redirects your attention: Alone, Together is a duet for violin and percussion, sans electronics, played by Aysel Taghi-Zada and Michael Murphy who perform together as Duo Holz. Any logic present in this piece is undetectable, as Taghi-Zada bows isolated phrases of sundry durations in white-key modes with an unsteady but even tread, accented by occasional harmonics. Murphy plays in a slower and looser style on bells and small gongs, not quite precise in pitch, creating a quasi-accidental counterpoint to the melody. The two create intrigue simply by their presence together, then entrench that mystification by wending back and forth in no particular direction in no particular hurry to achieve nothing more than take up over half an hour of your time. Having lifted the album sequence above the ordinary, the final piece Madrigal redoubles by returning to the solo-plus-delay loop method, but this time around creating a completely different impression. Countertenor David Hackston sings a sombre melody that evolves through a series of transformations, with occasional pitch-bends up or down which render the piece more strange and affecting, while also tempting the listener to latch onto them as reference points while Hackston’s voice expands through an ever-growing hall of mirrors. The sax piece used loops as a means of establishing stability, but in Madrigal the loops create uncertainty, with no neat patterning to the uncanny voice. Also, Madrigal ends, suddenly. The three are united by Griffin’s conception of musical slack (pace Ivan Stang) as music “that doesn’t really go anywhere but doesn’t necessarily stay in one place” may therefore ensure it never achieves a definitive state of completion. If you get this on CD the first and last tracks are abbreviated: presumably the first fades out early and the third fades in late. Alone, Together must be heard in full.

The new Sawyer Editions release of Eden Lonsdale’s music shows marked differences from his earlier collection on Another Timbre, even though the pieces heard here were all written around the same time. The common element to the three compositions on ricercari for rainy days is the harp, played by Cara Dawson and accompanied by the ensemble red panel. The use of electronics and reverberation heard on the previous album are here restricted to the opening piece, falling asleep on an airplane, in which lever harp, cello, percussion and electronics are gradually sublimated into a hazy wash of evocative ambience. For the title work, the role of electronics is effectively substituted by harmonium, which binds together the fragile playing of the other instruments into a cohesive, denser sound, yet also suddenly swells into loud drones that drown out the smaller details to create thick, roiling textures. The process seems to invert itself in cycles/emptiness: a slow melody on the harp repeats itself, with harmonic colouration from cello and harmonium evoking low brass and high winds. The piece slows down and breaks apart into isolated sounds, with the increasing presence of silence, before gradually rebuilding itself into a quietly flowing continuum. It seems to function as a counterpart to Alone, Together.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Eden Lonsdale, Paolo Griffin
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There’s a counterpart to those composed drones I was talking about last week, in improvisation when musicians make a piece out of sounds that remain mostly static, where development or progress is more a function of entropy than of a chosen direction. The success or failure of such music hinges upon the musician being aware of the difference between making a sound and digging deeper into it to uncover and identify unique details in the complex that makes up what on first appearance was a simple sonic unit. It can often resemble a process of following your nose, all the better to understand where you already are. Adam Pultz’s two bass pieces on his album Wade (Carrier) seem to take this approach, but he cleverly uses an external impetus to force his hand in a series of small but regular adjustments. In the title piece he bows amplified double-bass in long, regular drones which are further activated through a feedback mechanism; the substance changes more than it develops or accumulates. Some digital processing comes into play and field recordings gradually intrude, opening up the claustrophobic space with sounds that first resemble further electroacoustic enhancements before emerging as a distinct entity. In the second, shorter work the feedback-driven bass sounds more like an outright electric instrument, with a denser texture and higher level of energy. Analyzing each element, Pultz’s obstinate playing could be expected to bog everything down but his adept use of technology makes the whole more than the sum of its parts.

I’ve been listening repeatedly to Explore Ensemble’s superb album from last year, Perfect Offering (Huddersfield Contemporary), with works by Cassandra Miller, Lisa Illean, Lawrence Dunn and Rebecca Saunders. The last name seems like the odd one out, but Explore’s performance of murmurs is freighted with a similar sense of fragile repose, at once relaxed and coiled for action. I did not expect to get that same feeling from a set of improv duets on contrabass clarinet and percussion recorded one day in 2020 with a Spooky Scary Skeleton on the cover, but here we are: pianissimo etc (Tripticks Tapes) pairs John McCowen (former) and Carlo Costa (latter) on three untitled tracks, with McCowen staying still as possible while releasing a iridescent tide of overtones and harmonics while Costa underlines the clarinet’s fundamentals with bass drum. With each piece the clarinet recedes a little further, the low pulses from the first track becoming smoother harmonics seasoned with small gongs and high friction sounds, before finally being subsumed into a complex but still transparent texture of breaths, buzzing and reverberations. I wish more compositions were as lucid as these three tracks.

Phicus is a trio of Ferran Fages on electric guitar, Àlex Reviriego, double bass and Vasco Trilla on drums and percussion. Their album Ni (Tripticks again) is, uh, kind of an improvisation – it depends on how you look at it, but really it all keeps coming back to improvisation. To break it down: Phicus play live improvisations, Covid puts a crimp in their practice, the group gets a recording date, they’re conscious they lack time to get their intuitive chops back together, Reviriego writes a composition “trying to recontextualize and develop further” their musical vocabulary as a counter-intuitive way of stimulating their creativity, the trio take it away in other directions to move beyond consolidation of what they have already achieved. It worked. In Ni they improvise with elevated economy of action and telepathic coordination, making an extended piece which never loses momentum even as it appears to stay still. Reflective silences mark changes in approach and signal structural divisions. Its effect as a composition comes from the absence of any spare moments when you hear a process working itself out, as each new detail arrives as though fully integrated into the overall form. A long strange journey which leaves a strong overall impression, the incidents along the way still catch by surprise after repeated hearings.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Adam Pultz, Carlo Costa, John McCowen, Phicus
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Do we even know what we mean anymore when we talk about drones? I seem to remember a definition given by Robert Ashley many years ago which turned away from descriptions of surface appearance to consider the internal mechanism; the exact details have slipped my mind and I’m not going to look them up now but the idea that stuck in my mind is that drone is a form of music in which the passage of time is experienced on its own terms. In popular and artsy genres, working with the awareness of this concept appear to be broadly assimilated into most modern musical thinking – you can work with it or against it, but it’s there.

Does it make sense to call the three pieces in Mara Winter’s The Ear And The Eye: Music For Four Renaissance Flutes (self-released) drones? Heard casually, each of the three rebuffs the ear with long tones held in apparent stasis. Winter and her colleagues in the Phaedrus quartet make the most of the thickened tones of their Renaissance flutes. She has done a similar thing before with Rise, follow, her duet for contrabass Renaissance flutes, but where the earlier work made use of resonant space and more overt interactions between the performers, the three new pieces use a more thoroughly research and composed approach. Closer listening reveals each piece to be a complex essay in timbre related to pitch and dynamics: Hyacinth harmonises its way through consonances and microtonal dissonances through overlapping pitches which highlight the difference in timbre between each instrument. Incarnadine moves the emphasis away from change in pitch to change in dynamics, exploiting the variations in colouration available without needing to move between registers. Smaragd focuses on sonority, expanding and contracting the pitch space between the instruments to reveal variances in intonation and clarity or complexity of tone. What may be taken for drones are really being used as a vehicle to express the flutes’ relationship between pitch and timbre, a concept made audible. Winter composed her pieces based on “historical sources which described color proportions analogous to the ratios of tonal musical intervals” and created a notation that used watercolours to convey variances in intonation. The colour analogy is studied here and applied to practice to produce ever more sophisticated manifestations of the initially observed phenomenon.

There’s a similar approach to material in Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard’s Colliding Bubbles (surface tension and release), a composition for string and harmonica quartet. Again, a drone, but in service of a more elaborate conceit. Løkkegaard draws upon the behaviours of bubbles in collision, how the forces at work may cause fluctuations in surface tension, or ruptures in which tension is released. That sounds like a principle behind a Xenakis piece, but Løkkegaard’s method and material are very different. It may not even be a method as such, more of a philosophical or poetic guide without seeking a direct analogy in what or how the musicians play; despite this, however, the piece expresses its principle through fundamental activity rather than through interpretation. String quartet and harmonica quartet are to be, one and the same: here, Quatuor Bozzini follow the composer’s instructions to play their usual instruments while also playing harmonicas. Both involve slow, constant tones, simultaneous throughout, presenting a challenge for the musicians. The Bozzinis can maintain diaphanous harmonies indefinitely, sure, but those even tones become more fraught when they’re also required to blow with a similar lightness. Despite the references to bursting bubbles, there’s nothing explosive here, just the constant unsteady and fragile balance between pitch and timbre as the colouration of the two sets of instruments clash and the pitch and force of each note wavers minutely. The piece begins in the high register, slowly descending somewhat lower before finding a sort of resolution, with the transition to a lower register bringing its own challenges in maintaining tone, even as the pitch seems to settle. Both here and with the Winter album, there’s a tension at work which drives the music, with a seemingly implacable surface that reveals itself to be made up of many softer strokes in combination.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Mara Winter, Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard
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I’ve been listening to the latest batch of releases from Kory Reeder’s Sawyer Editions label. Bodies of Water presents two instrumental trios by Sarah Hennies which give further insight into her unusual way of mixing up expressive subjectivity with rigorous formality. The two pieces here employ both of these tendencies at once to exploit the tension between the emotive and the impassive. Lake for violin, percussion and piano proceeds in short sections of repeating units with off-kilter melodic cells that comply with a tendency to settle into new forms of stasis, while the longer Abscission for violin, cello and guitar extends and propagates small amounts of material in which all momentum would appear to be exhausted. In both works, the unassuming material is reiterated and varied in ways that give the appearance of following a strict process, yet the only logic that appears to be at work here is that of intuitively feeling a way through what has already been given. As such, each piece develops through neither building up nor breaking down, but always suggesting that either outcome may be possible if they were not averted by Hennies’ compositional strategies. Each piece taps into a selection of musical ideas from the past fifty years to create a synthesis reminiscent of all of them without being reducible to one specific reference. The musicians (violinist Ilana Waniuk and Duo Refracta, Arcana New Music Ensemble) are steadfast but refuse to be misled into pursuing soulless precision, enhancing the experience of music that alternately takes and gives.

Georgia Denham is new to me. Her collection of chamber pieces with love is a modest thirty-nine minutes long, which along with the lowercase titles seems to match the deliberately understated nature of her music. No audible processes or method here: emotion is at the forefront, with five pieces that are expressive and vulnerable to interpretations and explanations. Denham’s way of conveying emotion is unusual, manifesting as subdued melodic lines and dynamics, in many cases with melody apparent more through inference of voice leading and texture, with the line itself rendered almost flat. Where this method is more typically expected as an evocation of quiescence, Denham manages to present it as though it were constraining an excess of emotion into a coherent form. The piano quintet subject of breathing briefly surges, but only so far, for the ensemble to unite in a profound sonority that needs no lyrical outpouring laid on top of it. The most overt lyricism comes in the pair of violin-viola duets, if bells could sing and if bells could weep, yet even in the former a gentle melancholy reins in exuberance, while in the latter it precludes despair. (To be clear, I instinctively approve of this restraint as it dignifies emotion with classical timelessness.) The final work, to gwen, with love is for piano and string trio and the only work here that barely exceeds ten minutes’ duration. It feels the most complete work here, in the way that it takes up a melodic fragment for contemplation, essaying possible continuations before breaking off and starting over. Somehow Denham makes this feel natural and tender, without seeming timid. It also owes a lot to the sensitive performances from the various ensembles here (the pieces were recorded in the UK and Canada), who know how to apply melancholy in all its shades.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Georgia Denham, Sarah Hennies
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