Boring Like A Drill.

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 on that asap. Speaking of brilliant follow-ups…

Sylvia Lim: Flare [Another Timbre]. It’s good to hear some more music by Sylvia Lim, having first heard her Sawyer Editions album back in 2022. On Flare 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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.

Eldritch Priest: dead-wall reveries [Another Timbre]. A collection of three more pieces by Eldritch Priest, including the promised recording of his string quartet dust breeding performed by Apartment House. When I heard them play it live 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’t 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 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 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 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… in London later this month.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Eldritch Priest, Sylvia Lim
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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 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 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, 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 from 1950-51, as oblique and elusive in their fleeting gestures as the Six Melodies for Violin and Keyboard, 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 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.

Weston Olencki: Solo Works [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) 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 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 hisses electronically and builds up into the sound of grinding machinery and a clipping microphone caught in a gale.

Astasie-abasie: Vestigial Gamelan [Shame File Music]. Stupid me overlooked this one, even though I enjoyed Ian Andrews’ previous release Elliptical Gamelan. 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 (less so on the preceding Molecular Gamelan), 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.

Alex Paxton: Happy Music for Orchestra [Delphian]. Really, really did not enjoy Paxton’s Music for Bosch People 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 got wrong Happy Music 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 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 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.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Alex Paxton, Astasie-abasie, John Cage, Weston Olencki
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Helena: BILBAO MMXXIII [Blu-Rei]. The composer is Àlex Reviriego – the five pieces here make up a half-hour live set played by Helena, a trio of Reviriego on double bass, Clara Lai on piano and Vasco Trilla on percussion, with some background audience sound. Each piece is distilled, concentrated into little moments of articulate stillness, proceding from one moment to another with stead deliberation. At times some of the pieces resemble cool jazz, but the absence of any propulsive beat atomises the elements of the genre into something more abstract and rarefied. Trilla plays a large side drum with a soft mallet, more for emphasis than rhythm, with bells, woodblocks and a cymbal for faint washes of noise. Lai’s piano acts as a focal point but limits herself mostly to slow, chordal themes which offer some movement while always staying in the same place, while Reviriego and Trilla act as commentary, the bass part often shadowing the piano. Things start out weird with the first track and then gradually build momentum to an almost indulgent climax on the penultimate track, with the trio’s members throwing out some more demonstrative chops, but then regain composure for the final piece: a stately, slowly unwinding processional.

Markus Reuter / Vasco Trilla / Àlex Reviriego: Música fúnebre [self-released]. Speaking of processionals: Reviriego and Trilla join up with Markus Reuter on Música fúnebre, an ominous piece that spreads out over half an hour to steadily immerse the listener in a sensation of crepuscular horripilation. Reviriego’s bass provides the sombre undertones for Trilla playing a set of flat bells and Reuter on a Phillicordia organ. The source of inspiration is Lutosławski’s Musique funèbre, specifically the twelve-note series in its opening form, all tritones and half-steps. The trio wallow in the funereal harmonies, starting out as a drone before using otherworldly bowed bell edges and the eerie electrical sound of the organ to evoke old-timey spooky movie music. It’s almost cheesy, except that it’s done wih seriousness of purpose and, thanks to pursuing the twelve-tone ramifications, just keeps evolving into something different. When the bells are finally struck the instrument’s overtones imbue everything with a luminous, sinister halo. The trio take an obvious pleasure in indulging their creepy side, not least when Reviriego starts to get some coffin-like sounds out of his bass fiddle.

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Tags: Àlex Reviriego, Markus Reuter, Vasco Trilla
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Ian Power: Brace [Semayd]. My first encounter with Power’s music found “slow, widely-separated and often repeated sounds” but with “messy edges” – a tendency that appeared both soncially and conceptually. While maintaining an impassive exterior, his music relies upon internalised self-discipline from the musicians to determine the course of the composition. The elemental string quartet Brace Each Other Dive comes across to the listener as a constructivist assembly of contrasting sonorities, but the finer matters of timbre, intonation and texture in each block of sound are given life and interest by an unpredictable degree of imprecision that lurks behind each switch in direction. The intrigue comes from Power’s compositional method for this piece: a set of instructions to the players with loosely-defined materials, often relying upon the musicians’ own judgement and intuition, such as “Eyes closed: 1 person plays a 30″ solo using one of the above materials, e.g. very slow bow, mp-mf, 3″, non vibrato.” Some passages require eyes to be closed, others open, adding to the taut balance between freedom and control. The piece is realised by the Bergamot Quartet, who pull off the whole thing with inventiveness and clarity, sounding confident and spontaneous. To give you an idea of their commitment to the piece, the booklet comes with excerpts from the score, together with the quartet’s own “graphic shorthand” score for realising the piece. The graphics show the extent of their imagination, with an approach far beyond what I would envisaged as a technical sugbject. The quartet is framed by two shorter works; reveni ad me has Power himself playing organ in piece which moves in slow-motion between small, clustered chords and clean intervals. The untitled piece for viola and cello uses a minimum of textural contrast as material, moving together almost in unison with a plastic treatment of notes and effects being expanded and contracted. The musicians are Andrew McIntosh and Jennifer Bewerse, who make the most of the implicit variety in colouration.

Quatuor Mémoire: Chronos, Kaïros et Aiôn [Mnémosyne]. Three Québécois string quartets performed by an ensemble dedicated to new music. All three are big on making use of sonority as a material, with what sounds like forms of distorted spectralism. As a matter of fact, one of the blurbs online states outright that they share interests in “exploration of microtonality, complex polyrhythms, and sound-based compositional approaches”. The first two are compact: Florence M. Tremblay’s Insides is peppered with moments of busyness, with some neat interlocking patterns, before morphing into slews of long sliding tones. Other than that, the polyphony in these pieces is more about texture than rhythm. Louis-Michel Tougas’s Quatuor à cordes no. 2 “Vague à l’âme” throws in dramatic gestures here and there at odds with its tendency to languidly pass time in luxurious but slightly sour-toned colours. The third piece is extensive: Olivier St-Pierre’s Chronos, Kaïros et Aiôn stretches out beyond half an hour. It draws its inspiration from classical Greek conceptions of time, but the question is how its use of time manifests itself to the listener. There are recurrences and refrains, but the overall impression it made with me was of a traversal of a horizontal landscape with large open spaces, with occasional moments of interest spurring sudden activity. These brief outbursts do signal variegations in the material, creating a fairly broad, earth-toned palette and torquing the pace of the work just enough to add tension. Some nicer details for appreciation come through here and there on closer listening, but for your first hearing you will either want to soak in the faintly carbolic waters or else wonder when something is going to make you sit up and take notice.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Florence M. Tremblay, Ian Power, Louis-Michel Tougas, Olivier St-Pierre
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Ensemble Pamplemousse: Brightness Drifts [Ensemble Pamplemousse]. Heard that name somewhere before and… well, this isn’t what I expected. Pamplemousse are the ensemble who recorded Andrew Greenwald’s A Thing Made Whole III a while back and it turns out they’re as much a composer collective as a chamber ensemble. I wasn’t counting on these four pieces being so perky, with an emphasis on electronics. Natacha Diels’ What Do You Want to See Today? is one of those existential reflections on “the modern condition” that plays out as an attention-deficient satirical romp but, as happens all too often in these cases, the light-touch irreverence borders on whimsy. Nevertheless, it’s one of the better examples, aided by the musicians’ rapid-fire timing, some genuinely striking effects and the composer’s nous to keep the material as semantically empty as possible to put the emphasis on nebulous unease rather than tempt fate by suggesting specific cause. David Broome’s Luminosity II (from the Hertzsprung-Russell Project) is also playfully frenetic, using photoelectric cells to trigger synth sounds and drum machine samples to produce aural stroboscopic effects. Either the cheesy instruments are subverted by the impartial manner of their disposition, or the technical interest in the piece’s stop-go flow is offset by the trivial synth patches, I’m not sure. Bryan Jacobs’ Envelope En En is the most successful of the electronicky pieces here, using modern day low tech to emulate the effects of early electronic high tech: sophisticated, complex textures and timbres are produced by the ensemble operating “chirp toys”. Not exactly sure what these are – Google suggests either a cat toy or a wine pourer – but evidently they are put to use here as pulse generators, bubbling along and buzzing around like a reincarnation of the glory days at Westdeutschen Rundfunk. Odd percussive noises and vocal sounds may or may not be from “field recordings”, but they all add to a quirky, exotic atmosphere that suggests a well-intentioned but incongruous attempt at recreating natural sounds. The sole acoustic work is of David Broome playing Andrew Greenwald’s piano piece Facets. Greenwald’s usual contested thickets of sound receive a necessarily cleaner and neater appearance when expressed on the keyboard: Broome sounds unnervingly precise in his rapid, scattershot bursts of notes that build up a portrtait of nervous energy, manic episodes counterpoised with tentative periods of studied inaction. Didn’t find a mention of this piece anywhere else on the web, so I think it’s either new, or else very old.

Pareidolia: Far Away Worlds [Dissipatio]. Saw the cover and assumed it was one of those improv/fusion things I usually ignore but read the blurb and saw that this is a duo one half of which is Marta Zapparoli, so I’m interested. Quick recap: she works with radio waves, using various antennae and devices to intercept broadcasts and natural electromagnetic phenomena alike. Pareidolia pairs her with Liz Allbee, exponent of the quadraphonic trumpet – which is not as depicted in the cover art but an equally fantastic electroacoustic gizmo. It’s sort of like if you first heard a Jon Hassell record at someone’s party while on shrooms. As a pair, they’re all you’d hope they’d be and more. The album grabs your attention with the thunderous opening track in which Allbee makes full use of extreme pitch bends and amplification, gleefully matched by Zapparoli electrical spikes and manipulated static. The subsequent pieces are less interested in showing off and more about world-building, creating alien aural landscapes that are ripe with allusions and implications. You’d expect the wildness of Zapparoli’s earlier work in the medium to be tempered somewhat by the somewhat more tractable nature of Allbee’s beast and to a certain point it is, but the collaborative effort is channeled into establishing an overall tone through echoing sonar booms and crackling atmosphere. A science-fiction theme seems almost inevitable here and while the duo suggest retrofuturist overtones they never get cute about it. Nerdier listeners will appreciate the shortwave transmissions and that there’s a track titled “Number Stations”.

Erik Hall: Solo Three [Western Vinyl]. I sometimes wonder if certain musicians seek out novelty for the sake of it. Hall evidently has a vocation for arranging compositions for multi-tracked keyboards and guitars, then performing all the parts himself. As the title advises, he has two previous albums in this vein, tackling Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and Simeon ten Holt’s Canto Ostinato, neither of which I wish to hear albeit for differing reasons. This third effort follows the same compositional thrust but appears more palatable as it’s made up of shorter pieces by four different composers. He begins with Glenn Branca, perversely selecting one of his orchestral scores for the guitar/keyboard treatment; his take on the opening movement of The World Upside Down must be the gentlest Branca ever committed to disc, even as the source is relatively mild itself as far as Branca goes. Charlemagne Palestine’s Strumming Music is domesticated to a tidy fifteen-minute essay, with the overdubbed harmonic ramifications sounding decorative more than organic and the monadic form of the piece stripped of its obsessive forcefulness. There seems to be potential in a human interpretation of Laurie Spiegel’s A Folk Study, one of her pioneering works in digital synthesis and sequencing, but Hall sticks to keyboards and produces an interpretation that seems faithful but lacks the incongruity of the original. I was just wishing this piece used strings instead. By contrast, his version of Steve Reich’s Music for a Large Ensemble is unusually effective, taking advantage of a reduced palette of instrumental sounds to produce something crisp and propulsive out of Reich’s busy polyphony, with enough substance in the writing to stop it from coming across as trivial. It’s the one piece here which does let you hear the music afresh.

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

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

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: James Opstad, Zeynep Toraman
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John White would be ninety this year, had he not died in 2024. There was a large concert that year to celebrate his life and work, but there is still much to celebrate and more yet that has been so far overlooked. Music We’d Like To Hear began its extended twenty-first season with a concert dedicated to White yesterday which demonstrated both of these aspects. As a pre-concert event, Tim Parkinson gave the premiere of White’s Piano Sonata No. 47 from 1969. Relatively longer than most of his 179 other sonatas, it’s a spacious work that “quietens the mind” in the Cagean sense, although the lean but unyielding structure bears a closer relationship to Christian Wolff. Mixing single notes and chords harmonising the upper leading voice, the piece moved slowly in a largely stepwise way with occasional displacements, the extended duration creating a sort of slow-motion long line of melody. Strange how you could tell it was over.

The concert itself featured performances by frequent White collaborator Christopher Hobbs with Dave Smith on piano. Most of the works were duets for piano four hands, with Smith pairing with Mary Dullea, Rob Grassie, Mark Viner and Hobbs. The piano duets were mostly written in the mid-1970s and tended to be all of a similar style, reflecting White’s interest in the Romantics and in theatre music. The programme notes describe these as non-system works, as opposed to the pieces for which he remains best known, but traces of machinery could still be heard here, both in his fondness for sequences, applied meticulously or haphazardly, and the salon-cum-player piano approach that Smith et al. took to interpreting this self-consciously anachronistic music. There’s a bone-dry humour at work in these pieces if you’re looking for it, mostly in their form, either cutting off the romanticist rhetoric in mid-flow or extending it until it verges on bluster. The English reticence at play here also ensures the seductive effects are blunted. This would all appear to be a way for White to have his cake and eat it, and an evening’s worth of the stuff did start to play on the nerves.

To break things up, Hobbs and Ian Gardiner played a couple of White’s machine pieces for untuned percussion. Yet Another Exercise and Photo-Finish Machine both date from 1972 and use irregular patterns of sounded and unsounded events to produce fleeting, elusive textures out of a game-like situation. Tammas Slater gave the early Toccata for Organ (from 1961) a rendition on the St Mary At Hill instrument, the first airing of this piece in about, oh, sixty-five years or so. It’s a lively, exuberant work, composed to show off the pipes of the newly-commisioned organ at Guildford Cathedral. There were also surprise items not announced in the programme: Smith and Hobbs performing a piano arrangement of Nordic Reverie, and a newly-discovered work from 2019 dedicated to John Tilbury, adapting material from Rossini’s Sins of Old Age into a sly, quasi-obsessive indulgence.

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Tags: John White
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Eva-Maria Houben & Harmjan Roeles: given [Sawyer Editions]. The last time I reviewed something by Houben I called her composition style as “on the cusp between just-enough and not-enough”, but her collaborations can often go in unexpected directions. In given, she plays a neat little portable pipe organ as part of a trio with Harmjan Roeles on double bass and the producer Roeland van Niele – yes, they describe their practice as involving all three. I don’t see any recording venue or dates on this album so the circumstances of the perfmormance(s) heard here are for conjecture, but the sleeve notes refer to it as an “exercise in breathing”, presumably with the producer providing outsourced mindfulness. In the first part they are susceptible to mood swings, with Roeles’ bass growling in the lowest registers while Houben’s organ is unsettled and flighty, with occasional florid outbursts. They gradually centre themselves, until by the end of the first part and throughout the remaining two they achieve near-immobility. The two musicians occupy a strange space in which timbre and pitch start to blur into a single quality, making as little overt action as necessary to produce sounds in which bow on string matches air through pipes, clear tone meshes with overtones. While working their way down to almost nothing, they never lapse into stasis; rather they feel their way through the piece moment by moment. Lasting over an hour, they seem to achieve a reductive endpoint by about a third of the way through, yet by extending far beyond this apparent limit they keep finding new places to explore with increasing attention and refinement.

Marja Ahti: Visiting Cloud (Two Translations) [Another Timbre]. This is the first solo work by Ahti that I’ve reviewed, and it consists of two electroacoustic compositions from around 2019-20 that were repurposed for the all-acoustic Blutwurst ensemble, featuring Cristina Abati, Marco Baldini, Luisa Santacesaria et al. Laurence Binyon’s aphorism “slowness is beauty” is the watchword here: these new arrangements are about twenty minutes each, somewhere between two to three times longer than the originals. Which I haven’t heard, so I can’t make comments on the tempo. What I do hear is that Chora is stately and sumptuous, rendered as a slow series of chords that gradually fill out an existing harmonic idea rather than follow any form of development or process. The ensemble plays viola, trumpet, cello and double bass, bass clarinet, accordion and harmonium, offering a rich palette of sounds from relatively small forces. In Fluctuating Streams the progression is more linear, starting with unvoiced sounds that slowly morph into monotones, then begin to take on simple harmonisations. Once again, Ahti and Blutwurst prefer not to build up but to detail a single musical image, reaching a certain stage of completeness and then examining its effects at length, creating a piece with a strangely sinuous aspect to its languor.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Eva-Maria Houben, Harmjan Roeles, Marja Ahti
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Lance Austin Olsen: Death In The Urban Jungle [Confront]. Before I get to the new stuff, let’s backtrack to last year to see where Olsen is coming from now. For many years, the painter/composer has been producing haunted sound collages, combining instruments, amplified objects and old recordings in a symbiotic relationship with his paintings, either complementing or taking direct compositional knowledge from them. The mood is often dark, and these new pieces have stripped back the former complexity of the collage texture to produce music of greater starkness. Death In The Urban Jungle begins with an emphasis on timbre over any particular mood, with strange, synthesised-sounding textures dominating in an unusual way, quite unlike his previous work. (The principal instruments listed here are amplified copper plate, shruti box, guitar, bamboo flute, found tapes.) The work falls into a series of scenes, separated by silences. As it progresses, each scene settles into slow ostinati of unidentifiable sounds which establish their presence and then recede. The introduction of identifiably musical source material in the later stages of the piece seems all the more alienating and ominous when heard in this context.

Lance Austin Olsen: Fascist Cockroaches Over Canada Meet The Resistance [Somnimage]. This is a shorter work made for Somnimage’s unknown territory series, coupled with a digital print of one of Olsen’s visual works. Olsen plays solo on amplified acoustic guitar, raw and uncultured, surrounded by extraneous sounds of scraped and rubbed objects, with an added sample as a sting in the tail to add a pointed reference to place and time. The tone is unmistakeable (see title) but doesn’t stoop to propaganda, locating its grievances in its attitude instead of elevating and restricting to a particular set of circumstances. In some ways this is the theme of the piece, as the ills of the world are ever-present, changing only in appearance and in place.

Jamie Drouin & Lance Austin Olsen: a field far beyond form and emptiness [Infrequency Editions]. Time flies, and this is apparently the first album put out by Olsen and likeminded long-time collaborator Drouin in six years. Again, there’s a newfound starkness in their approach here, even as their work together is more ambivalent and neutral in tone than the portents of Olsen’s solo work. Besides the old radios and found tapes, there’s a particular focus on capital-I Instruments here, even if amplified: cello, guitars, dulcimer and piano predominate. It’s a strikingly pointillistic work, with acoustic phenomenon placed front and centre in clear relief. Elements of collage and found sounds are still present but used sparingly, adding inflection points to the surface. Silence is always present, either through implication in the sparseness of the sounds and the low dynamics throughout, or the extended pauses which separates the work into chapters. It’s both the strangest and the most conventional work I’ve heard by the duo; an extended composition of endurance and restraint which is never passive or fully at rest, even in its most subdued moments.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Jamie Drouin, Lance Austin Olsen
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Tim Parkinson: The Projects [untitledwebsite]. I had something smart to say here but I forgot it so I’ll start over. I think I’ve previously described Parkinson’s music as acting like a non-sequitur to something never said. The four pieces presented on The Projects are all very different but try to convince you that they’re all alike. Siwan Rhys neatly trips through the piano piece untitled 2021a in a way that at first reminds of Christian Wolff’s later music, but the tonal language used here is less rarefied and deceptively sophisticated. Rhys spins the piece with a jazzy, insouciant breeziness that suddenly pulls up short at unexpected moments. The following pieces find other ways of being lulling and nagging simultaneously, leaving everything momentarily balanced but still unstable. Project 3 is a duet between Travis Just on saxophone and Parkinson on a motley assortment of keyboards. Across five movements Just plays two- or one-note riffs over obtuse, wandering keyboard lines and low-tech drum machines, with the sax managing to sound as affectless as a free MIDI instrument patch. The po-faced directness starts to accumulate arbitraty collisions between the instruments until it all ends on the verge of chaos; an even-tempered chaos, but still. Parkinson’s keyboards double piano and MIDI piano on the solo piece untitled 2021b, which seems to follow some sequence or process that chases its own tail, looping through harmonic circles while counting down to a preordained endpoint. Skipping ahead to Project 9000, we hear something that sounds programmatic but is entirely baffling. Rhys returns to bang out sporadic piano clusters, eventually joined by percussionist George Barton on various tasks of musical carpentry, all while Parkinson grandiloquently rhapsodises on an otherworldly Mighty Wurlitzer. It’s enough to make Kagel scratch his head. I don’t want to trivialise this album by asserting there’s a point to it all, but nevertheless Parkinson presses upon our assumptions and our anxieties that subconsciously play out when we listen to music, digging into the cognitive dissonances of misapplied logic that can amuse or frustrate us, to instill responses in the listener that are complex and strongly personal.

Okkyung Lee: just like any other day (어느날): background music for your mundane activities [Shelter Press]. Okkyung Lee dispenses with the cello and makes an album entirely of home recordings with electronic keyboards, computer and a cheap cassettee recorder. Ten pieces that are gnomic but fully realised. The setting and pervading mood of comforting melancholy recalls the convalescent feeling produced by the “lockdown aesthetic” of a few years ago, but the music here is more definite and complete. The keyboards hearken back to the clean synth sounds of the early 1980s, here brightly coloured but not strident, mellowed by a soft VHS burr of nostalgia. The slightly lo-fi sounds evoke the domestic form of techno-optimism from that period, when home computers were new and suggested boundless potential, simultaneously futuristic and quaint. Each of the ten tracks evokes a mood while also suggesting a quiet wit operating behind its pithiness. I mentally bracketed it with Tim Parkinson because it seems to share the peculiar combination of being friendly but aloof. The pieces are charming and seemingly trivial, too candid to be ambient, too obliging to be musique d’ameublement, but as with The Projects this music has an oblique way of acting on the senses.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Okkyung Lee, Tim Parkinson
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Clinton Green & Allanah Stewart: Yarrow and Clinton Green & Barnaby Oliver: Steady State [Shame File Music]. Two more collaborations from tireless improvisor/innovator/label mogul Green. Yarrow collects two outdoor improvisations with Allanah Stewart from early 2023, using found objects, derelict electrical goods and homemade doodads of various kinds. Both live recordings are further demonstrations that authenticity as an aesthetic value is not enough by itself. There is murk, as promised in the blurb. The crunchy, grungy vérité of the performance is swathed with the grey grot that pervades all recordings made in suburban backyards, which casts a pall over the proceedings. Green and Stewart are working with recondite instruments and at times are audibly stuck trying to make something happen. It’s realism with all the dull bits left in, for all the good that does. My attention wandered and I suspect I would have been even more distracted at the event itself, seeing someone else’s backyard. Green’s work with Oliver on Steady State is more explicably musical, continuing from their earlier collaboration The Interstices Of These Epidemics. In the first of two pieces, Oliver solos on a piano in a way that’s both floaty and earthy at once, while Green fills in an atmospheric wash of stuck and bowed gongs. As with the following track, the duo improvisation is greater than the sum of its parts. For the second piece, Oliver switches to banjo, employing the instrument’s vinegary sound to complement the gongs in often confounding ways. Somewhat ambient, somewhat exotic, but always prickly enough to keep you alert, exploring sounds to hugely effective ends.

Eamon Sprod: FOIL VOID JOIN AVOID [Aposiopèse]. There seems to be a crucial difference in the way that Australian musicians handle field recordings, compared to European counterparts. The British, for example, always seem to be searching for something essential in the sounds, much like in their frequent reversions to folk music. Australian field recordists seem no less earnest, but are always ambivalent about how much they can claim as authenticity. This can manifest itself in various ways; in the case of Eamon Sprod, FOIL VOID JOIN AVOID is one of the most comprehensive, oblique, and sophisticated statements of that ambivalence. Sprod, who’s previously recorded under the name Tarab, works with field recordings and the sounds of non-musical objects. With this new work, about a hundred minutes long, he has successfully produced an example of anti-field recordings, in which source, context and place are irrelevant. Each section is marked by fast cutting, with an emphasis on percussive effects created by short interruptions, strung together with empty moments of almost inaudible hum and, between sections, silences of arbitrary duration. It resembles some works by Luciano Maggiore, in that it all sounds deliberately incoherent on first listen, but on the second time around you can hear it’s cannily composed: I guess no coincidence that the two of them have discussed these very issues in their music (link is PDF). The large scale and employment of punctuated disinterest creates an overall impression of an elusive but compelling argument being made. The sounds could be nondescript in themselves but gain force through rapid juxtapositions which highlight contrasts; then again, the selection of sounds also turns out to be vast, suprisingly detailed and richly coloured. Further listening reveals compositional tension as elements move back and forth between the brief and the continuous, suggesting other layers that are yet to be discovered.

Cassia Streb & Tim Feeney: Lampworking [Kuyin]. Streb and Feeney were both part of Tasting Menu, reviewed here before. Improvisations on objects was the M.O. then, with the twist of using the recording space as an additional percussion instrument to be struck and scraped. Lampworking takes these basic ideas and develops them further, much to the better. Both pieces on the album are recorded live in a gallery, as part of an installation. Recordings of objects are played through spatialised speakers, sometimes filtered through other resonant objects, and then re-recorded in space with live performances on another set of objects. Complex means for simple materials lead to engagingly textured, site-specific soundscapes while still remaining open to alternate dimensions through the pre-recorded material. “Pasadena” adds rubbed wineglasses for musical drones draped over the percussion, “Chinatown” is more slippery, with sustained ambient resonances emerging during the middle sections before the intrusion of bass percussion from field recordings of fireworks.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Allanah Stewart, Barnaby Oliver, Cassia Streb, Clinton Green, Eamon Sprod, Tarab, Tim Feeney
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Patricia Alessandrini and Marco Fusi: Proximity, Distance [Sideband]. I’m all about using feedback as a musical method, so I’ve been getting to grips with viola d’amore adept Marco Fusi‘s collaboration with Patricia Alessandrini. Alessandrini works with acoustic feedback and electronics, and has spent about the last five years on and off creating with Fusi an elaborate but lucid style of electroacoustic music. The two musicians’ respective instruments form a symbiotic relationship, with Fusi’s violin and viola d’amore acting both as resonant bodies and tone generators, each playing roles which can simultaneously generate and condition the feedback conditions in real time. Alessandrini makes use of amplification, including contact microphones, and the resonance of the recording space to introduce the feedback tones through the speakers. She has also built the “Feedbox”, a collapsible, portable wooden container with transducers fitted to it to act as a surrogate loudspeaker, large viol and small room all at once. Fusi and Alessandrini work together very closely, with a degree of interaction that shows up much live electroacoustic music as little more than a form of accompaniment. The thinking here is beyond instruments-plus-electronic processing, instead harnessing electroacoustic phenomena to create a mercurial compound instrument with a life of its own. The opening piece “Adjoining, Touched” shows this best, in that you quickly give up trying to distinguish one musician from the other as it misses the point. Each of the pieces maintains a serious mood for the album, even as the colour and shading is far from monochromatic; the focus is on producing varieties of tone. On “Squared, Boxed” percussive effects are introduced, either from the Feedbox or one of Fusi’s instruments magnified by amplification (both violin and viola d’amore are used throughout, with one often present passively as an additional resonator). In the later pieces some more obvious bowed and plucked sounds seem to emerge, but these are used as a means to an end, or as another coloration device to the overall sound: the title piece “Proximity, Distance” sounds like an ensemble transformed, while on “Fractured, Undone” the strings seem to function as triggers for different kinds of feedback oscillation. It’s a rare case of an album focused on demonstrating innovative techniques that both succeeds as a musical experience and wordlessly reveals a depth of insights into the ramifications of pursuing this technique. It also makes me sad that I won’t be able to get to Fusi’s solo gig in London this week.

Laura Cetilia: gorgeous nothings [elsewhere]. It can’t be just me who’s thinking there’s been an awful lot of albums in recent years by female cellists who also sing a bit. Not quite as prevalent as solo albums by crossover-type composer-pianists, but still. This is why I initially balked at an album by just such a cellist with the title gorgeous nothings. Forgive me, I forgot she’s also a member of the ensemble Ordinary Affects, whom I’ve heard giving fine interpretations of works by Mangnus Granberg and Michael Pisaro-Liu. Her three works on this album are spare, thoughtful pieces: the title work is indeed for solo singing cellist, but the nothings alluded to are more John Cage than Taylor Swift. It’s a calm, sombre affair: bowed notes are slow, soft and translucent, but within a low, restricted range and in no mood to float. Cetilia’s voice provides harmonic overtones that resonate with or beat against the cello playing. I’d call it melancholy, but then the second piece is titled six melancholies, with Cetilia joined by fellow Ordinary Affects members Morgan Evans-Weiler on violin and J.P.A. Falzone on vibraphone; the percussion is often bowed, acting in a similar manner to Cetilia’s singing in the previous piece. It’s an introspective, self-effacing work, the three performers studying each note, chord or short phrase in isolation, treating each event with close attention before moving to the next. The longer piece soil + stone is a cello duet with Hannah Soren, Cetilia again adding voice very unobtrusively, as coloration and troubling the certainty of the cellos’ pitch. It’s not a heavy piece, neither a drone nor a drag, but it does not deal in trifling lyricism. The two cellists ground themselves with slow descending passages, taking the harder road. The gentle beauty that emerges from their playing comes through as a reward for their efforts, rather than assumed as a premise.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Laura Cetilia, Marco Fusi, Patricia Alessandrini
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Joseph Branciforte & Jozef Dumoulin: Iterae [Greyfade]. With its slightly fuzzy chimelike sounds and reverb, the electric piano (particularly the Fender Rhodes variety) has always struck me as a dreamlike instrument, always somewhat aloof from its context. It hadn’t occurred to me that there might be musicians who work with mutations of these instruments, but that’s just what Joseph Branciforte and Jozef Dumoulin have been doing independently for some time. Iterae puts the two of them together in a two-day recording session of manipulated improvisations. Their respective Rhodeses are treated electronically, both in their sounds and in how their playing is restructured, with real-time editing guiding how the unfolding music is shaped. With the use of distortion and filtering, the small amplified sounds of a Rhodes piano quickly lose their resemblance to the conventional instrument. The live editing consists of loops and processes that mimic tape delays, with elements repeating while being slowly transformed or effaced. Branciforte and Dumoulin thus make use of short gestures that provide both continuity and change, allowing large-scale developments to emerge out of small elements in near-stasis. The press release mentions “post-glitch” to save critics from having to risk it themselves, and indeed the album has the traits of that genre, including the association with ambient music. The emphasis is always on creating texture and atmosphere, with none on representing the improvisers’ chops, happy to explore one space without ever settling into a comfortable groove, then, little by little, events start to drift away from the familiar. Things start out hinting at melody and then gradually evolve into more complex atmospherics, but even in its crunchiest moments the musicians always retain suggestions of melody inherent in their instruments, without ever breaking into full-blown song or all-out noise. The two of them maintain this tenuous balance throughout, over four extended pieces that each fall into a two-movement form. That dreamlike quality is also present, in a shapeshifting, time-slowed-down way.

The blurb suggests the structure of the album is modular, by which they mean you can play the thing straight through as one large work or as four pairs of tracks. The physical media version emphasises this by packaging the set as five discs: one regular CD and five mini-CDs (remember them?). Vinyl collectors will be relieved to learn that the dust jacket comes with a wall-hanging tab already fixed to the back. It’s not out yet but they’re touring Europe right now.

opt out: Geography_VII [Moonside Tapes]. The premise of this short album seemed intriguing from its brief blurb: pieces synthesised and sequenced in MaxMSP, built on some of Erv Wilson’s microtonal scales. Sadly it’s not so interesting to listen to. It isn’t a dour academic exercise, as many microtonal works can be, but the pieces are fairly rudimentary and don’t seem to particularly benefit from using Wilson’s tuning. Those two factors in tandem work to defeat the apparent purpose, producing a set of pieces with windchime-like repeating patterns with not much accompaniment or development, pleasant enough without demanding attention. The exception is the track “Presence_chamber”, which uses longer, strained notes with almost no melodic movement, making the astringent intervals themselves the musical subject and substance. It also reminded me that you can get Warren Burt’s classic Harmonic Colour Fields on Bandcamp.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Joseph Branciforte, Jozef Dumoulin, opt out
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Michael Pisaro-Liu: Concentric Rings in Magnetic Levitation [Sawyer Editions]. Just last month I was carping that Fata Morgana, Pisaro-Liu’s collaboration with Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard, had both not enough and too much going on all at once, making for stultifying listening. This realisation of his 2011 composition, on the other hand, is the real stuff. It shows the profound difference between almost nothing and not enough, with much of the hour’s duration passing almost inaudibly. The near-silence is observed with intense concentration by the three musicians, and their concentration becomes infectious. The name of the ad hoc trio is Forming; they listen in to a cycle of almost imperceptible sine tones, articulating the presence of sound, if not always its manifestation. Andrew Weathers marks off tiny inflections with small piano notes, Ryan Seward’s cymbals augment the upper partials of the faintly humming air, Carl Ritger uses electronics and field recordings to compound the implicit hum that pervades the absence of activity. By the end of the hour, what had at first been inaudible has soaked into your consciousness, radiating sound. This recording captures a very special moment.

Samuel Reinhard: For 10 Musicians [elsewhere]. I described Reinhard’s earlier piece For Piano and Shō as “tinting the backdrop of silence”. In For 10 Musicians the forces are larger but the music is even more intangible. Two pianists – Paul Jacob Fossum and Gintė Preisaitė – reiterate a single chord at their leisure, with some free interplay on a small gamut of single notes. They are circled by an ensemble of clarinets, violas, cello and double bass, who play as softly as possible at their discretion. There are faint developments that occur by chance, through small changes in colouration and harmony, keeping everything still but alive. The ensemble’s presence reminded me of the electronic treatments that shadow the solo pianist in Michael Pisaro-Liu’s Green Hour, Grey Future, but in Reinhard’s case the sound has greater depth and the form is more rigorous. There are four movements, each identical other than the pianos’ chord; as always, same but different, each resembling the other but cast under a different shade. It’s a large work which is always present but elusive, with the musicians and recording successfully transcending the music’s substance into the aether.

Jakob Ullmann: Solo I / Solo IV [Another Timbre]. Way back in 2013 at Huddersfield I heard the first (successful) performance of Jakob Ullmann’s Son Imaginaire III. It had a galvanising effect on me. “Again, a piece that hovered on the threshold of audibility, but in Ullmann’s case the music contained a faint but indelible richness, a mystery in how the sounds blended together in ways that couldn’t be understood, from one musician to the next and with ambient sounds in and outside St Paul’s Hall. Sitting there, attention focused on perceiving the music, you could lose yourself, your concentration on a sound so diffuse that your attention becomes a sort of dream state. Over a hundred years ago painters really started to pull apart the idea of what it meant to see something; we still don’t know what it means when we say we’ve heard something.” In a talk before the piece, Ullmann described his compositional methods, making use of a kind of palimpsest of overlaid pages. These translucencies partly reveal and partly obscure. In the Solo works, the musician accompanies themself with recordings of alternative interpretations, covering additional aspects of the suggestive score that cannot be realised in a single take. On top of this, pieces can also be played simultaneously. Rebecca Lane plays Solo I on quarter-tone flutes, Jon Heilbron double bass for Solo IV: both have a strong history and affinity for this type of sensitive handling of small sounds. Their combined performances produce superbly evocative sounds for compositions that expect the material to be kept at a level below perceptible, wide-ranging in timbre and register without ever seeming deliberate or intentional. Everything just seems to emerge and persist organically, creating an experience both indistinct and indelible.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Jakob Ullmann, Michael Pisaro-Liu, Samuel Reinhard
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Sachiko M: Sounds From M [Party Perfect!!!]. The latest two Party Perfect releases return to their abrasive and bloody-minded roots. I heard Sachiko M play live in Melbourne back in (checks sleeve notes for this album) 2001? Gosh. She had a sampler with nothing in the memory and somehow got the high-pitched sine wave that emerged from it to move about a bit, after a fashion. Since then, I have never actively kept tabs on her career but I had always hoped that she was still doing more or less the same thing, somehow. It is therefore a pleasure to say that Sounds From M proves the last twenty-five years have neither softened nor diluted her end-point aesthetic. The piece, recorded one day in 2024, falls into seven nested movements of precisely five minutes each, forming a kind of palindrome. A high-pitched sine wave pierces the air, ducking and diving depending on where your head is in relation to your speakers. Pulses of digital switching create pops and crackles at various frequencies; the sine wave returns, but higher pitched and out of phase, creating dead spots in your room. In the central section the sine wave pushes upwards against my threshhold of audibility, becoming frangible with more pulsing. Then it recapitulates on each action in reverse. Digital pops aside, it’s all mastered at a very low level. There’s a level of commitment here, beyond experimentation, to create sonic objects that evoke a physical presence while seeking an absolute minimum of texture and colour.

Luciano Maggiore: tordo + uah + cick [Party Perfect!!!]. It’s Luciano Maggiore, so as is the custom I must admit I have no idea what is going on. This time, however, he is unwilling to help me, other than to say he composed and performed this piece a small number of times around Europe in 2024. I think there’s a sampler invovled here too, maybe with CD players, Walkmans, stuff like that. Track 1 was recorded live in London and has lots of low-level twittering and the occasional chirp on a farily regular basis. It goes for over half an hour so you know he’s committed and you’ll have to start paying attention sooner or later, but what that attention will get you is something never really answered. He’s confronting you but giving you the freedom to be unaffected by it; a rare commodity in modern art, to accommodate indifference. Maggiore makes insistent but neutral sounds, refuses to elaborate, then on track 2 goes and does it all over again in Berlin. Hilariously, the two sample extracts on the Bandcamp page are each thirty seconds long, because really anything more is superfluous. You can also get it on cassette, so that the low-level twittering is submerged in hiss.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Luciano Maggiore, Sachiko M
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