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conversation with anne-f jacques; notation from Daniel Barbiero; reviews
The first volume of Graphème, a new print-only publication for experimental music scores from smallest functional unit - which is Tony Buck, Racha Gharbieh, Mazen Kerbaj, Magda Mayas, and Ute Wassermann - is now available, featuring notations from Tomomi Adachi, Lotte Anker, Tony Buck & Lloyd Swanton, Marina Cyrino, Tina Douglas, Mazen Kerbaj, Magda Mayas, Phill Niblock, Jon Rose, Ute Wassermann, and Nate Wooley.
Sound American print subscriptions for 2021-2022 are now available and will include three issues on Life, Mapping, and Roscoe Mitchell. 2021-2022 print subscribers will be given a first crack at and a 15% discount on a forthcoming print anthology of the publication’s first twenty issues.
Daniel Barbiero recently published As Within So Without, a collection of twenty essays on the arts - music, dance, poetry, painting, and more.
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conversations
Over video chat, sound artist anne-f jacques and I talk about the weather, materials, amplification, systems of moving constructions, time, space, composition, and audiences.
anne-f jacques has released the solos poudrerie and crab-shapedness as well as first album with the a.hop ensemble in 2021 and runs the presses précaires and dormant crustacés labels.
Keith Prosk: Hey! Can you hear me?
anne-f jacques: Yes!
KP: Ah, perfect. I can hear you.
aj: Ah yeah, it’s finally working. I just installed zoom on my phone. I’m pretty disorganized with these things.
KP: That’s good. The transformer in our backyard blew out and took the power out this morning and I was afraid I would have to figure out how to use zoom on my phone for this. But luckily avoided that.
aj: Nice.
KP: Well, how’re you doing today?
aj: I’m good. How’re you doing?
KP: Good, good. Thank you so much for agreeing to chat for a bit. I actually looked up - just ‘cause I was interested - the weather in Quebec today and was not surprised to see that it’s a little bit cooler than we are down in Texas but what I did find surprising is that your days are as long as ours are right now. I guess with that fall weather coming, our days have already shortened like an hour in just a couple of weeks, which seems crazy fast.
aj: Yeah. Well and really by Canadian standards this is absolutely tropical. [laughs] I mean, I’m wearing shorts in October, it’s amazing. So, pretty nice.
KP: Yeah, yeah. Well, I’ll hop into it but always feel free to guide the discussion in any way you please. In preparation, I listened to your Free Form Freakout interview, and I kind of picked up from that, at least when you’re starting out constructing your environments, you’re not too concerned with the sound result but more so with the kind of materials and machines and the construction of it, and I was wondering what draws you towards the materials that you use, whether that’s texture, shape, sentimental value, their context, or something else.
aj: Yeah, I guess there’s not one single thing. Like it’s not always even clear to myself. But I think I’m kind of interested in objects or material that seems on their way between different states of being, meaning like objects that are clearly part of something but I’m not even sure what or things that are so worn out or tired that they’re kind of becoming something else. And that then by putting them in relationships with other materials or putting them in motion, they become even something different again, you know. When I say I’m not that worried about sound, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t - like at some point I have to worry about that - but I’m trying not to be too instrumental or too willful in what I’m trying to get as a result and more experiment with things that may seem like they don’t produce sound and to then arrive at sound in a very kind of oblique way instead of having something in my mind. It’s a way of kind of being less intentional, I guess, for a large part of the process.
KP: Yeah, of course. I guess everything kind of vibrates so everything kind of sounds, right, so I guess it’s just your scale of listening. One of the throughlines... or I feel like a lot of the materials that you use are quote unquote trash or discarded and I wonder if there’s - you mentioned these in-between states, these items in the threshold type of thing - and I wonder if there’s some ideology behind that, whether it’s a commentary on consumerism through a type of recycling, or engaging with queer theory where you’re amplifying otherwise unheard or discarded voices.
aj: Well, there’s a bit of all of that and I think... I'm certainly not trying to take a moralizing stance on consumerism like, oh consumerism is bad we should all feel guilty, but more along the line of being fascinated by how much we have been trying since the beginning of industrialization to make things that are an exact reproduction of the same thing, the same object flawlessly and a lot of artforms are very obsessed with that - the kind of seriality of all these objects being exactly the same - and I think that I’m quite interested in that through time and use the similarity of objects then fades away, you know. Which is why also I’m interested in working with some objects that have been manufactured and not, like, lovingly crafted to be unique. Even if it’s something that was made to be an exact copy of something else, then through it’s life, through it’s adventures it does become something that is different than the other products that it was made to be exactly alike at the beginning. So I guess I’m interested in that, the kind of imperfection of whatever something is supposed to be, and then with accidents it just keeps becoming something else and something different. And yet, still being there. As much as things may not be working for their initial purposes, they’re still around us and they still kind of have this active presence just by being there. So this may seem quite arcane yet I feel like we all experience some of that in our daily life, you know, in our attraction with some odd materials or things that have lost their function. It’s also, I think, a way of realizing how much the difference between organic matter and manufactured product is actually not that different, like also through time and decay and use these universes kind of intermingle quite a bit. So yeah, I guess that’s not a very direct answer, is it. But all these things go through my head in the process of being interested in these objects and trying to surround myself with them and observe them and put them in strange situations to see how they react.
KP: Yeah, yeah, that’s perfect. Just like - to go on a bit of a tangent - we recently got a home within the past year and discovering the sounds of the home in its various states of disrepair has been very interesting. So like there’s a really beautiful fan resonance from our HVAC unit that kind of sings through the house and finding out... you know, a lot of people want to get rid of fan resonance and along the way to do that, or I guess figuring out how to repair that, it creates a different tone, all of which are very beautiful. We’re also on septic out here and we have two fields, one of which I was able to aerate a few months ago so it’s very quiet, the other which needs aeration and is in disrepair and the pump is very loud but makes a great sound. Yeah, all the same things, but very different characters in their very different states.
aj: Absolutely. They kind of develop their own voice.
KP: Absolutely. Very musical. Are there some material combinations that you quite like or that you find yourself returning to? I feel like I see a lot of paper and plastic.
aj: Ah, I think I’m interested in materials that are not the most immediately resonant, like I try to avoid working with say big sheets of thin metal, because materials that are less directly resonant need a bit more probing, you know, a bit more provocation and then the way they react to that they kind of resist vibration to an extent and that produces more ambiguous results. So yeah, clearly, paper and cardboard. Also like the plasticity of it, the way it can get into a shape but then pops back to a different shape that you didn’t ask it to do. For that similar reason I’ve been very interested lately in seaweed, which in a way feels quite similar and looks a lot and sometimes sounds a lot like plastic which is totally strange because it’s a plant but like a kind of plastic plant, which doesn’t make any sense. And plastic, I guess, I’m also interested in it because I am - like I’ve also been working quite a bit with cork, which I find interesting - but I like to mix these domains, and if I have seaweed and cork and paper that are all these quite beautiful, rich, you could call them noble materials, then you also have to have some plastic thrown in there for good measure. So there’s also a bit of that preoccupation.
KP: I’m not super familiar with seaweeds but that’s definitely on crab-shapedness. The seaweed that I’m familiar with is hydrated, it’s in the sea, it’s pretty soft. But the seaweed that I think I was hearing, was it dehydrated and a little harder?
aj: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve left it to dry quite a long time so that’s why it becomes quite rigid and really resistant actually, so you can put it in motion and some little bits will fall off but it’s surprisingly resilient. Wet seaweed, well, that would be something.
KP: Yeah, it almost produced a kind of scratchy timbre which was super interesting. I guess another huge - other than the materials and machines - probably the thing that really sticks out about your practice is the amplification. So my perception around what I’ve heard so far is that it reduces the scale in such a way that focuses the material. And I also found that there’s a spatial aspect as well. I watched a video of a performance recently and you were placing a stone on a paper cup over a portable recorder and what struck me was that, more than any gesture, just making the bottom of the cup concave or convex super changed the sound. I guess before I start getting ahead of myself, why are you drawn to amplification and what are you exploring with it?
aj: I think I’m super interested in trying to hear as if I was inside materials, you know. Trying to have this perception of sound, not just sound wave to air but sound wave to different materials, which we cannot probably get there but trying to get us close to that or kind of imagine or kind of fictionalize what that would be. And as you say, if you remove... if you’re not putting sound in the air, if there’s sound in the material, you still have a sense of space and distance, it’s just the proportions are totally different. So I’m kind of interested in that, that kind of... it’s not so much a closing in, but an inside of things and sometimes kind of just being at the surface, you know, going in and out of the density of matter, basically. Trying to listen as if you were a piece of cardboard or as if you were inside it. That specific thing you are talking about, that piece where I put the cardboard cup on top of the recorder, I had to make instructions for people to execute a sound piece for themselves. And I work a lot with contact mics, but I wanted people to be able to have that experience without any specialized gear, so I’ve been working with that for a long time, how just like a normal air microphone if you put it directly on a material already the perception of sound gets totally different, like it actually gets mediated through the vibration of the material and not just air. So it’s interesting how you can get that experience even just by putting your ear on some things or putting a microphone on some objects, even without any specialized equipment.
KP: So since you mentioned instruction, do you have notation and if so do you prefer textual instruction or do you have a practice around that symbology?
aj: Until very recently I would have said, no I don’t work with that at all and I really come more from just playing with objects and matter and seeing where that takes me, but recently I’ve been asked to - by some collaborations with some people - either to execute scores or even to make them instruction-based scores. And I had a huge resistance to that at first, I think because I feel that it’s such a good thing that we somehow got rid of the whole notion of the composer, you know, the composer as an author, as a kind of artist, ego, that has things in his head, very much like that kind of straight figure. So at first I was a bit sad to have that come back, right, like a composer writing instructions for others to do like, ugh this is so backwards. But then, I must say, after playing around with that a bit, I started with my good friend and collaborator Ryoko Akama who works a lot with scores, and trying to play some of her scores I realized what was the point of that which is just kind of to take you out of your normal rhythm or normal process of doing things or making sound. By following some very simple instructions, suddenly your mental process just takes a different direction and that can be extremely freeing and can produce super interesting results. So then I was like, OK now I understand the point of it. So now I’m actually quite interested in that, just giving little instructions to each other to help us… just to set you off in a different direction, right, to get you out of your usual routine of how you construct a sound piece, for example.
KP: Yeah, someone has told me that composing kind of allows them to compose situations that they wouldn’t be able to imagine on their own, kind of like construct an environment and then people contribute their own voice and make it something totally different that they could never imagine. I think there’s definitely a lot of coolness in that. Even though the newsletter does this notation thing, I was originally very resistant to the idea of composition as well, and it came from that stuck-up background, but I think as I’ve gotten more and more into it, I think composers, particularly today, are coming up with very interesting ways to do it in a non-hierarchical way.
aj: Exactly. And that’s where also I find it interesting, like I’m working with a lot of people now where we kind of sometimes write little scores, little instructions for each other and back and forth so I find that particularly interesting, where people can change roles, you know, somebody can be the composer and then be the player or whatever you call it, just we take different jobs at different moments and it just kind of keeps things in motion.
KP: Just to turn back towards the spatialization and amplification bit, I think I picked up somewhere else that some of your installation work solves the logistical issue of more complex sound systems that allow you to spatialize sound - in an ambisonic way almost. And then you mentioned the coolness of the spatial property on the paper cup piece, but I wonder why you might think the spatialization of sound is important.
aj: I think it’s because it allows you to build things in a very different way. And basically by distributing sound in space it allows you to be less worried with the temporal aspect, meaning you need less to develop a narrative or a kind of linearity and more an environment, right, cause then its more like the sound in space and how things move around and get distributed. So it’s a way of getting rid of that need to have a beginning and an end and a kind of progression or lack of progression through time. So in a way I find it very freeing, and even to try to develop some performance through that or even recording through that because it’s a less clear… yeah, it gets rid of the temporal problem, I would say. Just kind of spreading it out through space.
KP: So I was actually, uh… well, one of the things that feels inescapable with the motors is the kind of rhythm of it. The sound is always changing because the shapes of the materials are changing, and they can maybe slow down the motor on its turns, but the turns are relatively constant. I noticed in the paper cup video that even when you’re using your hands, the gestures are pretty rhythmic and regular as well. I guess talking about time, what’s your perspective on rhythm and do you intend to accentuate it? I guess you just said you’re trying to get rid of it, but the rhythmic aspect seems kind of in your face with some stuff.
aj: Yeah, maybe not so much block it out, but stretch it... really stretch it. Meaning, in truth I’m very interested in repetition and that comes also from my work with motors but as you said it’s true that even if I just manipulate things with hands I like that cyclical repetition. I think I’m interested in, even if I do a short piece, that that suggests a very long duration and kind of directs attention to the fact that there’s constant variations in something that seems pretty repetitive - there’s never something as a pure repetition, there’s always something kind of changing. But that is not a kind of resolution, you know, there’s no like clear like, ah now this is the chord resolution where you have the tension and then the release. There’s no release in my music, ever. And I hope that there’s not that much tension either, it’s just, you know, it’s always there, which seems to me closer to, I don’t know, the process of how electricity works or how my existence seems to be working which is all this kind of constant buzzing that has no clear resolution.
KP: Yeah, I guess in a variety of contexts I’ve been thinking a bit about time, like music as time vs music in time, or clock-time vs real-time, the arrow of time and entropy, and this is getting tangential but I came across what I think is a super interesting article earlier in the year of a physical study that found that the more accurate a clock was, the greater the entropy around the clock, so it’s almost as if the very ordering of the universe is the cause of its chaos type of thing. So just with your perception of time in your work, I wonder if the turn of the motor might be like a clock-time beat to grant the perspective by contrast of the relative, real-time, smaller-scale material sounds, or whether you perceive a growing complexity and chaos in your systems despite their apparent constancy... I guess just general observations of time in your practice.
aj: Yeah, I guess I’m interested in looking at systems that may seem pretty mechanical in a duration and seeing how what we call mechanical is actually full of constant change and variation and inaccuracies and things kind of adjust themselves to what’s around them constantly. I actually am trying right now - I’ve been trying for awhile but I’m right now very seriously trying - to just not use motors for a long time because I’m trying to move away from that a bit just ‘cause I feel like I’ve been working with that awhile. But still like, yeah, it’s this object, this process that can seem extremely accurate, repetitive, and mechanical but that’s one way of looking at it. You can also see all the erratic, imperfect, failing… but failing is never an absolute, right, it’s just a little bit failing and a little bit doing something else and a little bit erratic and all that at the same time.
KP: Yeah, and I guess the question is if there even is failure in art, I don’t know. But yeah, material failure. You kind of mentioned duration, but while I do maybe perceive a longer duration than what the actual time is, a lot of the durations of your tracks seem to fall in a relatively tight range of five to twenty-five minutes or like ten to twenty minutes. Is that out of a practicality, or something just felt, or something else?
aj: I guess I’m just trying to not absolutely bore my listeners. I mean, I know the sounds I’m playing with are not always the easiest to spend time with. But maybe I should explore some longer forms. It’s true that in my perception of these environments - sound environments that I’m developing - it kind of suggests a long duration, and it suggests a kind of continuity, so maybe that would be interesting to see if I can… I guess it’s just, I like there to be a constant little something that keeps changing, something that keeps happening… I may just need to develop a bit more my patience and concentration to keep that going for a little bit longer.
KP: You mentioned Ryoko, so I guess I want to segue towards some of your connections with people. So I know that you’ve participated in trios and quartets, and I know about the more recent, very large a.hop, but I also get the sense that you’re more comfortable in a smaller setting, like solo or duo, and that Ryoko, Tim [Olive], Takamitsu [Ohta], they pop up quite frequently. I’m wondering if that constellation of ensembles and people, if that’s because you prefer to share deeper connections with people that you collaborate with, or it’s just tough to find people that you feel are compatible with your practice, or you just prefer a less cluttered ensemble or sound space, or something else.
aj: Yeah, it’s true that... well, see, it’s hard to say right because I would have said, yeah I don’t really like big ensembles, but then the a.hop project is really working out in interesting ways. So I guess it kind of depends how you work out these things, you know. With a.hop we work with scores and long distance so that’s one way of making it happen. It’s true that so far I really like playing with one other person, I really like playing as a duo, and I am more and more interested in not just playing but for example with Ryoko and with Takamitsu it’s like a sharing of your whole practice and ideas and maybe what kind of devices you’re making or... I like to be able to work with somebody, even if they live in other countries where there’s not that constant… to keep the discussion up so when we do play or we make an installation together it’s more than just, oh I showed up with this, but to keep the discussion happening, what have you been thinking about and changing about your practice and what the other person is also working on. And that becomes really interesting so its not just… having this... like letting the collaboration notify how you work in the long duration, I’m quite interested in that, more than just the moments where you happen to play together.
KP: And do y’all make a construction and then don’t use it again, or repurpose it, or do you tend to reuse the devices that you make?
aj: Well, I seem to for the most part always remake them. Like I always take the components and use them to do something else but then I seem to often... I feel like there’s several of the contraptions that I have made many times, meaning I don’t know why I took them apart to then remake a new version of the same thing but you know I think I have and I can’t really say that they are necessarily improvements but just several versions or several iterations of a pretty similar thing. But, yes, so that means I am always kind of changing something for some reason that is not always that clear, changing an object, changing a motor, changing the way to attach the things together to see what will happen through that, to kind of keep me on edge a bit, not quite knowing how that’s going to react.
KP: Yeah, just ‘cause you mentioned kind of sharing practices and then also your experience with composition so far, it struck me as almost sharing the objects or devices that all of y’all create is kind of a way to put someone else in a different world almost like a composition, see what someone will do with it.
aj: Absolutely! At some point I sent by the mail a series of rocks to Takamitsu, knowing that he would probably appreciate that. [laughs] That’s also a way of making a score, right? Here are rocks, maybe you want to do something with that.
KP: Kind of a different thing but a lot of your stuff is on tape. And I wonder if you’re drawn to tape for any reason, like affordability, or its status as a cast-aside medium almost.
aj: I quite like them. I must say as a very tiny label operator also I love releasing things on tapes. I love how… for me it’s the easiest thing to both produce and ship around, in that way it is extremely affordable. That being said, I actually quite like the CD form, it’s just that there’s not that many labels that release on CDs. And records are totally lovely, it’s just I cannot afford to buy many records like, you know, it’s so expensive compared to other things. Also if you don’t live in the states, with shipping it’s almost impossible. Which is why, if at some point, somebody offered me to release something on a record that would be great but at my level of existence it’s not a really practical way of releasing that much music. I like that you can just keep releasing stuff and seeing what came out of existence on its own on that medium. So it’s not a kind of hardcore [deepens voice] analog media [/deepens voice] or anything it’s just I love for that music to just be able to exist. And be shippable around the world and things like that. I still love the fact that - I must say - I love the idea that if somebody at some point listened to one of my tapes and is like, you know what this is extremely annoying, they can just take a piece of tape, stick it on there, and record something else on top of it. I love that. Right? Other mediums don’t have that. The repurposability of the medium is pretty nice. I know most people are not gonna do that, but it’s a theoretical possibility that I appreciate. So feel free to do that if you need.
KP: You also had the postcard label, which I’m less familiar with, but I understand from the Free Form Freakout interview that it was almost to build a little more of a connection in the music…
aj: presses précaires? Or crustacés? Which one… crustacés. Yeah, well, it was a kind of idea that developed over time, which seems to be often the way I… like a lot of people sometimes start projects with having a clear idea in their head of what they want to do, and I seem to proceed the other way, just starting something to do it and then it grows from there. I just wanted to start something that was barely a label but was this idea that if anybody wants a tape to just send me something by the mail and I would mail them a tape. So it was an idea of removing any money exchange from that and the surprise of just receiving whatever from people I didn’t know by the mail, because I’m kind of obsessed by mail. And, yes, creating connection through that. Although I must say, a label is always a way of creating connection, even if there is some form of money involved, but yeah it was kind a way of trying to find the silliest, most absurd way of operating or not operating a label by refusing to sell its product.
KP: And just as far as the function of a label and distributing - like I know there are digital labels - but do you think that it’s important to have a tactile object in shared listening experiences, whether it is a tape or an exchange in mail, do you think that has anything to do with the connection?
aj: It’s certainly something that I appreciate. Also I’m somebody with a lot of… like at my studio I don’t have an internet connection at all, which in many ways I’m very thankful for so that way I can work on things instead of just answering my emails or something like that. So I need physical media to be able to listen to music while I work, you know, so I’m very attached… and I like also the way that I seem to find back an old tape or an old CDr from ten years ago when it’s a physical object in a way that I don’t think I would necessarily when it’s a digital file sitting on one of my many computers that I dropped and it doesn’t work any more. So personally I do like the physical format. That being said, again, there is now some labels that do amazing work of doing non-physical releases, like I’m thinking here about SUPERPANG mostly. I’m super surprised that a digital-only label was able to create such a kind of following, so it’s all possible I guess. But I’m pretty illiterate in the digital media or the social media type of things, so for me the physical world is easier for me to invest.
KP: Yeah, yeah. And kind of getting a little deeper into listening, one thing that I feel like I see in your practice, just because of how… I mean, you’re doing stuff, but the intervention compared to a lot of practices is relatively light. And I think in every practice there’s always a degree of listening and responding to what you’re hearing but it strikes me that yours in particular allows the opportunity to become a listener free from action almost as much as the audience. I don’t really have a question to follow up with that observation, but I wonder if there are perspectives around listening reflected in your practice or that you find important to the work you do.
aj: Well, it’s totally true what you said about me often being a listener while doing my performances and I guess I spend a lot of time trying to find these zones where something interesting happens between materials, sound-wise, and I know that I’ve found such an interesting zone when I find myself just letting that thing happen and play and then I just sit there for a really long time. When that happens in my studio, I’m like, OK this is what I’ve been trying to do, this is what I’m here for, and I guess for me performance is just trying to create these little moments where I can stop doing anything for awhile and just listen to that stuff and having other people there present to listen to that and hopefully they can find something in there. So it’s not a kind of demonstration of what I can do as a person but more finding, having a shared experience with people, which is also why I think it can be such a… when that happens, it feels really like a deep connection with people that you don’t know and you’ll probably never talk to. And I often have that feeling when I go to other people’s performance, right, so it doesn’t have to be me doing things but when there’s a moment of shared listening to something that is happening in our presence for me that is a very deep connection with the people around you. It allows you to perceive differently the space that you’re in where that’s happening. I don’t know why, but having a sound experience somewhere and kind of knowing the dimension of the space, where the walls are, you notice it differently. So, yeah, I guess that’s a bit what I’m going… I’m trying to not have a kind of demonstrative function so much in my performance like, oh look at what this object can do and it can also do that, but more just finding that little zone where it’s like, oh let’s just stay with this for awhile.
KP: Yeah, do you find it taxing at all… I guess, do you account for audience expectations around action. I mean, I feel like I would be very comfortable listening to an environment that was set in motion, but I can also imagine an audience member that would be very angry that there are not many gestures involved. Do you take that into account not only in performance but also maybe in your recordings? Or do you approach performance and recordings in different ways as far as action is concerned?
aj: it’s somewhat similar but it’s true that sometimes in performance I think that that pressure has made me, forced me to do gestures that then after I was like, that was unnecessary. And this is something that I wanna work through, is resisting that pressure. I think that’s also why I’m playing not too long sets, because I’d rather seriously bore my audience for a short period of time than pretend to entertain them for a longer period of time. I’d rather just try to do what I have to do and then cut it. I also am trying to work around the need for an audience to see and understand what I’m doing. It’s often quite hard for people to see what I’m doing and to an extent that’s a good thing. Also more and more now I’m playing on the ground, not on a table, so people have the perception that there’s still the objects, there’s things that are happening, I’m doing some little things once in awhile, but there’s no clear perception of every little thing that I do and that’s very good because then that gets way too analytical and that’s not a direction that I want to go at all. Several times people have proposed to me, oh we could put a camera so that we have a close up of your hands and objects, and I’m like, no no that’s the least thing that I want, it’s not at all… yeah.
KP: Is your ideal audience seated, eyes closed, just listening, or are they walking around to get a spatial sense. Do you have a preference as far as what your audience is doing?
aj: By far my favorite context for performance is - and that’s pretty hard to do - but it’s a kind of context that sends a message that people can just do exactly what they want. Meaning if you want to sit down and close your eyes and have a nap, that’s great, and if you want to walk around, that’s great. But it’s tricky because I find often that the problem is that people are a bit too obedient, like too excessively respectful of the artist, blah blah blah. So if you say walk around, you’re going to have fifteen people walking around the whole room for the whole performance trying to hear everything that you’re doing. You can move around if you want, you can march around if you want, but there’s not a kind of action as an audience that will give you the key to finally understand my proposal and I don’t even know what is the way to hear this thing that I am playing. See what I’m saying? I think many options are equally good and bad but I wish that… like even this notion of, OK we’re going to listen now, people have to be quiet. Well, not necessarily... like telling people to be quiet… I’m not trying to play music to tell people to shut up and stop moving, that’s a little bit repressive. So I like contexts where there’s a certain amount of freedom, certainly like a context where people can decide to get closer or further, because there have been so many performances where I was wishing I could step away - I want people to have that freedom not to be stuck with these things that I’m playing.
KP: Nice. And then one phenomenon that I’ve heard about for acoustic instruments, especially the harmonic-, overtones-based stuff, is that they can do a soundcheck in an empty space, they’ll be able to execute everything just fine, and then if they do that exact same gesture when the audience is there because of all the water sacs, they’re unable to do it because of the harmonics behaving differently. I wonder with how sensitive with your - I mean, you said you use contact mics usually, which are very close - but with how sensitive your amplification can be, if you’ve noticed similar differences, where you have to adjust with the audience being in the space.
aj: Yeah, I certainly have to adjust to pretty much everything. My set up is so… unstable, let’s say, so even something that I’ve played with a couple of times, then I play it in the soundcheck, then when I get to play it the angle of that little amplified strip of paper hitting that rock is not going to be the exact same thing, or it’s not attached the exact same way even if I tried to, or you know there’s so many little variations so it creates this interesting thing where I have to not be too attached in trying to have a specific thing in mind that I want to do but more there’s this range of things that can happen and I’ll have to see what happens and kind of build from that. ‘Cause I can find a sound that I really like, it doesn’t mean I’m going to be able to make it happen again.
KP: Yeah. Well, that’s all that I’ve got. Did you want to explore any other directions that we didn’t hit up?
aj: No, not really, I don’t think so.
annotations
annotations is a recurring feature sampling non-traditional notation in the spirit of John Cage & Alison Knowles’ Notations and Theresa Sauer’s Notations 21. Alternative notation can offer intuitive pathways to enriching interpretations of the sound it symbolizes and, even better, sound in general. For many listeners, music is more often approached through performances and recordings, rather than through compositional practices; these scores might offer additional information, hence the name, annotations.
Additional resources around alternative notation can be found throughout our resource roll.
All scores copied in this newsletter are done so with permission of the composer for the purpose of this newsletter only, and are not to be further copied without their permission. If you are a composer utilizing non-traditional notation and are interested in featuring your work in this newsletter, please reach out to harmonicseries21@gmail.com for permissions and purchasing of your scores; if you know a composer that might be interested, please share this call.
Daniel Barbiero - Boundary Conditions (2012; 2021)
Daniel Barbiero is a contrabassist, improviser, composer, performer, and writer perhaps most often associated with the composition and performance of non-standard notation, intermedia collaborations - especially dancers, and other improvised contexts. In 2021 so far, he has released the solos In/Completion and Timekeepers Map the Already Gone, Now/here with Cristiano Bocci, and the larger ensemble works Allusions to Ores & Ethers for dancers and musicians and Kant’s Absentmindedness with Nobu Stowe and The Museum of Viral Memory. He recently published a collection of essays on the arts, As Within So Without.
Boundary Conditions is a 2012 composition for any number of dancers and/or musicians with any instrumentation. Drawing from the spatial relationships of Mel Bochner’s Theory of Boundaries, its text asks performers to exercise a heightened awareness of their position in relation to others, physically and sonically, perhaps more literally for dancers and perhaps more metaphorically for musicians. Barbiero observed and received feedback that these spatial relationships were often intuitive for dancers but less so for musicians, so the 2021 revision includes a more explicit textual unfolding of how it might be interpreted.
The text seems nearly a necessity of the intermedia collaboration, with language more accessible to both than choreography to musicians or notation to dancers. It describes no sound result - which would exclude too much of the dancers’ practice - but rather loosely prescribes a process. It is a process that cannot be satisfactorily analyzed from its page but requires an unfolding in time. And what is interesting is that it is a kind of compositional structure whose desired result could be wholly uncomposed improvisation. I imagine that its four scenarios could together encompass any spatial relation, so unless a structure of arrangements and/or durations of movement between scenarios is decided upon, what is the full form with four scenarios but improvisation. But that’s the goal, to provide a choose-your-own-adventure building block set of exercises to cultivate a performative language across fields.
reviews
While reviews here can be about anything they are most often about recordings of sound. For some interesting perspectives on the nature of recorded sound, check out Frantz Loriot’s interview-based Recordedness project.
Alvear-Bondi - Sigh (carried away) [d'incise] / grado de potencia #2 [Santiago Astaburuaga] (INSUB, 2021)
Cristián Alvear and Cyril Bondi perform a d’incise composition for electric guitar and four cymbals and a Santiago Astaburuaga composition for field recordings, electric guitar, etc. and field recordings, percussion, etc. on the 63’ Sigh (carried away) / grado de potencia. It is the first in a series of three recordings showcasing performances of compositions from Chile and Switzerland, with forthcoming releases intended to include performances of pieces from Nicolás Carrasco, Bárbara González, Anna-Kaisa Meklin, and Mara Winter.
The 43’ Sigh (carried away) draws inspiration from Pierre Henry’s Variations pour une porte et un soupir. Like that material, it plays with the morphology of sounds. In a way it is repetitive but clearly always changing. The guitar yawns and sighs, gradually fading into hearing, or announces itself with an abrupt attack, in either case its sounding and its decay radiating for various durations. The various tone components of its chords alternately accentuated. Its trills in various speeds and durations. Rapid-tapped cymbals stipple the space in stretched scales like hearing the fractures for the fault or the creaking of a door for its cracking slam. Truncated into discrete soundings, muted in different ways to adjust attack and decay. A sine tone or something like it sometimes extrudes beyond a sounding like an artifact of questionable origin in its stripped sonority. There are moments when the shape of the guitar assumes that of the cymbals previously and vice versa but, perhaps unlike the sigh and the door, their timbres always appear recognizable. I have a hunch that this has less to do with the difference in objects and more to do with the shapes being performed rather than manipulated and arranged in their post-production, which might direct attention towards a felt difference between real-time and its distortions in the studio.
The 20’ grado de potencia #2 is a composition for recording. It asks the performers to separately record a layer, curate a selection of fragments from it - kept at the time of their occurrence - or sound in relation to previously completed superimposed layers, and then superimpose their two layers, and this is done six times and each sequenced iteration calls for different actions. Those actions include reading text, phonography, playing instruments, and playing sine tones, sometimes alone and sometimes in nuanced combinations. I wonder if the title is a play on the six-stage muscle power grading scale, though perhaps a gradation of listening power for the various complexities of each layer. The music is a décollage but interestingly retains a momentum despite its jagged non-linearity. Speech feels cut short. But the recordings of trains over joints, hammering, steady traffic, and the crackling of falling water seem to continue the simple beats of played percussion and guitar which seem to continue the pulses of sine tones which all abut save for some small silences. The sonic bricolage reflects the roles of the performers, who are asked within the composition to compose, perform, listen, record, and mix the sound result, which perhaps is not uncommon but highlighted here. The minimal to non-existent overlap of its layers approaches a feeling that this could be performed in real-time, serving as a kind of foil to Sigh (carried away).
- Keith Prosk
Maria Chavez - ASLEEP/AWAKE/EKAWA/PEELSA, Spring 2021 (self-released, 2021)
Maria Chavez performs with four turntables with double needles and sound therapist Sara Auster’s singing-bowl-based Namora on the single-track, 58’ ASLEEP/AWAKE/EKAWA/PEELSA, Spring 2021.
The bright and ringing undulations of singing bowls appear to open in their sustain, like walking towards a cliff or canyon on the horizon, revealing a depth of harmonic layers you could step into. And several tracks of singing bowls overlay each other and the varied frequencies of their oscillations produce a polyrhythm of pulse. Their characters not just singing but throbbing, pulsing, rewinding, purring, buzzing, and beating and always changing, shifting. Sometimes a low om or nasal harmonium. I imagine the environment could cultivate its nuanced harmonic interactions in innumerable ways, in the overlay, in the difference of the double needle’s playback of similar tones at different moments, in the mixed speeds and pitch shifting across turntables, in simultaneous forwards and backwards playback, or in some combination of these and other things. Sustained waves are punctuated by more discrete bell or gong rings and their long rippling decay and strings of twinkling chiming melodies from the source material, dotted by the pops and plunks of skips, and underlain by chirps and an electric drip permeating the entire hour and the soft gallop of turning. Like its source material, its gesture of sounding is circular - like its source material, its meditative in the way it funnels consciousness towards the present moment.
- Keith Prosk
Nat Baldwin / E. Jason Gibbs - Phase Planes (Confront Recordings, 2021)
Nat Baldwin and E. Jason Gibbs play three environments for amplified contrabass and electric guitar on the half-hour Phase Planes.
This duo language is tense. Guitar is restlessly swiped, scratched, and thrashed for fried atonal action painting, sharp acidic attacks, and other gestures sounding the corrugated coil and truncated chug of its electric identity. Among rapidfire pizzicato and unsettling arco repetitions, contrabass is squeegee and rubbing balloons. And the formication of percussive pricklings from preparations or popping bow on strings. They stay together in dynamics and pulse but diverge elsewhere, flitting connected yet surreal through this feverdream. In these manic movements’ momentary pause, amplifier hum fills the room and there is a sense the air is explosive, reacting aggressively to these provocations. As if to intensify the anxiety by way of contrast, a clear and simple beat sometimes intersects for a short time.
- Keith Prosk
In 2021, Baldwin and Gibbs have also released Microstates for acoustic environments.
Joelle Leandre / George Lewis / Pauline Oliveros - Play as you go (TROST Records, 2021)
Joelle Leandre, George Lewis, and Pauline Oliveros combine contrabass, trombone, and electronically-manipulated accordion for 44 minutes.
I can’t help but hear this collaboration in relation to the archetype of the classical concerto, which is perhaps ironic given that form’s emblematization of Romantic individualism. Oliveros’ accordion, as funneled through Lewis’ electronic modulations and/or her own ‘expanded instrument system,’ registers as soundscaping, as worldbuilding, as timbral and harmonic grounding - but, to be sure, a rapidly shifting ground, ‘teleporting’ restlessly, flitting not just between different environments but seemingly between different digital ‘resolutions’ or bit-rates, between what could pass for MIDI-grand-piano and something much more ‘warm’ - cf. plunderphonics, or such relatively-mainstream acts as Giant Claw or Oneohtrix Point Never. There is a similarly science-fiction cast to all this, improvisation offering glimpses of doorways to alternatives possibilities, futures, pasts... Leandre’s bass, by contrast - along with Lewis’ rare trombone, a second 'character' - registers as a lone persistent (unmanipulated) voice against this almost tyrannical abruptness, inevitably(?) both smaller and more ‘3D’-seeming than the keyboard instrument. Pulled or pushed - and, to be sure, offering its own less-passive directionality, but, for some reason, I more easily hear it the other way around - from ‘scape to ‘scape, this voice responds now with enthusiastic contribution, now with resigned acceptance, but, despite occasional attempts, never melds completely into the ‘background,’ remaining audibly separate. In this sense, at least to the extent that the dubious concerto analogy remains a useful framework through which to hear this seemingly-unstructured trio performance, the relationship between pseudo-soloist and pseudo-orchestra is reversed: per the stock symbology, Romantic ‘hero’ (and Leandre’s bass, as an instrument if not as a set of techniques, is actually a plausible candidate for this role, whereas ‘electronically-treated accordion’ could only have emerged from the later 20th century), rather than triumphing over masses or society or nature, is instead subjected to and overcome by them...
- Ellie Kerry
Merzbow - Flare Blues (Room40, 2021)
It’s been a long running debate among MerzFans what exactly his “good noise” and “bad noise” might be – some would even say that to use either term is to miss the point of the genre. What fans do seem to generally be able to agree on though is that in the mid-90s, Masami Akita was a Japanoise king, and Flare Blues finally rereleases two of that era’s most defining works: Flare Gun and White Blues, both recorded in the summer of 1994.
One exciting element here is that neither of these releases have ever been made digital before. Unlike the international CD releases that came soon after and greatly amplified the artist’s popularity, Flare Gun was able to build its deserved reputation as one of the artist’s most ferocious highlights based on just a decades out of press record and muddy vinyl rips. Even more exciting though is that Merzbow took this opportunity to remaster and expand the material, offering new mixes of these fan-favourites alongside bonus tracks.
The new masters sound incredible. They’re dynamic, destructive, overwhelmingly devastating – everything that I could want from a Merzbow release. Previously distorted textures have been rendered sharp as stilettos, and just as piercing. The bass acts as a constant explosion, continuously overpowering the listener and occasionally pulling away, only to smack back even harder. The tracks have also been slightly extended to offer a bit more noise for your buck, a welcome treat, but other minute enhancements can be heard along the way as well.
“Flare Gun” plays as brutal, dense webs of analogue chaos, but the new mix trades in some of that mass for aggressive stereophonics, attaining a soundscape that sounds less likely to drown the listener and more like a genuine assault. “Flare Gun Extra” stretches out similar textures to achieve a sustained, performative battery that discards compositional nuance in favour of a slower, more crushing blow. “Flare Gun” has always been one of the Japanese noise scene’s hardest hitters, but its chaotic electric fury has never been more palpable.
“White Blues” begins with equally painful sensibilities, but treats the listener to some subtle, cynical fun in the form of feedback-laden rock loops. They ground the music in references to popular forms, but their mangling and disappearances erode the music of any populist charm, encouraging the listener to find a more perverse source of pleasure instead. If the intent was ever a fair fusion of rock and noise, then clearly something went terribly wrong as the result is a The Fly-esque monstrosity, and the extended mixes have these tracks feeling more intimidating, thrilling and disgusting than ever.
Album closer “Deathmetal” again flirts with rock but leans on deep, pulsating bass to achieve a more somber, subversive effect, one that threatens before it attacks. The overblown bass acts as a blanket that protects the listener from the rest of the screaming soundscape before proving itself to be equally suffocating, only to fade away and leave the listener right in the heart of harsh noise hell by the track’s conclusion.
I think we’re lucky to finally have this release, even if one can imagine more exciting possibilities. Would it have been a thrill to hear these new mixes morph the material into a totally original experience? Sure. Would it have been nice to have had “Flare Gun”’s cacophonous B-side included as well? Of course. But I'd rather count my blessings with this release, because neither of those complaints hold it back from being a great noise album or one of my favourites of the vast Merzbow catalog.
- Connor Kurtz
Silvio Moiz - Atractor (Rumiarec, 2021)
Silvio Moiz plays six tracks for guitar, perlon strings, portable recorder, and objects and preparations including glass and metal slides, seals, picks, fingerboard, clips, hooks, sticks, cloth, and elastic bands on the 37’ Atractor.
An exposition in unconventional guitar. While various aspects of this curious practice appear throughout, its odd menagerie of sounds is presented almost systematically, each track accentuating something new. In “...y 59,” the circularly rubbed resonating body registering the ghosts of it strings like the sighing decay of a tapped piano, the orbit of the hand interfering with a string for more corporeal vibrations. In “Yango,” a sharp and bright attack for detuned harmonics in alternately tuneful and tuneless variations on a lullaby nearly hummed in the buzz and hiss of the strings against the soundboard. The slowed Faheyesque fingerpicking - even underpinned by a fundamental note in sliding raga cadences - that is sometimes transmogrified into cascading lamellophone textures of “Apa-lapah.” The pin-cushion prepared guitar of “Viola Odorata,” its threaded sticks and objects a shop of clocks out of time, their seesawing metronomes a rain of percussion against the body. And other textures still, in the muted inside-piano of “La gran curva interior” and in the horn and bell with rhythmic tap of “...y el río purga materias.” It is as if the whole world, not just its plucked strings, were filtered through the body of the guitar.
- Keith Prosk
Jessica Pavone - Lull (Chaikin Records, 2021)
The 46’ Lull is a four-track suite composed by Jessica Pavone for soloists Brian Chase (percussion) and Nate Wooley (trumpet) and string octet, which includes Meaghan Burke (cello), Shayna Dulberger (contrabass), Christopher Hoffman (cello), Nicholas Jozwiak (contrabass), Charlotte Munn-Wood (violin), Aimée Niemann (violin), Pavone (viola), and Abby Swidler (viola).
I would find it difficult to discuss the music in a non-narrative way because there is a marked movement in the progression of thematic chapters within tracks more than any individual instrument and because the ensemble converges around transitions among them that convey a cinematic catharsis. “Indolent” begins with strings in sustain and other strings in contrapuntal brushstrokes, soon adjusting durations and tempos towards convergence but never unison, in phasing sequences, the crestings of their various timbral ranges the phases of a lighthouse under the moon, lightest, lighter, darker, darkest. This is the way movement often occurs in Lull, in changes in duration and pulse more often than tonally or dynamically, in swaying expanding and contracting oscillations more than romantic step-pattern gesture. The strings then form an odd yet warm circus harmonium melody before unphase. And in their unphase they reassemble into a little dust devil of whirling strings in flitting ascending movements like a flock of birds braiding themselves in the eddies of the breeze. And this evokes the kind of cinematic catharsis or frisson which this ensemble appears to locate with ease. “Holt” begins with talking drumhead and its wood frame resonant in its decay, soon complimented by stippling strings - plucked, popping bouncing bows, and other discrete sounds - that elongate to arco strokes as the drum intermittently rolls like swash on the beach. Blending towards a moment of pizzicato contrabasses woven with a wandering lyricism reminiscent of “Song for Clare.” The ensemble building in pulse, dynamics, and density with a hammered drum towards the shimmering gong of electric cymbal sheared parallel to its surface, which is accompanied with the bright metallic timbres of trumpet in fluttering raspberries, cavitational pops, and deflating balloons. “Ingot” is a sustained trumpet tone for most of its duration, strings swelling above and below its line, itself quavering in fidelity through its duration with subaqueous synereses around sniffs as it challenges the strings’ constancy in their necessary bowing returns, squalling in brassy distortions and soon sandy timbres as stabbing strings in unison form radiating bursts. By the end of it, the trumpet swells with the strings. And in “Midmost,” strings appear to move in families among shifting overlapping relationships, sometimes coalescing all eight together on repeated melodic motifs or in sustain, emitting faint beatings or at least a purring decay. It is a music that plays with the heartstrings of emotivity and what that can be in music. And it is all the more emotive because it acknowledges the complexity and nuance of its subject, never saccharine joy or oppressive doom but always something bittersweet.
- Keith Prosk
Vanessa Rossetto/Lionel Marchetti - The Tower (The City) (Erstwhile Records, 2021)
It’s hard to put music this cinematic into words, it feels minimizing, but so does reducing it to just music – there’s a whole world of thoughts, feelings and meaning in these recordings, or rather, a whole city of them, folded upon itself. I’ll try my best to translate some of the mental paths this album puts me on into text. The first track opens with an environment that could be any city, it sounds as if I’ve opened the door of my parents’ home and stepped outside into noisy suburbia. How could I not feel nostalgic? The soft sound of everyday life comforts me, it embraces me and offers to stay with me, but it’s a trap. There are already some signs that what we hear isn’t to be trusted.
It isn’t obvious, but this neighborhood we’re hearing isn’t really a single recording. This is presented shamelessly by fading in the first, then immediately fading in the second. That element of nostalgia was never real, and neither is this suburbia: this is a city of the mutual construction of two of contemporary music’s strangest architects, Vanessa Rossetto and Lionel Marchetti, and it will play by their rules. When more elements start to enter the scene, pushing the city into increasingly artificial terrain, it shouldn’t be a shock: this is what was promised.
Even with context removed the sounds of a child playing sounds joyous. I can see a strong mental image of them, this ambiguous child of unclear gender, running after nothings on hard wood decks and laughing. Again, it reminds me of my parents’ home, of sitting in the backyard and listening to neighbor’s children playing within earshot but out of sight. They usually seemed to be having fun, but it wasn’t rare to hear that fun erupt into screams or tears – but truthfully, from the contextless listener’s perspective, it was always hard to tell one from the other.
Before the child can be heard though, there’s a bird – one loud, enhanced chirp before settling itself into the background. It’s almost as if nature starts the conversation that humans continue, or that nature itself is what prompts humanity, life and language, opening the door to the city and its contents. The bird keeps chirping, and despite the child talking over it, it never appears as a dialogue for a couple of reasons. In a sonic sense they occupy two different registers, one high and one low, allowing the two voices to share a place in time while being separated in sonic space. In a perceived social sense, however, they’re simply ignoring each other – nature triggers humanity and humanity refuses to respond, too distracted by the miracle of its own existence. But is it the child’s fault for ignoring that bird? It isn’t even speaking the same language, and perhaps more importantly, are these even elements of the same recording or are these voices existing on different plains entirely?
The first tone to be introduced sounds natural for the setting – it could be a generator that’s switched on, the squeaking breaks of nearby vehicles, wind blowing through chimes… Without giving the listener too much time to consider any of these possibilities, the child begins counting down. Are they talking to the listener, or is this just part of their game? A squelching acousmatic explosion reveals that the music itself is the game and the listener is the player. All shreds of reality are torn away in an instant in favor of the synthesized. Although the child is now silent, I can feel them laughing at me.
The explosion repeats, accelerating, battering the listener into submission for daring to mistake what’s heard for a reality. The explosion shortens and twists itself into miniscule clips, sharpening and growing concerning until a sigh of relief appears in the form of a massive smack of bass, a sound even more clearly synthesized than the last. It’s otherworldly. I couldn’t possibly understate its impact. Is this the album revealing its true colours, or were the true colours what was heard before? A more realistic answer is that this is a work with no true colours, where each colour is a tool and they’re assembled in such a way to appear as a complex painting, where they co-exist, merge and make for a greater sum than their whole.
Along with the bassy eruption comes some trebley static in the right channel. It seems to be a processed recording, but the fascinating thing about it is how it now separates the music into two fields: the right and the left, two different but linked environments, opening the door to twice the possibilities previously considered and an even greater sonic confusion. It realizes that possibility by giving the left channel the album’s first instant of music, something that’s ineffably compared to the right channel’s filtered buzz: a comparison doomed to fail.
The total change of tone that those first few keyboard notes bring are massive, even bigger than the previous explosions somehow. It makes it so all that came before feels like abstraction, insignificant in comparison to these new, tonal sounds that the brain processes as music. Like a film soundtrack, the music quickly sets a mood, grabbing the listener’s emotional attention and leaving its effect in a way totally different than all sounds thus far, less complex but more visceral. It makes me think that if this is what music is, and if this is how music leaves its impact, then what was all that that came before, and what were all those thoughts and feelings that it expressed to me? Was it something more, or less, or is this vast range of expressive possibilities simply the magic of music?
That’s just the first minute. On The Tower (The City) there’s a brilliant moment, a radical shift in perspective and/or a revelation around every corner. The rest of this masterclass of assembled sounds you should probably just hear for yourself. I’d like to end this review with a quote included in the description for this album’s (also very good) sister release, The Tower (l'escalier en spirale). As well as providing an answer for my earlier questions, I think it sums up why both these albums work as well as they do quite well.
“Music is perhaps the bridge between consciousness and the unthinking sentient or even insentient universe.” – Ezra Pound
- Connor Kurtz
Loren Rush - Dans le Sable (Recital, 2021)
The 44’ Dans le Sable presents three arrangements from the composer Loren Rush.
The sidelong title track appears to be four sound sources in shades of overlapping relationships, a narrator musing on time and their perception of it or maybe rather memory, a piano melody bright but melancholy ascending some in pitch but languorous in its intonation, an angelic soprano performing Barbarina’s cabaletto from Le nozze di Figaro in which she laments losing a pin in sand, a broadstrokes swelling of orchestral strings with intermittent horns heralding. Maybe temporally the piano is more tethered to the narrator, the orchestra to the opera but each seems as dissociated from the others as the narrator does their past though flowing in counterpoint together musical enough. Their arrangement conveys a visceral mystery and gravity and prods the mind to ruminate on some meaning at the interface of its sound and its text. In the drama, on the stage, the narrator tries to rid themselves of time in what might appear as contradictory ways, fantasizing about spatializing time to immobilize the world around them and render classical mechanics and its arbitrary constant t null, relating their experience of time to their memory of the past that is crumbling and approaching the unconsciousness of the future making the pinpoint of the present some thesis of time as still, undirectional, and therefore unnecessary. And Barbarina sings, ‘I have lost it, poor me’ in repetition as if the linear pin like the narrator’s time has itself become a point, a grain of sand, a material associated with time not just because of the hourglass but because of its submission to the suzerainty of wind, that phenomena from thermodynamics which serves as some thesis for the arrow of time. But in the audience, off the stage, the audience becomes aware of other contexts. The narrator’s voice contains a decay that suggests it accompanies some projection, overtly a recording within a recording, while the clarity of the aria suggests something happening closer to now. Auditorium coughs and sneezes can be heard. Which might conjure up that feedback loop wherein western art music recordings aim to reproduce performance and western art music performance aims to reproduce recordings, in blinding or despatializing and therefore dehumanizing the act to center the ideal of the composition. Which obliquely by way of siphoning power from the performer to the composer might bring to mind a conflict of music as an absolute in time versus music as a collection of contingencies, as time. As if time need not exist for music to exist, as the narrator would have it and as a composer might. Something to chew on but perhaps it’s telling that the presentation of this recording makes clear the composer but none of the performers, and it seems as if the composer becomes the narrator.
“Song” is a series of a shifting orchestral theme whose iterations each feel like dawnings, alternately appearing to rise from the relative quiet in dynamics and sit throbbing in tonality or vice versa, inducing a feeling of suspension like some groundhog day. “Dance” is a whirl of strings as seemingly static as music could be until punctuated by the uneven cadence of single-tone horn repetitions among which the strings then appear to swarm above and below relative to the horn movement, with a splatter of twangy digital timbres in apparent atonality. Taken as a two-part suite, they might provide some arcane commentary on the movement, the time of music and its relativity to the movement of the text or song that accompanies its page and the gesture or dance that accompanies its performance. In doing so, Dans le Sable presents a confusing yet coherent treatise on the material of time.
- Keith Prosk
TAK + Brandon Lopez - Empty And/Or Church of Plenty (Tripticks Tapes, 2021)
Brandon Lopez and the TAK ensemble co-compose and perform two sidelong tracks of heavy improvisation on the 40’ Empty And/Or Church of Plenty.
The notes express a desire to subvert the hierarchy of composing and Empty And/Or Church of Plenty approaches this in several ways. In all participants co-composing primarily through aural/oral transmission rather than through a disembodied text or symbology. In collapsing the compositional chain by performing it themselves. In performing it in an equitable circular formation when possible. In making a music contingent upon decisions in real-time rather than some absolute to be replicated. And seemingly in the structures of its two tracks. “Side A” is a tight dynamic, tonal, and textural range of whispers, hisses, buzzing flies, utterances, creaking, trembling, groaning, and other subtle vibrations whose relationships rearrange themselves through duration and pulse, as if leapfrogging each other in their changes between sustain and shorter wobbling, see-sawing, or otherwise more discrete soundings. “Side B” is much more active and its parameters feel more free but it appears to rotate soloists, indicated by their dynamic position, violent contrabass arco, violins’ rubbing balloons and squeegee, an operatic aaaaaa, angrily chirping clarinet, rapid bubbling and popping flute, and drum in a low-end gyre of play parallel to the head, the others supporting the soloist with complimentary timbres and contrapuntal pulses. There are a couple of prominent silences that appear to restart the rotation but with the sequence moved forward one performer like a poker blind, as if this hurricane could continue forever. But the group collectively builds towards a swarming end. In each tracks’ rotational passing game of odd timbres, even at its most turbulent, the music induces a feeling of unsettling suspension.
- Keith Prosk
TAK on this recording is: Laura Cocks (flutes); Madison Greenstone (clarinets); Marina Kifferstein (violin); Charlotte Mundy (voice); and Ellery Trafford (percussion).
Tender Buttons - an established color and cunning (Rastascan Records, 2021)
Tania Chen (piano, percussion), Tom Djll (electronics, trumpet), and Gino Robair (electronics, percussion) freely play seven environments on the 75’ an established color and cunning.
Soundings lean discrete and quick, nervous, but the momentum feels languorous with the generous space often surrounding them, which also lends a sense of quietness despite the dynamic range and a notion of stasis more than propulsion in its disjointed tonality. Rhythmic snippets seem more often loosely grouped by timbre than any beat or repetition. The players appear to converse obliquely, operating in the voids left by others like fluids of different densities intertonguing, with notable exceptions like a moment of trumpet mimicking electric outbursts in overlap or the sometimes pervasive electric presence of its atmosphere in its hum, buzz, and hiss. As a texturally-driven communication, its palette is broad. An electronic library as rigorous as Skywalker Sound of swells, throbs, chugs, and bubbling, of bleeps, bloops, and clicks, of groans, oms, and roars from activated surfaces, something like fretless electric bass, the wet clapping valve of a heartbeat, and some radio transmission as if it was picked up through a feedback system rather than played in-house. Inside-piano strummed, plucked, and played on with ping pong balls and lonesome notes and ominous chords whose decay fades into that of the percussion. And percussion, ball bearings in mortar, maybe bells, but more often a variety of metallic materials whose character ranges from potpourri wind chime to a kind of gamelan orchestra depending on the speed of play.
- Keith Prosk
TONGUE DEPRESSOR - Fiddle Music [vol. 7] (self-released, 2021)
Henry Birdsey and Zach Rowden coax complex harmonies and harmonics from their two fiddles.
Birdsey and Rowden’s decision to credit themselves for ‘fiddle’ rather than ‘violin’ strikes me as delightfully political, in the sense of rejecting the academic background (however distant) usually assumed for projects like this. Granting that that information primes my ears, I do indeed hear fiddle here rather than violin - something in the way the musicians move through their frequent glissandi, which in this context seem somehow supernaturally vertiginous, threatening to send the whole track careening; something in the confident ‘roughness’ of attacks and decays... An improvisatory spirit seems to be at work, the two fiddles responding to each others’ contributions, dialoging, albeit at drone-speed. Complex overtone structures are frequently audible (calling to mind the recent all-strings Occam Ocean recording), but Birdsey and Rowden don’t pursue them single-mindedly, making space also for vestigially-tonal minor-key descents alongside various other harmonic ideas. As a result, despite the narrow-seeming focus of Birdsey and Rowdens’ shared musical language, I find myself ‘code-switching’ frequently, shifting and readjusting how I listen and what I listen for. As in the folk traditions which ‘fiddle music’ obliquely refers to, here a profound sense of depth and complexity arises from a sharply limited palette of sounds.
- Ellie Kerry
Nick Zanca - Cacerolazo (Full Spectrum Records, 2021)
Nick Zanca arranges a three-part suite and a sidelong track of obliquely-narrative, field-recording-based environments on the 36’ Cacerolazo.
Cacerolazos carry a lot of poetic weight. There is perhaps no greater moral subject than eating. In western religious rituals around fish and pork, for instance. In the avoidance of consuming four-legged creatures in past cultures of Japan. In the condemnation of Kronus, Tantalus, and the lotophagoi, in the monsterification of Polyphemus, Scylla, and Charybdis. And not just what to eat but how to eat it, its preparation, its cooking. And similarly common across time and place is the use of noise to ward away evil, from fireworks to wind chimes to small bells around the necks of animals and people. So when people make a ruckus on cooking utensils directed towards a cultural offender, there is perhaps no better way to say, you don’t belong, go away. It is a kind of ritual death. And indeed the charivari with which cacerolazo might blur often involve burning an effigy of those invoked to die. Contextually this fits this statement of Zanca, who has now cast aside previous musical monikers to assume their name, and interestingly does so by purging their archives of old field recordings which pepper this release.
The three-part “Cacerolazo” suite is a dreamhaze soup of singing metal, digital cooing, throbbing bass, night critters, unrecognizable whispers, energy drumming, twinkling keyboards, and a recording of an infomercial and the rain of a shower - a cleansing - and a shower-singing attempt at throat singing, culminating in an unadulterated presentation of a cacerolazo. The sidelong “Boy Abroad” focuses the ear on field recordings of conversations with the composer while travelling, underlain by rolling sines - sometimes beating, meandering keyboard, and an anonymous ambience with variable dynamics to glue the collage. Its odyssey illuminates the otherness of the composer in foreign places, who appears to experience conflict with the local, wishing to find a Starbucks to use the phone, waiting to arrive at the airport before converting files so as not to corrupt them, conversing more often with other travelling friends than strangers. And interestingly they reference eating, the Starbucks, choking on teargas, asking to be guided towards a juice. This time culminating in white noise and a bell like a death knell. So what has occurred twice is a presentation of the past followed by a mark of death. The boy is dead. Zanca is born.
- Keith Prosk
ZIMOUN - Various Vibrating Materials (LINE, 2021)
62 minutes of a suspended sensation of elevation: that’s essentially what Various Vibrating Materials sets out to provide, and it’s more than enough to capture my fascinated adoration. The sound palette is exactly what’s implied – various small materials are made to vibrate, and this composition slowly drifts through these materials. In a sense they make a drone, but not really, it’s just many small sounds coming together to create the illusion. More than a drone this is a texture, it’s a hard surface splattered with tiny bumps and bruises, just like the artwork.
Movement is something worth questioning here. In a sense there’s a lot of it, there’s nothing but it. Objects are always moving, even if only slightly, both in a sonic and a physical sense. The soundworld subtly changes at a moment’s notice as discreet elements enter and exit the stage, gradually forcing the entire texture into a territory that the listener might not even notice is totally different than what they were hearing five minutes ago. On the other hand though, linear movement is exactly what the composition ignores. Every petit step forward is matched by an immediate step back, making a continuously shifting timbre that doesn’t really go anywhere, and resulting in a truly vibrating music.
There’s something about these high-pitch textures that I find exquisite. My only point of comparison (coincidentally also released on LINE, but 20 years ago) happens to be some of my favourite music ever released, Bernhard Günter’s Monochrome White series. Those were made digitally and had the effect of a million microscopic clicks coming together to form a delicate computer rainforest, a music that provides and sustains the sensation of being elevated into the clouds, a feeling of total weightlessness; and that’s what I feel again here, but in some ways this vibrating acoustic rainforest is less comforting. Bernhard’s release mostly stuck to the highest frequencies, to the untouchable and the immaculate, but on Zimoun’s release the bass is so thick that the ground is crumbling. It feels inescapable, and like those frail high-ends are the only thing that keeps me from sinking into it.
It might be calm and tranquil, but I can’t ignore the intimidating, concerning element to this, it’s as if this fragile music is at constant risk of total collapse. A lot of this frustration comes from the acoustic reality of these recordings – these small vibrating objects and their sounds really are fragile, they really could stop at any moment, and sometimes they even do. That element of instability is wonderful though and remarkably, despite shaking at every seam, the music never crumbles. Just like there’s beauty and life in that bruised, bumped wall, it’s here in this music too. What Zimoun has made here is the illusion of an organic, living, breathing texture, one that simultaneously ebbs as it flows. It’s something rare, and beautiful.
- Connor Kurtz
Thank you so much for reading.
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