The newsletter is tickled to announce the addition of contributors Ellie Kerry and Connor Kurtz, who appear in the reviews this month.
For those literate in Spanish, Cristián Alvear recently published an article, Interpretive Dialect and Reflex Act: Determining the Indeterminate in singularidad #1 (2016) by Santiago Astaburuaga.
Houston, Texas’ Nameless Sound performance series continues celebrating its 20th anniversary by diving into archives of previously unreleased sound, video, and stories from musicians with deep connections to the series. The most recent edition explores relationships between The Aural and The Visual and features Keith Rowe and Loren Connors solos in the Rothko Chapel, Peter Brötzmann at The Hill of James Magee, Cristina Carter + Heather Leigh, Ran Blake’s Film Noir, and more. Previous profiles include Joe McPhee, Maggie Nicols, Alvin Fielder, and Pauline Oliveros. This past month, Keith Prosk had a conversation with Dave Dove for The Free Jazz Collective, ostensibly about the anniversary project but really about what makes Nameless Sound a model arts organization.
$5 Suggested Donation | If you find yourself spending a good chunk of time reading the newsletter, discovering music you enjoy in the newsletter, dialoguing your interpretation those in the newsletter, or otherwise appreciate its efforts, please consider donating to it. Your contributions support not only the writers but the musicians that make it possible. For all monthly income received, harmonic series retains 20% for operating costs, equally distributes 40% to the writing team, and distributes 40% to musicians (of this, 40% to interviewee or guest essayist, 30% to rotating feature contributor, and 30% equally to those that apprised the newsletter of a project it reviewed). For the nitty gritty of this system, please read the editorial here. The newsletter was able to offer musicians $0.60 to $1.79 for the month of August, and $6.54 to $13.10 for September. Disclaimer: harmonic series LLC is not a non-profit organization, as such donations are not tax-deductible.
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.
Radu Malfatti - oto no kage (2020)
The translation of instruction as provided by Radu:
all sounds are calm and quiet
the long line indicates long to very long sounds (around 20 seconds or more)
the short lines indicate sounds of 2 to 3 seconds
the little circles are like little “clicks,” not too loud but still well felt. on the instrument or outside
all pitches of sounds are ad lib. one can play the same pitch over again or change constantly
the structure is free as well but the order remains as written, read from left to right and top to bottom. the silences in between sounds are free as well but keep in mind that every page should last about 10 minutes
Radu Malfatti is a composer, trombonist, and bass harmonicist perhaps most often associated with the wandelweiser collective. In 2021, Malfatti has so far released insinuations, performed by guitarist Cristián Alvear, and oto no kage on his label, b-boim, of which the most complete and up-to-date archive exists on discogs and whose entries may be ordered through the email listed there or, for the most recent releases, through the new b-boim site.
oto no kage is a 2020 composition for saxophone, accordion, sine waves, and bass harmonica composed specifically for Christian Kobi, Jonas Kocher, Klaus Filip, and Malfatti. A kind of distanced pandemic piece, Malfatti asked each performer to interpret the score and send him their recordings, which were then overlaid from 0:00 with no other manipulation. Performers were asked to not communicate with each other about the piece and did not know that they had each received identical scores. Malfatti was interested in the degrees of similarity or difference between the individual interpretations.
The way sounds are made, calm and quiet and pitched, are intuitive but might require some familiarity with Malfatti’s approach, and indeed Malfatti has stated that he is comfortable with this level of specificity because the performers of his compositions are often intimately familiar with his preferences. While the sequence and durations of soundings and the sequence and durations of pages are approximately determined, the durations of silences are not, allowing the shape or structure of sounds on a page to be stretched or compressed at will. (Those that are familiar with our presentation of insinuations might recognize that this key feature also appears there, despite its many differences and being composed nearly two decades earlier.) The pitches of sound are undetermined.
I think the symbology here is intuitive enough for even those that would not consider themselves musicians to play along, and I encourage you to do so. I tried it using (quiet, calm) feedback. During my first playthrough, I counted lines and used a watch to guide page durations and played too quickly. During the second, I placed a recording device behind me and did not count and upon playback found that I stayed more faithful to sounding and page durations. Each playthrough I became increasingly aware that I was bucketing or playing symmetries in different portions of the page, that the durations of my silences correlated to the durations of the soundings around them, and that though I set out to play similar material for simplicity I almost automatically diversified the clicks (though this was more a practicality of the instrument than an aesthetic one). The experience illuminated some of my habits and in doing so encouraged their subversion.
The video below includes a brief interview with the composer and musicians about the piece, and its performance follows at 28:19. I found it difficult to track timbres across all soundings - namely the accordion and harmonica - but what is clear is that the sequence of instruments shifts between nearly every sounding though their grouping remains relatively tight. Without context a listener would likely believe that the piece was scored to deliberately facilitate these shifting instrumental relationships, which is a wonder considering the independence of each performance. - Keith Prosk
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.
Sarah Davachi - Antiphonals (Late Music, 2021)
Sarah Davachi arranges contemplative atmospheres for Mellotron (with sounds of English horn, bass flute, clarinet, recorder, oboe, French horn, chamber organ, nylon string guitar), tape echo, Korg CX-3 electric organ, pipe organ, harpsichord, piano, ARP Odyssey synthesizer, acoustic guitar, violin, and voice on the eight-track, 44’ Antiphonals.
I could not shake the feeling of a tapestry that conveys the gravity of its story not through its depiction but the wear of its textile, its frayed threads, moth meals, and yellowing. Its contrapuntal weavings of dispirited heralds, whale songs, celestial auroras, ethereal swells, and other mysterious timbres. The stressed decay in the delay of its discrete soundings of guitar and harpsichord, each rippling in a reflective pool, their waverings intimating a fragility, fading to the soft edge of the threadbare hiss of silence recorded. Its pulse one of subsistence, in the low om of organ, in the fleeting beatings of winds, in the barely-there bum of some drum. And a kind of melancholy in its lethargy, in its taciturn movements belying the breadth of its orchestra, in its slowed time save for some melodic flourishes, a flare of glassy resonance, a cathartic distorted strings. Ensconcing. - Keith Prosk
Jordan Dykstra / Koen Nutters - In Better Shape Than You Found Me (elsewhere, 2021)
The first thing that this album's artwork reminded me of was abstract filmmaker Daïchi Saïto's latest work, earthearthearth. The film starts with faint, orange horizons appearing and disappearing from the screen, shifting and flickering. That aesthetic idea of repeating appearance and disappearance is a big part of what made that film great, and it's a big part of what makes this album great as well.
It's enchanting to hear how these elements patiently come and go, slowly but surely working through the composition's cyclical, geometrically pleasing structure. In simpler sections I feel nostalgic for the louder, fuller moments, but comforted by the leisurely pace of the insistent piano and various soft acoustic textures which warmly embrace while feeling fragile enough to sink away at any moment, which they always do. Returns to the central drone are reassuring but off-putting – it's quite dissonant, almost ugly, really. But as I hear it again and again, under the influence of repetitive nostalgia, it somehow feels just right.
More than anything else, what I love about this album is the atmosphere. Plenty of composers from this patient school of contemporary music have shifted emphasis from pure experimentation to ambient-esque atmospherics, but few have done it this well. The atmosphere here is complex, dark, creepy yet pleasant. It's like a forest path at night with shimmers of moonlight shining through the trees, with small musical creatures lurking in the shadows and a triumphant, rotating lighthouse which shines a harsh, eerie light over and past the listener five times through the piece's hour duration. The path eventually leads to a train which conveniently takes the listener back home, but even then there's a little music, some left-over traces to be heard and remembered.
It's only taken about a week for In Better Shape Than You Found Me to become my most heard album of the year. There's something about that barely lit forest path that keeps me coming back, never offering to reveal itself but inviting me deeper and deeper into a menacing atmosphere which never harms me, only ever leaving me in better shape than it found me. - Connor Kurtz
Jordan Dykstra (viola, pitch pipe, crotales, piano ebow, electronic programming, field recordings) and Koen Nutters (piano programming, field recordings) realize a joint composition that appears as a converging structural wave on the hour-long In Better Shape Than You Found Me.
The gentle pace and duration of the piece induces a faulty memory but recurring soundings recognized as repetitive enough reveal a sturdier structure. Step-pattern crotales melodies seem to signal not the beginnings of changes but that something has already set into motion. First hammered piano keys and chords sometimes allowed to reverberate, sometimes muted, truncated, in phasing relationships with swelling ebow sines, their pulses together braiding and occasionally extending each others when not separated by significant silences. And then sustained soundings of pitch pipe and viola, their similarly rippling pulses in similar phasing relationships. These two independently developing duos eventually bridged by a step-pattern scalular piano melody that itself may contain some reflection of the crotales. All these undulating soundings closer together and converging towards a peak density close to the center of the piece like a wave packet compressed on the sea shelf, mixing and blending a bit, the reverberant piano chords, ebow, and viola a trio for a time, only to slowly crash and dissipate to the piano and sine duo distanced with generous silence. Just as the soundings appear to mirror each other, in their movements and their relationships and their wave swells and pulses, so silences appear to mirror the soundings in some way, containing as many identities as instruments in the hiss of recording nothing, a kind of tunnel whistle, ethereal hooting like circulating air, a quiet night teeming with critters calls, and pure silence. - Keith Prosk
anne-f jacques - crab-shapedness (SUPERPANG, 2021)
anne-f jacques records three environments for seaweed, glass, plastic, paper, motors, and amplification on the 20’ crab-shapedness.
Motorized materials sound the slow circular turn of the machine, rhythmized miniature ebb and flow and bob like debris in the limbo of slackwater. Amplification conveys the volume of silence in its hiss and suck and thickens the density of air, the sighs of materials grained like scuba valve-release and turbulent bubbling pumping, and emits movements evoking lightly drumming fingers and buoyant dub basslines whose source seems more likely to be the muted crumpling of the materials themselves and their displacement of the air around them than any contact with another solid. And it microscopes the combinatory textures of solid on solid as if to make materials’ coefficients of friction audible. Seaweed’s tendrils a slow but bright spidery pluck with the gravity of high-tension wires snapping. The grain of paper, the crystal lattice of glass, the woven waxy polymers of plastic the scale of sounding rather than anything visible. - Keith Prosk
llumm - cuhda (self-released, 2021)
Ferran Fages and Alfredo Costa Monteiro activate a 25’ electromagnetic environment for electric guitar and resonant objects and electronics on cuhda.
The air is electric. Soundings emit auras, ghostly tremolos, motion-blurred electron fields, in their vibratory half-life but even seemingly in their non-intervention, always haunting the space, humming, as if the duo has activated a generative environment that is as much a character in the drama as they are, a field of coils manifesting a magnetic wind in the residual harmonics and their swaying in it like blades of grass. Beyond the delay and decay, metallic timbres feed back into this electric vision, the acidic attack of spiderlike strums, guitar chimes and jangles as if a piano was struck on its body or inside, strings galvanic thwacks against the soundboard, and the arced trajectories of high-tension plucks like those of particles on course for collision. The duo moves together in collaged forms, dwelling in new timbres for a time together, molding their shape in attack, decay, and the durations of soundings and silences, these flashbulbs of a nonlinear dream tethered together by the ectoplasm of the everpresent environment. - Keith Prosk
Annea Lockwood - Becoming Air / Into The Vanishing Point (Black Truffle, 2021)
Becoming Air / Into The Vanishing Point presents two sidelong Annea Lockwood compositions, a solo for Nate Wooley and trumpet, gong, sheet metal, and amplifier and an ecological piece for the piano/percussion quartet Yarn/Wire.
“Becoming Air” is four gong rings seemingly extended by a sustained trumpet tone, its iterations branching paths: air notes of several characters as if to illuminate wind’s behavior in the trumpet’s various chambers, deflating whistling from leaky embouchures, circular sniffing and simultaneous inhalation and exhalation, and the mouth, nearly sighing, percussive in its wet clicks of lips or cheek and gum separating; the clanging and wobbling vibrations of a sheet metal mute emitting a resonant howl or hum - perhaps with a vocal multiphonic or electronic accompaniment - and an aquatic and bubbling cavitational airstream sometimes sounding as if rewound and scratched; the electric air of amplifier heavily distorted as if in heat, interference and feedback lashing out among electronic swells both eerie and triumphant; the end. The ebb and flow of breath work, and not just the outward emission of sound, and the metallic similarities of trumpet and gong and amplifier and the structural progression, with the help of the title, seem to transform the instrumentalist and their instruments to some singular porous passthrough material of pure vibration.
“Into The Vanishing Point” is a spacious environment of mostly extended techniques and percussive objects in the ecological counterpoint of night critters. A throbbing inside-piano tanpura like cicadas. The castanets of chitinous clicks. Chirruping. Scratching. The scrape and crack of shells. A hovering whoom and whoosh like dragonfly or hummingbird. A shimmering chime as if to sound moth’s mica. Dynamically swelling, clamoring and quieting in amplitudes. Some ominous piano chords - perhaps the only traditionally musical sound - seems to scare them off like some predator. Once it disappears, the small sounds of critters popping, creaking, calling, and crying reappears. - Keith Prosk
Yarn/Wire is: Ian Antonio (percussion); Laura Barger (piano); Russell Greenberg (piano); and Ning Yu (piano).
Cecilia Lopez - Red (DB) (Relative Pitch, 2021)
Gerald Cleaver (drums), Brandon Lopez (contrabass), and Cecila Lopez (electronics) perform a Cecilia Lopez composition that energizes the room to form a polyrhythm of resonances and feedback on the single track, 50’ Red (DB).
The composition involves the installation of suspended nets laced with speakers and microphones and filled with resonant bodies, here mirroring the acoustic instrumentation and containing contrabasses and drums. Their presence and influence is subtle in the sound result, and I might only recognize the buzzing frames of resonating drums. Probably because soundings are rarely so sustained as to create beating patterns or undulating waves but tend towards discrete, punctuative attacks in repetitive phrasings as if instead of approaching the harmonic synthesis that might be expected of an environment centered around resonance and feedback the instrumentalists aim to excite some reactive electroacoustic system. But while I suspect the suspended bundles provide inputs for some electronics, the electric manipulation of played contrabass or drums is never obvious if it ever happens, even something like the warped electric echo of contrabass appearing more call and response than automatic modified output. So what results is a polyrhythmic ecosystem of diverse vibrations, electric clicks with the cadence of a fluttering film reel and chirping and groaning feedback peaks with pruned waves to produce turbulent movements, beats of arco brushstrokes and quick skittering plucking, snare rolls and kick drum marches, and the more illusory vibrations of these soundings refracting among each other and among the walls. And it seems as if the ensemble explores its niches systematically, with metered introductions of electronics, then contrabass, then drums, with alternating focuses on the room, the bundles, each other, allowing a range of dynamics and density from barely-sounded roomsound to louder locked-in grooves. - Keith Prosk
Another performance of Red, also performed in Roulette, is available here.
Francisco López - Animast (Ferns recordings, 2021)
“In conclusion, I shall stress the total ambiguity of our relation to the real and its disappearance. Behind every image, something has disappeared. Behind virtual reality in all its forms, the real has disappeared. And that is what fascinates everyone. According to the official version, we worship the real and the reality principle, but – and this is the source of all the current suspense – is it, in fact, the real we worship, or its disappearance?”
I first read this quote in the inlay for a different Francisco López CD entirely (untitled #290), and it comes from Jean Baudrillard's 2007 essay Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? Finished only months before the French post-modernist's death, Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? is a deeply unsettling text which concerns itself with humanity's inevitable disappearance as a cost of technological development, as well as the growing threat of the great accelerating force that is virtual reality. If we continue to perpetually analyze and transform our world, abandoning the real to embrace the artificial, won't there be a point where nothing real remains, or will it just be inseparable from the artificial? Baudrillard puts it more bluntly: Is everything doomed to disappear?
The other primary concern of this text is digital photography. One might think that, whether digital or analogue equipment is used, when they take a photograph, they are creating fiction, and they wouldn't be exactly wrong. The camera observes the real and tries its best to replicate, but this action is an impossibility – reality can't be captured, only transformed. The result of this must be artificial, but there's still some nuance in the word “create.” An analogue camera does indeed create – when a photograph is taken, a light imprint is read and burnt onto film or another light-sensitive surface, creating a negative. The real is observed, and a replica is created. When a digital camera takes a photograph, it is immediately saved to the device. As far as the material world is concerned, all that has happened is disappearance.
The essay doesn't mention it, but its artistic scope goes beyond photography: the exact same words could have been written about audio recording processes. I wrote Francisco López an email to enquire about the recording equipment that was used on this album and ask whether the sounds I'm hearing were captured via digital or analogue methods and received deliberately muddy answers. From the field to the studio to the live performance they're used interchangeably. In Francisco's own words, "the distinction is -no offense- bullshit." In this work where sounds perceived to be digital are often analogue as well as vice versa, the significance of their separation becomes hard to take seriously.
Baudrillard was quick to dismiss the potential artistic possibilities of the digital form. He accuses artists of attempting to find freedom by using the digital to subvert the real, which he criticizes by claiming that it ignores the genuine creative gesture that is essential to the artform – "You cannot liberate photography!" However, liberating his recordings sounds exactly like what López has done here, and what he's been doing for many years, whether it be through analogue forms, digital, or both. Francisco López has long been a master of de-contextualized sound, exploiting whatever sound sources he needs or desires for his artistic pursuit, re-phrasing them in ways which seems logical in only the least real of realities, elaborate virtual realities that joyfully interweaves the digital with the analogue to such an extent that they cannot be pulled back apart or even differentiated. I can't think of a better word for it than liberation.
“untitled #369,” the A-side to this LP, constructs a clear and concise hyperreality. It opens with the sounds of massive, layered ruffling – it could be the rhythmic cycle of machines in production, the improvised whims of scotch tape being ripped from contact microphones, wind blowing through tall trees with colliding branches and rubbing leaves, electroacoustic or synthesized pulses, or the interior of a movie theater where the whole audience decided to open their bag of potato chips at the same moment. It could even be all at once, or none of them. It's rhythmic though, allowing the sounds to all come together as the collective voice of a single autonomous machine – an illusion made believable by patient, virtuosic sound design. Its impossible low-ends grow and distort and the sound machine twists and redefines itself – the artificiality of the music becomes so clear it can't be ignored, so unignorable that it must be accepted. Towards the end of the 20-minute sound mass, the machine's voice begins to soften, starting to appear less as a machine and more as an environment. It feels like sitting on a surreal beach, watching and hearing loud, oversaturated tides washing over thousands of small rocks which subtly sound beneath shifting friction, where thousands of small, alien-like crabs flee, accidentally walking right over the recording devices each time.
Especially considering that I've spent most of this review talking about French philosophy and technical processes so far, one might mistake Francisco López for a stern conceptualist, but he's really not. Aesthetics are always given the highest significance in his work, it's what keeps it exciting. It may seem trivial, but last year he released his largest compilation yet (a bunch of stuff), including 11 hours of music made over 40 years. What's especially notable about it is that he broke the tracks up into a handful of sections, 'Lopezian genres' he called them, including names like 'Drone World', 'Non-Representational Environmental Sound Matter', 'VirtuAural Machines' and 'Within the Noosphere'. Okay, clearly these were written with tongue partially in cheek, but to divide one's own work into genres is nothing shallow: it's to admit that each piece works off of existent aesthetic principals, that a creative goal exists here, and that each work is part of a lineage, rather than the work being created to deliberately push any boundaries. “untitled #369” is a fine example of the VirtuAural Machines genre, creating an illusion of exactly that.
I don't think that “untitled #369” is going to turn on many new fans, but the B-side, “untitled #365,” might – it's brain-rattling. It comes from the considerably more fickle 'Medium With No Message' genre. It refers to a phrase coined by communication theorist Marshall McLuhan, which Baudrillard himself has already provided commentary on: "the medium is the message signifies not only the end of the message, but also the end of the medium". If the message is what destroys the medium, then Francisco liberates the medium by depriving it of any message. In 369 we wondered what we we're hearing – where do these sounds came from and what do they result in? In 365 there's no questions of sound, there just is sound. I can describe it as rhythmic and I can describe it as intense, but frankly I'm at a loss for an accurate description. It's powerful, it's immersive, it will grab you by both ears, pick you up by them, and quickly, rhythmically shake you until the piece is done and it drops you on your ass. Maybe that's not for everyone, but I'm sure there's many like me who can derive a perverse pleasure from such an experience.
When we compare the two pieces, we're made to compare two entirely different hyperrealities which may or may not relate to our own. In “untitled #369” we heard what sounds to be reality transformed into a fictitious machine. In “untitled #365” we hear what sounds completely non-real transformed into the undefinable, an aural experiment that reaches beyond reality's scope. If to record is to prompt the disappearance of the real, then Francisco López has been basking in it for years. Through his real-world sensibilities, López has carefully crafted aesthetic frameworks that could only ever exist in the virtual. Baudrillard asked what it is about the disappearance of reality that intrigues us so much – "How can the world be so vulnerable to this liquidation, this dictatorship of integral reality, and how can it be fascinated by it?" I don't have the answer to this question – neither did Baudrillard, and I doubt López does either. But I think that if we did have the answer, we might also have a good idea of what exactly it is that makes the music of Francisco López so endlessly alluring. - Connor Kurtz
Francisco López - Untitled (2020) (Marginal Frequency, 2021)
Francisco López presents seven sonic collages on the 62’ Untitled (2020).
Bricolages of looped recorded materials whose macromovements most often come from changes in dynamics and the density of layers. Its sounds are often mysterious, simultaneously appearing recognizable and unfamiliar, and coalesce into singular moods no matter their disparate components, perhaps recontextualizing. The poltergeist of “#385” in its clicking meter, low-end sounded-cistern reverberations, guttural ghost vocal, and a churning insectoid gyre. The technonoir of “#384” in its glittering glitching crashing modemsong, Screwed-up phrasings, and industrial spank. The imagined radio of “#389,” its squall of buzz, zap, rustle, and shake from which criss-crossing conversations arise in Nashville confusion the waves of carriers with no modulating content somehow sounded. Hand in hand with how these sounds maybe gain new meaning in these new ecologies to form new narratives, the text of all voices - save for some descriptions in “#389” - is manipulated to minimize its intelligibility while maintaining its intonations and emotivity, allowing sound and not language to determine the narrative. Except in the case of the EVP in “#385,” which is naturally - or supernaturally - given the benefit of language despite its lack of text, and “#386” and “#397,” which might contain no voice but - especially given the strong presence of voice everywhere else - I suspect is birdsong recorded underwater, an anthropomorphized language. - Keith Prosk
Low Frequency Trio - Low Frequency Trio (self-released, 2021)
Juan José García, José Luis Hurtado, and Antonio Rosales perform six pieces - each composed specifically for this ensemble - from as many composers that emphasize the textural and rhythmic capabilities of this contrabass, piano, and bass clarinet trio on the 60’ Low Frequency Trio.
The breadth of play reflects the breadth of composers. Space ranges from sparse to dense. Dynamics all together low to sweeping romantic gestures. Forms of repeated motifs to collaged progressions to an interlocked propulsive groove. Soundings alternately discrete and sustained alternately emphasizing contrapuntal rhythms and a textural soup of extended techniques like a winnowing whistling of bass, glistening inside-piano twinklings, and clarinet as deflating balloon. But each fittingly foregrounds the low end for some time: the heavy frictional thrum of deep bass arco; the corporal rumble of sinistral piano clusters; the venerable woody vibrations of bass clarinet. And each accentuates the tension and gravity that chamber music can have. - Keith Prosk
The composers are, sequentially: Aldo Lombera; Cecilia Arditto; Gabriel Salcedo; Christian Villafañe; Wilfrido Terrazas; and Danielle Savage.
Joanna Mattrey - Dirge (Dear Life Records, 2021)
Joanna Mattrey presents seven tracks for stroh violin - with Chaz Knapp (tape machines, organ), Steven Long (organ), and Cleek Schrey (daxophone) each contributing to one - on the 38’ Dirge.
The stroh lends (occasionally directional) volume and a mongrel grit, the shredding friction of strings and the tinny distortions of bell each apparent in the melancholic, bucolic fiddling, the dilapidation and torpor of tape machine and organ’s long decay, delay, and sustain and the apoplectic animal yowls of daxophone further magnifying the rough and rustic character of the music. Mattrey’s multiphonic play unveils cathartic movement in the noise, in double stops, in bowing and the crippled plunk of strumming at once, in glimmering harmonics’ sublimation to imagined melodies and psychoacoustic effects like the sound of gasping, and in the bijou gestures in between the beats of bowing returns in wandering arrhythmias from stomped dances to errant lyricism that knead and stretch time and the emotivity of it. - Keith Prosk
Éliane Radigue - occam ocean 3 (Shiiin, 2021)
What, to me, feels different about this third installment in the series is not so much the novelty of ‘all strings’ - timbres blend and separate here just as freely as in the earlier recordings - but rather that I approach it with, however sketchy or tentative, some set of established expectations around the structure, affect, effect, etc. of Occam Ocean pieces in general. “Occam River II,” then, in its opening episode, returns me to a now-familiar acoustic environment, a warm, dark, velvety complexity, almost sumptuous in its feeling of harmonic suspension, before taking a now-familiar turn: depth drops out from under this structure, which levels into a silvery paved-over flatness, glinting uncomfortably - and while I am still busy missing the earlier section, I become aware of an organic, breathing depth underneath this flatness too, ossifying into brittle crispness by the piece's end. I hear broad structural similarities in “Occam VIII:” a tinnily echoic field submerges precipitously before, again, a sharp drying-out of the whole texture, which registers eventually as a liftoff, breaching surface tension so completely that the sound continues to float even with the addition of lower pitches. “Occam Delta III,” by contrast, strikes me as something of an enigma in the context of the series. The piece begins in a kind of sustained early-morning dawning, which, yes, gradually accrues detail and texture after the initial (pseudo-)‘tune-up,’ but then this basic texture simply persists for the length of the track: of course, as always, none of the instrumental parts remain static, but, in this case, their gradual shifts register as variations, inflections, or ‘inversions’ of the ‘root’ texture rather than serious departures. Still, conditioned by my prior experience with the project, I don't stop expecting such a departure - and, as a result, the sustained warmth of the piece becomes, by its end, almost painfully intense, overflowing my capacity to receive it. Much of what attracts me to the Occam Ocean project is in its resemblance to ‘folk’ or ‘traditional’ repertoires - this is a body of works built from shared musical ingredients, transmitted orally, tied to a community of musicians, and allowing for specific types of variation between performances. Whatever recordings are made available, then, enter into a relatively granular and ever-evolving dialogue with each other - with recordings of other pieces and, eventually, perhaps, with other recordings of the same pieces. At this (hopefully) early phase in that process, each new release seems to contribute exponentially to my fascination with the project as a whole. - Ellie Kerry
occam ocean 3 presents Deborah Walker’s cello solo, violinist Silvia Tarozzi and Walker’s duo, and violist Julia Eckhardt, Tarozzi, and Walker’s trio in composer Éliane Radigue’s network of brimming harmonics music, occam ocean.
Whereas occam ocean 1 served as a kind of initial exhibition of the solo, river, and delta forms in the system and occam ocean 2 featured its largest eponymous orchestral form, the three sidelong tracks here trace the progression of a performer and their instrument through solo, river, and delta, somewhat similarly to Eckhardt’s journey on occam ocean 1 though Carol Robinson switched between birbyné and bass clarinet there. Gleaning from the limited but treasured context for this music, especially Eckhardt’s Intermediary Spaces and Sound American’s The OCCAM Ocean Issue, this music manifests fundamental relationships between instrumentalists and their instruments while simultaneously remaining sensitive to changes not just in time and space but to specific arrangements with other instrumentalists and their instruments. I found that this ensemble and track structure, with enough static variables and incremental additions, focused my ear towards what might and what might not change in a performer’s sounding across forms and I found what is reflected in the macrostructure of each piece and what words from Verlaine Walker quotes in the notes to describe differences among performances of the same piece, “neither quite the same nor quite different.”
Which speaks to the subtlety and fragility of the music. I can perceive the physical limits of performance approached in the sound. Soundings as soft as breath - so light as to illuminate the grain of gut and hair but not their frictional catch and release - that it’s a wonder the bow does not skip transversely down the strings. Faint increases in fingers’ pressure around bowing returns to counterbalance minute differences in gravity at the middle of the bow and its ends. There are significant movements in tone but more often there is what can only be heavy-handedly described as natural variations in repetition. And from these ascetic movements arise dancing harmonics. Their spectra radiating apart like light through denser material. Choruses of siren song sines, celestial overtones, and fishtailing beatings. But what’s more revelatory is that these acoustic phenomena appear to animate new life in the ether, pulses whose character is so distinct from the behavior of primary soundings as to baffle the ear which can only assume it has stumbled onto some distant branch of a sound’s lineal tree.
As to tracing Walker through the forms, I am still listening but believe I can attribute at least a flute-like revelry in some overtones and a low undulation whose crests breach into perception and whose troughs dive out of audibility across more than one piece. There are moments in the river and delta where each instrument is quite distinct and others where it is difficult to parse them and I suspect the instruments often play in a zone of overlapping frequencies to cultivate their harmonic interactions, blurring their individual timbres. I hear more pulses the fewer instruments involved but the trio conjures a strong sonic stream, its palpable pulse’s crests and troughs points and cutbanks carving canyons in time.
A pedantic thought of mine around this music and its water themes has been, ‘but streams are not the water that flows through them.’ A dry lake is a lake and an ephemeral creek is a creek. But I have since understood that each shapes the other. The topography and material of the vessel determines the character of water there and the water is glad to sculpt its sand and stone and bedrock according to the means afforded it. A dynamic equilibrium. Tension and mutualism. And then again I have stumbled across another intuitive mean, always progressing, mutual, in this music, like the relationship between composer and performer, performer and performance, simplicity and complexity, moment and moment. It is fitting that this music should be represented by water, that being the medium thick enough by which the waves around us are most often recognized, but the feeling is of pure frisson, like being embraced and listening to the fluttering heartbeat in the warmth and comfort of that who embraced you. - Keith Prosk
Nick Storring - Newfoundout (mappa, 2021)
Nick Storring arranges six or seven sprawling rhythmic environments on the 64’ Newfoundout.
Newfoundout is colorful not just in its range of textures but the brightness of them too. Dense, sometimes cyclical polyrhythms of drums - not individually talking but conversational among their varying tones - in sprightly tempi blend with a menagerie of lighthearted melodies in mottled substrates of ethereal ambiance. Their beats alternately structured and quite natural, like the cadence of gusty rain drops in “Dome” or the stumbling bass arrhythmia of “Vroomanton.” Its forms feel progressive, at times linearly additive, at others collaged such as “Silver Centre,” and sometimes alternating between two motifs building in parallel like in “Dome.” While movement is most often frolicsome, the total pace is ambling. And while there are a couple abrasive or ominous moments, they are more often cheery and bubbly. All of these characteristics, particularly the abundant stable of sounds, combine to create a dimensional experience of walking in an environment and recognizing an unfolding not in it but in the self in a kind of growing wonderment at its animism. - Keith Prosk
John Wall - v02 Variations [ I-IV ] (self-released, 2021)
Something that I find exciting about following the work of John Wall is the constant feeling of refinement and revision. In his earliest plunderphonic music, he fit into a recognizable scene of collage artists, but each release since has stepped deeper into the rabbit-hole of digital abstraction. Over the next several releases the samples were cut into smaller and smaller chunks, bordering on the microscopic to test both the computer's and the listener's aural limitations, and assembled into radical compositions, both minimalist in a sense yet enormously complex. In more recent music, his process of dissection and recomposition has grown into something increasingly individual and virtuosic, and one of his most notable advancements is the reuse, remix and variation of his own music.
The title of this release seems to be dedicated to the idea of reuse and self-remixing, alluding to each track being a potential variation of a variation, although a track titled v02 doesn't seem to actually exist. Instead, v02 Variations' samples are mostly coming from dance music, including producers like Sv1, IKTS, Pent and, most notably, PC Music founder A. G. Cook. Perhaps unsurprisingly though, the list also includes John Wall himself, making each track a balance of external influence alongside personal development and reimagining.
Tracks I, III and IV are some of the most captivating headphone experiences of the year – three short but huge unmelodic, unrhythmic panoramas of digital clicks, grains, tones, washes, cracks and fragments, all with faint hits of re-contextualized and re-created melodies and rhythms scattered through-out. Despite the high-speed arrangements, fast enough to make repetitive cuts sound like textures, the music is progressive, aggressively hopping through delicately laid-out sections which occasionally call back to each other. The sound design is so nuanced and precise, overwhelming the listener without sounding overblown.
What will be the standout for many listeners though is track II, Wall's latest collaboration with poet Alex Rodgers – it's a pop song, kinda. Not just are there sung vocals, but there's a huge sense of rhythm through the production of the track which cleverly, dynamically follows Rodgers' poem and intonation. As the thick, abstract production twists and grows, Rodger's vocal performance gets surprisingly fierce, and Wall responds by doubling down into dance music inspiration. It results in something that sticks out like an enormous, gloriously sore thumb, a rare collision of pop and avant-garde which refuses to place itself on either side of the line, staying as inexplicable as Rodger's poem.
Through-out the whole EP hints of dance music are apparent – be them powerful smacks of bass, hidden fragments of melody or just-barely recognizable textures and effects. But these hints are buried beneath so many layers of Wall – they're brutalized, injected with his own material, chopped up, disseminated, reconstructed, redestructed, reinjected with new material, his own material as well as outside sources, perhaps itself, and then further recontextualized and manipulated. It's great to see an artist building off himself while taking in inspiration in this way, and the results are spectacular. - Connor Kurtz
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