Magma, Thanos Chrysakis

Magma, Thanos Chrysakis

Magma is a 2011 release by Thanos Chrysakis on the Russian label Monochrome Vision. The work, a 30 minute piece in the electroacoustic idiom, makes extensive use of electronic devices, acoustic sounds and field recordings.

A piece of this length is a bold venture. Most electroacoustic, or if you prefer, acousmatic pieces, for fixed medium, are in the 8 – 12 minute category. Any longer and they probably wouldn’t get programmed, unless it’s a ‘classic’ like Dhomont’s Forêt Profonde. In fact last time I checked, most of the opportunities for this kind of music insist on shorter pieces, not to mention suffering from the most pathetic ageist regulations, but I digress.  So releasing a longer work on a specialist label makes sense. If you want some fresh musical experiences I’d suggest that Monochrome Vision is well worth a visit.

I had forgotten how much I enjoy a good blast of acousmatic abstraction. Magma pushes all the buttons that you’d expect: inventiveness, pace, flow, expert use of a wide dynamic and spectral range. As a work based on a proliferation of gestures there is less in the way of morphological investigation by means of more sustained textures and the development of restricted resources. I put this down to the weight of the history of music in the teaching of this idiom – music has to go somewhere, has to show constant invention, keep busy, or be less so by contrast. In thinking about the whys and wherefores of acousmatic music Paul Virilio’s ideas about speed and information overload often come to mind. If music conjurs up a place or an inner space, then this isn’t a relaxing musical space or one made for reflection – it’s fast and furious most of the time, requiring an intellectual rather than an emotional response. All of which has its place.

This is a very well composed piece and I could go into great detail as to why I offer that conclusion, such as examining the complex relationships between the various strands of material. Primarily though, Magma succeeds in holding the listener’s attention for long periods, a very difficult feat in working with highly processed material of such abstraction.

I’ve always considered the core of acousmatic composition to be similar to working out in a gymnasium. You develop great strength, stamina and technique relating to an extremely focused area of endeavour. Your aural skills are honed to near perfection and your production values soar. Ultimately though, developing the analogy, there comes a time when you have to apply all this training to a sport, otherwise you end up with a big muscles, great strength and the only friends you have are in the gym. Or is that being unfair?

Thanos Chrysakis has since explored a range of new directions, in particular improvisational styles incorporating an electroacoustic sensibility. Magma in one sense is a (re-) statement of the artist’s credentials in which we are treated to his strong compositional skills –  the collaborative and improvisational projects build on and extend these core strengths.

Rustle VV – various releases

Rustle VV is a cassette label run by Brooklyn based artist Joshua Sullivan. He releases new work mainly by solo artists who explore underground territories in and around the  noisier singer/songwriter genres. In Joshua’s own words, the aesthetic of the label has been described as American Gothic and I don’t like that very much. I took a lot of inspiration from all over the place but maybe it helps to name a few: the poetry of Samuel Greenberg, Emily Dickinson and Fernando Pessoa, early American folk and blues recordings and post-war field recordings, zine and d-i-y photocopy culture, 19th century photo-postcards, 80s post-punk and gothic bands (like Bauhuas), Junior Kimbrough, Jandek and Corwood Industries, G.I. Gurdjieff and Thomas de Hartmann. 

I think that these days, in the claustrophobic world of new music based on popular idioms, you need to have a clear idea of where you’re coming from if you want to find a niche. I think this label does that very well, finding a niche, and for what it’s worth the music hovers around areas that I’ve always enjoyed – broadly music with strong roots such as folk and blues, as opposed to a lot of the fashionable disembodied indie pop, usually of UK origin, which makes me want to strangle somebody, then slit my wrists.

The label started as a private collection of various home recordings and has since branched out to include a range of artists found either online or seen in performance.

Linda Spjut - The First Stone (2012)

Linda Spjut, in common with several of the artists on the label, is both visual artist and musician. The most distinctive trait in The First Stone is heard in the treatment of the voice, described as the husky and darkened voice of a masked female character, as if a persona has been deliberately adopted for the album. However she manages it technically, her voice comes over as a very low tenor of indeterminate gender. In fact the first track, Love is Gone, could pass for a lo-fi version of Daniel Lanois’ 1995 production of Emmylou Harris’s Wrecking Ball, a highly stylised album characterised by the range and register of the voice, what I’d call a deep Southern treatment of the songs, and a warm blend of distinctive reverberation and chorus in the instruments. I can hear the same stylistic traits on track 6, Steel. The fact that I’m constantly reminded of other artists goes with the territory of reviewing music by singer/songwriters.

How do you do? has shades of Lennon’s solo albums after the Beatles. All the Tears is simple, very well produced, minimal but never monotonous. Unfortunately it clips into distortion at a couple of points, probably not intended, which tarnishes the otherwise excellent overall production.

Homeland smacks of early Dylan, mixed in with a dash of U2, yet it remains always folky, well grounded. The Deep Dark oh the Wild, a simple but effective couple of chords and a slack beat, keeps the work consistent. The vocals are simple but engaging, the accompanying sounds exceptionally well orchestrated. Crossroads offers more of a bluesy Southern stomp, conjuring up visions outcast snake healers and dodgy redneck misdemeanours, for which I have a particular soft spot. I’d say that the visions or mental images that come to mind with this music sets it apart as highly stylised, dark and filmic, folky and bluesy, conveying mood and atmosphere. Want it Back is the only track out of kilter with the rest of the album. The guitars in particular are especially well produced and there is never too much at once. Yet it’s all done undoubtedly on a shoestring. This is honest music, more so than much of the posturing in the so called experimental scene.  My only question would be to ask why the tracks are so short. I’d have happily listened to much longer versions of some of this material. If this is a side-effect of mp3 culture then it’s unnecessary because we’re not talking about a big commercial venture here.

PERFVGIVM - Le Mal Voisin (2009)

The first song, Wings of the Heart, offers us a mix of field recordings and heavily clipped distorted guitar, the guitar being the distinctive trait across the three tracks. Not forgetting a voice like Muddy Waters through a tin can microphone. The approach to the guitar is in my opinion a bold and admirable statement. Distressed beyond anything reasonable and miles away from what the music industry expects from a guitar, the sound incorporates what most guitarists and record producers spend hours (and buckets of cash) trying to eliminate. So, an emphatic distortion that doesn’t attempt to strip the enamel off your teeth.

At heart we still have a folky and bluesy archival feel to the whole album. Following shades of Ray Davies in That’s a Woman, Le Mal Voisin has the cadences and spirit of an old blues song – relaxed phrasing means that the guitar is occasionally left to feed back, sounding at times like Hendrix noodling about in the studio or at home in the armchair. After several listens I began to love it. We finish with field recordings, broadband noise, or, from the sleeve notes, a recording of night entering with rain falling outside on the sea, wind whistling in an attic, the inside of a clock tower, a dog on a chain howling, a boat rocking over crests, and a neighbor rehearsing opera. All these while a guitar makes thunder.

More from the catalogue up next…

Punto Cero Aragón – Luis Tabuenca, Wade Matthews

Punto Cero Aragón

Luis Tabuenca, Wade Matthews

There’s a lot that one could write about an album like this, primarily because the artists are very clear on their intentions and I’m in the privileged position of  knowing what these intentions are. Related to this of course, is the thorny issue of whether the album achieves what it sets out to achieve.

Something I often forget to do in reviews is to let the reader know in general terms what to expect. In playing this cd for the first time I expected to hear some ‘nice’ field recordings, perhaps typical of Aragon or at least leading me to believe they were typical of Aragon, along with some ‘musicalising’of the sound world (there is indeed percussion and digital synthesis at play) generated by these field recordings.

This expectation, playing on the notion that somehow a landscape will print itself as sound directly to tape, is played upon by a host of artists or more accurately by the labels that represent the artists. For example we might have Scandinavian artists whose work, because of the stark beauty of the Nordic terrain, the topography or even the light, must surely in turn somehow convey that same sense of stark beauty as the landscape portrayed in the images. This sonic art version of judging the book by its cover is a trend in the ascendancy.

Despite there are being no images or image filled booklets with the cd, I still expected to hear Aragon. Which I didn’t. Instead I was treated an engaging and fairly original twist on the whole notion of representing what is unique about place or places by means of sound. A twist in which the artists are in a sense trying to have their cake and eat it vis-à-vis the field recordings, on the one hand letting some of the representational aspects of the recordings unfold, yet holding back enough by means of abstracting from the recordings and having them function as strands in a tightly spun musical fabric.

I know from correspondence that the artists were influenced by specific historical practices in the visual arts. I won’t go into detail here, but it’s important to acknowledge that they are in the business of making ‘a series of sound portraits, not supposedly objective depictions of the sonic characteristics of given locations’. Furthermore ‘the field recordings were fundamental, but they were important as sound sources, not as determinants in the structure, or even the nature, of each location’s sonic narrative’. This is interesting, the use of the word ‘narrative’, because my reading of many of the individual works is that they did indeed offer a narrative, in the sense of telling me something about the various locations, commented upon by music from the pair, almost like a form of abstract musical theatre or theatrical storytelling with musical accompaniment. Of course that’s the problem with making art – you never can tell what people will make of your work, can you?

So after all that I’m happy to say that broadly speaking and quite consistently throughout the work, the artists’ intentions were well met.

As for the sound world of Punto Cero Aragón, well, it’s an eclectic world, at the same time exciting, dynamic and unpredictable in matters of timbre, sound sources, density and texture. We have instrumental, electronic and environmental sound, dialogue and other vocal snippets in all manner of juxtapositions and layers. There are passages of great virtuosity in the percussion, balanced by passages of admirable restraint. If I were to draw any direct correspondences between the sound world created by the artists, which of course has some of them in it, and the location, I’d say that we are given here an enthusiastic picture of Aragón, full of vitality, variety and great beauty.

What I would like to do if I had more time and space would be to take a range of work like this, where field recordings are used in innovative ways, and to investigate some of the intentions behind the works, looking less at aesthetic issues (for example in relation to this album I know from a knowledge of previous works that Matthews is clever enough a musician to have figured out what ‘works’ and what doesn’t) and perhaps more at the relationships between the following elements and at the notion of agency in relation to each individually: the index (artwork) and what or where it points to; the artists(s); the prototype, in this case aspects of the soundscape of Aragon; the recipient or patient, most often the listener. This terminology –  indexes, prototypes and so on – isn’t my own. I’ve taken from Alfred Gell, whose work Art and Agency, an Anthropological Theory, is, or should be, essential reading for anyone who works with or has interests in field recording contextualised as ‘art’ and who wants to move on from purely (and largely what we might call Western) aesthetic views of contemporary art.

There is a profound difference between this kind of work and work using similar resources which aligns itself, consciously though seldom acknowledged as such, with the tradition of the avant-garde (yes, there is such a thing). Here the work is ‘about’ many things at once. I say this in the firm knowledge that everything which takes place in the context of social interaction (such as contemporary art) is always about more than just itself. But this is admittedly a large topic outside the scope of this little review. Too often in the avant-garde, the work is ‘about’ very little except the artist and their career, which on reflection is much more an attribute of the arrière-garde.

Finally, this work gets better the more you listen, a rare treat in itself.

Released on Aural Terrains

Winter: Wade Matthews and Alfred Costa Monteiro

 

Winter – Wade Matthews and Alfred Costa Monteiro

Wade Matthews – digital synthesis, manipulated field recordings

Alfredo Costa Monteiro – amplified springs, electric motors, radio

This album creates an engaging sound world full of invention. In its best moments the music  comes across as effortless, without any intention of showcasing a raft of original sounds simply for the sake of originality. That last observation should be taken in a positive sense – it matters very little whether sounds are original, unusual or ‘fashionable’. What matters in the kind of idiom we have here is that the sounds are interesting in themselves and in combination, that they are well shaped, layered and mixed, and that there are not so many sounds coming at you that you feel overwhelmed, that you have time and space to enjoy the music. In this respect Matthews and Monteiro have succeeded by means focusing on a restricted palette and by making best use of their fine listening skills.

In the first track Aconite, the sounds are generally difficult sounds to pin down. There is activity, predominantly in the noisy and fluttery sources, a powerful crescendo and a much gentler coda to settle us down. Regardless of whether this is composed, improvised, or both at once, behind everything lies a sense of restraint and craftsmanship.

Crookneck begins with a foreground of animated crackly sounds against a contrasting background texture, then offers us some detailed interest by means of activated springs. A few well-chosen sounds are brought together in a series of combinations. These combinations are given time to ‘work themselves through’ meaningfully, punctuated at times by sudden drop-outs. There are some beautiful passages here – a duet of springs plus the electronic sheen of some form of digital synthesis. We can identify the recognisable envelopes of some of the field recording material, despite being unable to identify the exact sources. The fact that I’m not spending all my time playing game show participant with the sound sources would suggest that the music holds much greater interest than a bunch of sounds composed in some fashion. The very obvious use of the radio breaks the acousmatic spell somewhat, taking us over that bridge between abstracted material to recognisable or referential material, introducing perhaps even an element of narrative. Here, and more generally throughout this album, the artists show good musical sense in letting passages run, allowing the sounds to unfold and speak for themselves. We finish again with another quiet coda. This piece is packed full of musical interest, again demonstrating a clever use of the restricted palette.

Flounder kicks off with radio, some static with accompanying indeterminate digital textures. Then metallic sounds. This piece seems very deliberately to set up a specific sound world, clear in its choice of materials, and to follow it through convincingly. Some obvious compositional or improvisational strategies – sudden dropouts, quick cuts – remind us that authors are still there. Again this is a fine piece which offers a listening environment full of interest, energy and invention. From a personal point of view, for what that’s worth, it goes some way along the direction I’d like to see music going. The artists have worked hard at selecting and shaping their sounds. Imposed form gives way to sonic interest, allowing form, at the best moments, to emerge from content.

Haven has a more introspective beginning: an almost instrumental pedal, a few background layers, blurred boundaries between foreground and background. This uncertainty is a strong feature of the album, particularly impressive when layers emerge and recede almost imperceptibly, over a tapestry of other textural and gestural activities. Modulations in the layers come to the fore, pushing through the intriguing textural veil, all done without any of the sounds jumping out at you demanding attention. Again, the use of the radio is foregrounded, this time as high frequency whispery radio voices which break the spell somewhat but are consistent with the use of the radio elsewhere. More importantly these sounds draw clearly perceptible structural relationships with what sounds to me like transformed contemporaneous material in a lower midrange layer.

Savory opens with two, then three well-chosen sounds. The layers and gestures enter, again promoting that effective uncertainty as to which will be foregrounded. The new sounds ‘materialise’ very well, again nothing surprising or unusual, but all very convincing – they simply fit well together. This piece took an unusual direction with the appearance of a processed vocal sound – a very odd referential musical syntagm. From this point, the music seemed to follow a markedly different direction from the previous pieces – out of kilter with the ‘edgy’ restraint of the previous tracks.

All in all, I’d offer the suggestion that the success of this album can be attributed to a two-piece arrangement in which the sense of focus and the merging of identities is almost complete, in which the music is delivered succinctly and with taste. We never feel that there are too many cooks in the kitchen and, at the risk of bending the metaphor out of shape, our two chefs have had the good sense not to throw the kitchen sink into the soup.

Winter is released on Copy for your Records

 

Knotted Alembic

Thanos Chrysakis: INSIDE PIANO, SYNTHESIZER, VIBRAPHONE & RADIO, SHRUTI BOX, CHIMES

Philip Somervell: INSIDE PIANO/PIANO

released on Aural Terrains

This new release reveals more of the rich inventiveness and creative drive behind Thanos Chrysakis, this time in a collaboration with Philip Somervell. Over the last few years I’ve been fortunate to have reviewed a range of work on Chrysakis’ label Aural Terrains, work which broadly falls into electroacoustic composition or free improvisation, Knotted Alembic being an example of the latter.

Knotted Alembic easily reaches, and in many ways surpasses, the very high standards of previous releases. From the first few seconds you are drawn immediately into the viscerality of the sound, the sense of agency, the simple but effective combination of two players attending to contrasting tasks – one more static, the other more dynamic. The natural reverberation of the inside piano is exploited to the full. My only criticism is that the first piece doesn’t go on long enough, such was the interest in the clear articulations of the restricted range of sounds added to the energy of the playing.

Tracks 3 and 5 continue this investigation of the inside piano. Here I should mention the overall quality of the recording, a fine studio engineering job. Track 3 is a remarkable piece of music: we have the suspenseful quality of restraint, where very simple chords are allowed to sustain, revealing the inharmonicity of the struck strings, and where silence is given a structural role. Each event attempts to explore a different articulation, a different timbral nuance. You are obliged to listen attentively. Track 5 examines further the inharmonicity of the piano, its metallic resonances. I drew parallels here with the timbral and spectral explorations of some of the new microtonal music played on hand made metallophones. I felt that in this track, apparently created earlier than the others and obviously in different circumstances, the piano playing was more agitated and a wider range of sounds used than elsewhere in the album, though the work unfolds at just the right pace to appreciate the entry of the radio passages. This piece came over as less integrated into the album, despite the elegance of several very beautiful and straightforward ‘musical’ passages.

Track 2 consists of a low midrange pedal and foregrounded actions on vibes, chimes, drone and piano. The iterations of the tuned percussion, the use of the piano as tuned percussion, snaps on the inside piano – all of these helped the music to move formlessly in and out of different moods.

Two of the pieces, tracks 4 and 6, focus on the use of the sruti box as a strong background presence. The sruti is always a good choice of instrument if you want a versatile but unobtrusive background cushion on which to sit with your various gestures. In fact that’s why I think the instrument was designed. I’ve always understood and experienced the sruti box in the context of an accompaniment instrument for chanting mantras, or for singing simple Sanskrit praise songs, like the tanpura. It’s not surprising therefore that it never offends. In track 4 exploits the beating inherent in the drone’s texture, which contrasts well with the piano figures. Track 6 sets a range of musical resources against the drone: inside piano scrapes (bowed perhaps?) which are so physical that you feel the materiality of the instruments with more than your ears, alongside a synth bass, adding texture and density. There is never too much at one time, a temptation wisely avoided throughout this album. In fact we return to the simple and time-honoured beauty of a figure and ground presentation, true in fact to to the sruti and other dronal instruments.

The last track is a short coda to the album, a sweet miniature with piano and synth,  another figure on ground.

The music never collapses into the easy option of alluding to the filmic, so simple to do with a piano whereby the player simply wanders around in a floating space of meaningless random chords and lines, often contextualised as ‘ambient’ to cover up any lack of design or intention. The artists’ close attention to the morphologies and materiality of the various sounds is far too important to let that particular kind of reductionism spoil the work.

Finally, going back over the output of Aural Terrains, I’d offer the suggestion that, because of its careful use of restricted resources, the hints of restraint and its fine treatment of pace and dynamics, Knotted Alembic is Chrysakis’ best offering to date.

Leo Alves Vieira & Pangea: Post-Sleep Paths

This is an unusual album. It doesn’t fit into any of the emerging forms and idioms that seem to be establishing themselves across various labels and interest groups. You’ll find some fine simple string quartet writing and playing, plenty free improvisation, some synthesiser with various effects as in film sound design, indeterminate hiss, buzz and crackle, and various recitations of poems and texts.

The overall impression is one of increasing formlessness, which is what you might expect from the free improvisation, though the strings and recitations seem to pull the music towards more formalised structures. That tension is what makes the album unusual.

Brazilian Leo Alves Vieira and Spanish based Pangea are obviously accomplished musicians. We can see and hear this both from their respective biographies as artists and from the range of instruments and musical skills on offer. The clarinet and guitar passages are full of interest, only occasionally falling into those ‘what do we do next’ moments. After a few listens I began to pick up on hints of interplay between the instruments. After a few more listens the chaotic formlessness established itself just enough to be convincing as a musical statement, never an easy thing to do.

I’d say that the strength of the album, outside of some excellent playing, lies in the way that the artists have brought together a bundle of disparate, seemingly unrelated resources and have then effectively imposed their collective musical authority on the materials.

Released on Luscinia

 

 

Spectropol Records: Possible Worlds and Duopoly

Bruce Hamilton’s Spectropol Records is ‘a friendly netlabel devoted to excellent music unbound by venue and commerce; it’s a destination for adventurous music beyond journalistic and commercial style/genre classifications’.

If, like me, you have a soft spot for microtonal music, then you’ll enjoy browsing through the catalogue of free downloads. Bruce sent me the details of his label some time ago and I’ve been listening off and on to the range of work offered on two albums, Duopoly and Possible Worlds.

And it is indeed a wide range: work based on the use and modification of conventional instruments, vocal pieces, new instruments, electronic instruments, and, yes, even, retuned synthesisers. I still have difficulty with the last of these, but even with that personal caveat, I’d say that the synth based works are well crafted in spite of the instrumentation. The main problem for me in listening to new work in this idiom is simple. Some of it is truly musical – the music rises above the technical means of production, that is, it succeeds in spite of the cleverness or complexity of scale structures or the hardware/software used to realise the work. Some, on the other hand, comes over as a demonstration of a particular scale or set of scale structures. The worst just sounds like out of tune music played with cheesy timbres. I’ll leave it to the listener to find out more.

Possible Worlds is described as a ‘snapshot’ of work, a series of  ‘recent xenharmonic explorations’. We are informed that xenharmonic is ‘a term coined by Ivor Darreg used to describe tuning systems, or music using those systems, which does not conform to or closely approximate the common 12-tone equal temperament’. Ivor Darreg  is worth checking out – a real original and an inspiration to countless musicians who have gone on to make significant impacts in the field of new microtonal music.

The online sleeve notes are comprehensive and informative. I recognised many of the names, indeed I’ve met several of the musicians over the years: Paul Rudy from the world of acousmatic music (who once let me stroke his cactus…); John Eaton, whose Agnus Dei is a very fine choral work, even though I can’t tell from listening how ‘microtonal’ the piece is (is the singer following a scale or simply inflecting more or less in microtones?); Stephen Altoft, who has championed microtonal trumpet for many years; Christopher Bailey, a truly original voice in new music; Manfred Stahnke, and of course Bruce Hamilton himself.

I’d recommend this compilation because it’s quite unique and over time certain works will grow on you. I can’t even begin to guess what you’ll like or dislike, but I can say that the music is different from a lot of new music out there and I know from experience that the musicians themselves are deeply committed to their work, so there certainly depth in there.

For the same reasons I’d recommend having a taste of Duopoly, another mixed bag, but this time a series of collaborations involving Bruce Hamilton and others, describe by Hamilton as ‘the result of collaborations between late 2009 and late 2010 via the ImprovFriday and the Society for Shorty New Music online musical communities. Most of these tracks are in some sense remixes I made of pre-existing tracks, ranging from enhanced versions to entirely new compositions using the tracks as source material. Often improvisation was involved for one or both artists; some pieces employ alternate tuning systems’.

So here we have a window into a community of musicians sharing common interests across specific notions of improvisation, tuning and sharing. Again the range is very wide: from unpredictable and formless synth based pieces, to free, skimpy and meandering jazzy two piece works, to filmic ambient keyboard based pieces, to more introspective pieces such as the very fine propinquitwo for (as far as I can tell) microtonal zither.

I notice that there have been four new releases since the two albums I’ve mentioned above, each by well established musicians in their respective fields. If you don’t know of their work, then hopefully these will be new artists whose work you can explore and enjoy on this fine netlabel over the festive break.

Barrel – Gratuitous Abuse

Barrel, so called because they scrape, are as follows:-

Alison Blunt – violin

Ivor Kallin – vioilin and viola

Hannah Marshall – cello

The tracklist gives us some clues about what to expect in the music:-

1 - RIGWIDDIE SNAUCHLE STRIKES AGAIN IN STYLE - 22:21
2 - SOFT PORN & HARD CHEESE - 1:49
3 - SKLATCH: unseemly semi-liquid mess - 22:29
4 - MOTHS & FEATHERS - 32:17

I’ll begin with a preamble.

Free improvisation has become very trendy of late. This is not surprising in view of some of the disappointments of post dance derivatives and unfathomable noise art. In particular the more reductive trends seem to be finding the most favour with reviewers and other doxosophers, folks who tell us the way things are.

It helps to move things along if the artists associate with other artists of the same ilk, hunting in packs if you like, or if they associate with untouchable ‘masters’ in the field, or if one conjurs up a name for the ‘school’ (useful for the media to scoop up) such as the new pan-European texturalists or similar.

In fact it’s reached the stage that some artists could record themselves shitting into a bucket and the specialist reviewers would say, ‘well, I don’t understand it, (s)he might be taking the piss (excuse the scatological references) and I don’t know if I really like it at all, but (after some devious literary manipulations) it just has to be good because it’s by x, y or z. We’re talking here of course about taste, more or less informed.

What I can say about Barrel is that their music doesn’t fit into any of the current categories, schools, sects or cliques that clutter the free improvisation stage. Although it’s not my regular ‘cup of tea’, the music has made a strong and positive impression on me, I like it a lot and I’ll listen to it time and time again. It’s what I would call very good music, that judgement contingent of course on my more or less informed taste.

We have four pieces, two digital home recordings and two recordings of live performances. How can I begin to talk about the music? Well, imagine three first class musicians locked up in a time capsule, having associated with various shamans, drunk Romanian fiddlers, Yiddish chant leaders, the serialists, especially Webern. Then folks like Ligeti, Satie, and various Dadaists pop their head round the door from time to time to put in their tuppenceworth. After a few months you let them loose in the 21^st century to pick up on the very new. That would be Barrel.

I remember talking to a musician who had just been to a concert of Schoenberg’s string quartets. Her conclusion was that it all sounded so normal nowadays. Perhaps it’s hard to make strings sound too atonal, given that the bowed string has such a low inharmonicity. I don’t know for sure but possibly because of the strings we have here this very listenable trio, playing of course in a very modern, even modernist, idiom. Then you begin to notice the folk influences, the strange groaning, coughing, snippets of (mock?) Yiddish chant and other incomprehensible utterances from Ivor Kallin. I could go on to talk about the musical and artistic implications of Ivor Kallin’s half-Jewish and half-Scottish roots, but the potential for political incorrectness prevents me.

Add to the aforementioned elements the extended techniques, emerging ‘legitimately’ (ie beautifully and seamlessly integrated into the flow of the music) and finally the inexplicable ‘tightness’, inventiveness, complexity and meaningfulness of the musical conversation between the three. Throw in their understanding of each other and finally what I would call ‘human-ness’ in the ebb and flow or rhythms of the pace of the music. Like bio-rhythms. On top of all that, and at the risk of sounding contradictory, I still can’t believe that most of this isn’t scored music, not least because of the elegant balance between the higher strings and the strong foundation of the cello.

Focusing on the verbal intrusions, I’d point you directly to 213TV, Ivor’s collaborative video project with John Bisset. Need I say more? What struck me in their work is how, in both form and content and by means of glossolalia, mock violence, postures and gestures, the pair manage to hover around the cusp that separates seriousness from humour, most evident in Smoo. Sometimes I’m not sure how to react, a feeling I experienced in French theatre after seeing a lot of plays by Ionesco, Beckett and Genet. At times In listening to Barrel’s music I find this to be a strength, a tap into the very strongest forms of 19^th century European art.

All in all, because Barrel have such a firm, sure and confident grasp of life and music their work succeeds at all levels in enriching my own musical life. I happen to believe that their music will do the same for many others.

Yannick Franck – Memorabilia

Yannick Franck’s work is well documented on his personal site. He runs the Idiosyncratics label and is very active both as a solo performer and with his YERMO project. From what I can gather he seems to be branching out into new areas, more research based recording projects. Hopefully I’ll be able to review some of the outcomes in the near future.

If you like his past work, you’ll enjoy this. But from what I’ve listened to in the past, I’d say that this new album has a more refined or sophisticated quality and comes over as an exercise in restraint. In terms of technical resources, things are quite straightforward -the artist tells me that he mostly uses analogue gear, ‘processing samples of my own voice and real instruments, and of course some software based instruments as well, but used only as a part of the composition process’.

Diving headlong into definitions, the music is ambient in some of the senses that Eno mentions in his Music for Airports liner note though there is a quality in the production that draws the listener in more than perhaps Eno envisaged. There are also ‘dark tendencies’, a cinematic concern with atmosphere and mood brought about by the use of dense textural layers. There are six pieces – one or two of the titles giving away Franck’s concern with the darker side, for example Urban Disease and Self Loading Defeat.

So what are the most evident characteristics of the album as a whole? Restraint first and foremost, most evident in Vides Linja where the feeling is that of holding back from the big overpowering gesture or texture which would break the spell.

Overall we find the same tonal (pitched) layered textures as in earlier works, a preference for the low to midrange, with the occasional gesture or contrasting layer, a light crackling and high frequency tones in Invott/Elements, a digitally modified birdscape in Helsingin Subterranean. We have looped pulses of timestretched instrumental sound offset with the occasional percussive flourish, as in Urban Disease. This piece had me travelling back to early Pink Floyd, waiting for a delicious Dave Gilmour solo to burst in. Very well balanced, high production standards, all evidence of a profesiional sound designer at work. Nothing too intrusive. I’ve heard music like this composed by less adept listeners which gradually starts to irritate as certain midrange frequencies are left running.

Good use is made of the back to front perspective: normally you’d play at spotting the clever use digital reverberation software, but in Invott/Elements and Helsingin Subterranean in particular the illusion of large mysterious spaces is beautifully fabricated – I’m hearing the space and not the software, if that makes sense.

A sense of narrative emerges at times, especially strong in The Answer which introduces background voices over (mostly pitched) modulating textural layers. The collage of these different nationalities speaking in English is offset by ‘stuff’ crashing about in the background. Towards the end I could pick out what sounded like quotations from various films.

The only track that did break the spell was Self Loading Defeat with its hint of synth and drum beats. But, and this probably says more about me than the music, I had inner visions of ‘bad things’ being done to victims, perhaps inappropriately clad virgins locked up in some crypt or another. All this without the use of corny ‘scary’ clichés.

The cleverest thing that Yannick has managed to do here is to make gentle statements within an idiom that doesn’t really thrive on gentleness. In a very unique manner, the music manages to be dark without being harsh or unpleasant.

Personally (yes, I know that my personal likes or dislikes are irrelevant) I liked this album the more I listened it. Yannick Franck strikes me as someone who knows what he wants and why he wants it. He also knows how to do it.

Yannick Franck‘s Memorabilia is released on silken tofu records

Mark Peter Wright – Where Once We Walked

Mark Peter Wright’s Where Once We Walked is described as a sound composition based on location recordings gathered from the Polish homes, villages and surrounding environments of Holocaust survivors of 1945, who, as children, were transported to the Lake District and cared for at the now ‘lost’ wartime village of Calgarth Estate near Windermere.

This is one of the very few sound works I’ve encountered which sets out to engage with a subject of real historical and social importance, above and beyond the historical and social importance of, say, working more narcissistically with abstract sound as an art form. We have here an extremely emotive subject, a subject overworked in the extreme by a Hollywood film industry obsessed with what can only be described as war and holocaust pornography, and of course a subject which requires sensitivity in the approach and artistic treatment.

Before listening to the work I was struck by the simple elegance of an act of compassion, people caring for other people, children in this case, and by the local link to Lake District, a link established to a large extent by the artist/curator organisation Another Space.

We are invited to listen to the work, with its five episodes, as one whole piece. Overall the work is marked by detail, clarity and transparency in the actual quality of the recordings, by a leaning towards realistic or even naturalistic representation though the framing, sequencing and gentle crossfading of the various scenes. The various elements work well to deliver an exceptionally powerful narrative whose mood lifts the listener above and beyond the mere fact of well captured location recordings.

I think we should give work like this more attention and certailnly more credit for investigating new narrative forms. Because of the weight of narrative, this kind of work always strikes me as drawing closer to literature than to music or to what passes for ‘sound art’. I say this  because the best critical theory I’ve found which helps me to understand such work comes from two discourses sharing an interest in semiotics: the semiotic branch of literary theory and analysis, and some of the excellent writing on photography. In the sonic department the only critical writing that makes sense in this context would come from some of the very clever commentators and critics working in the field of new radio art.

Bakhtin, in the contest of examining specific literary forms, writes of the chronotope, a space/time unique to every work. Where Once We Walked presents us with an unfolding tableau of several chronotopes, though the strength of the work lies in the fact that we are able to join everything up, drawn as we are into the illusion of completeness by means of narrative method. Worthy of further consideration in this context, again from Bhaktin, is the notion that we can seek out chronotopic motifs, condensed reminders of particular types of time and space which carry metaphorical resonances: church bells, train stations, water and birds, subjects which would seem to be inexhaustible in their multiple resonances and dear to numerous field recordists.

The opening episode, A Past Present, leads with the pealing of church bells, then carries us slowly and gracefully inside the church to simple choral music, to the church organ and then to what sounds like a station, where the sound fades to a lingering resonance, holding on to the quality of the earlier music. Linear and filmic on the surface, but with deep undercurrents.

In Tobacco Trails we find ourselves outdoors with water and birds, very clear and clean. Long slow crossfades reveal a train departing, a train arriving, people talking and a muted tolling bell. Everything gives the impression of being very expertly scripted, again in a cinematic sense. Passages of composed polyphony underline the fact that this is a sound composition.

Hope Transmits begins with (I assume) a Jewish religious chant. This is layered with rain – this scene in particular seems to me to be representative of something deeply emotional – then thunder, heavier rain, electronic radio sounds and an abrupt cut off, possibly a combination of narrative exigency and a sharp contrast to the earlier very effective diminuendi. On the topic of an emerging narrative, I’d say that the composer has succeeded in walking the very fine line between telling us just enough and letting us create something meaningful for ourselves.

With Witness we listen to cars and to the ambience of a town or cityscape. More church bells, this time in the distance, carrying the weight of penitence. These recurring motifs speak to me of the artist’s restrictions on his choice of materials (I can imagine the dilemma of deciding whether to introduce new material, from hours of ‘footage’, or choosing to establish repetitions). We  then hear bicycles, other vehicles in transit, cars idling. I should mention here that I particularly enjoyed, perhaps for the first time, the sound of cars idling, a sound which always seems to intrude and spoil most recordings carried out in urban settings. Perhaps it’s down to the skill in framing. The bells reassert themselves, then linger till the end of the episode. I for one could listen to bell recordings all day.

The last episode, Where Once We Walked, delivers an interesting twist on the bell theme, this time in the shape of a clock bell plus the whirr of its internal machinery. It is 9 o’clock. A voice in distance, coloured by loudspeakers, is then layered with the interior of a place of worship, an interior marked by the sound of people moving in a large reverberant space. I might be wrong, but I always associate this kind of sonic complexity, the movement and spatial cues, with Roman Catholic places of worship, where all  sorts of social and liturgical events seem to be going on simultaneously, as opposed to the more ordered and focused soundscape of Protestant churches. This takes us to the broadband noise of water, possibly rain, then to birds (because the narrative environment invites meaningful interpretation we might well ask what these birds represent: symbols of peace, hope?), the hint of an organ, bees. We end up more or less where we began, in the same kind of comforting space, a place of worship, this time with the pentatonic folk melodies of a simple hymn and its organ accompaniment. Church music is unique in delivering this particular experience, a beauty in which we can participate. The footsteps to finish invite the listener to come to his or her own conclusions.

This is an excellent work and it comes over well as a cd release. But I see this kind of work as finding its best presentation as a radio work, taking advantage of all that the radio can offer. It belongs with the the kind of work we need so much in order to overcome hackneyed documentary conventions in public broadcasting, the sort of work that, even if it doesn’t get much radio play,  is persistently highlighted by the Canadians and the French in particular as radical, (and at the same time) forward thinking, and most of all optimistic.