Ott is very much at home working the Ondes Martenot, that 20th-century electronic instrument known to all classical music fans who have dipped into the Olivier Messiaen ocean, and we’ve heard Ott playing it on earlier records; I just keep wishing for her to do something truly strange and adventurous with it. The label draw our attention to the two long pieces here (in the old days they would have filled two sides of an LP), ‘Crossing’ and ‘Arctic Passage’. ‘Crossing’ is part of this duo’s repertoire; they’ve been performing this “veritable journey” piece on stage since 2016. My plea for “more Ondes Martenot” is answered during one particularly wistful section, where its voice compliments the rather stiff piano episodes of Mathieu Gabry. It’s true the listener is led through certain changes across these 19 minutes of instrumental music, just not very dramatic changes, and the whole piece remains pretty much in the same key. Not unlikeable, but I kept waiting for the promised “mystical coda” to this sentimental odyssey, and it never arrived. ‘Arctic Passage’ is even more banal in its themes, intending to evoke night-time and melting icebergs; might be suitable fare for the Glacial Movements label in Italy. The tones have slightly more weight this time, but the duo seem to be afraid of electronic sound for its own sake; they can’t resist sweetening the notes, or lapsing into imaginary cinema soundtracks, a genre which Ott has assayed before.

Speaking of visual counterparts, two pieces here cross over into the world of visual arts; ‘The Weather Project’ is a namecheck for Olafur Eliasson, an Icelandic-Danish artist who has worked with glaciers and creates large-scale installations; to this piece of music is added the violin of Anne-Irene Kempf. It’s clear the Snowdrops respect this art, and the snowy landscape, but the music lacks any grandeur. ‘Ligne de Mica’ was originally composed for a fine art exhibition by Lea Barbazanges, where the music may be attempting to mimic a close-up view of the changing colours of this particular mineral. The cover artworks aren’t related, by the way, they’re by Julie Calbert – but they are in keeping with the overall scope of the release. ‘Ligne de Mica’ works slightly better for these ears, emerging as something more intimate and small-scaled, and focused, than the other more ambitious “icy landscaping” works. Here the Ondes Martenot and synths are joined by the accordion of Bartosz Szwarc, with good results. (27/11/2024)

This piece is the principal showcase for the “let’s sample old gramophone records of Caruso” strategy, and successfully achieves the hoped-for effect of a “virtual choir” with its loops, repeats, layers, echoes and time-stretching by the kilo. But Fennessy transcends the process; if you think you know what to expect, stop rustling your programme and sit still in the box until you’ve heard all 23 and one-half minutes of track 01. The arrangement of the samples is done with care and attention, and I like to think a good deal of spontaneity – the ghost of the singer soon appears with flesh on his bones and a velvet cape around his shoulders. The genius stroke has been to combine it with this eccentric guitar-playing – it’s not free-form blast-outs in the style of Sonny Sharrock, rather slides, picking, distorted vibrations, and a hefty dose of sheer oddness. Not even the craziest New Wave band from 1978 would have dared employ such an inventive axeman. If (like me) the closest you’ve come to experiencing the operatic arias of this internationally famous historical figure is the movie Fitzcarraldo, well – it so happens David Fennessy has composed an entire trilogy of orchestral pieces based on Werner Herzog’s diaries written during the time this film was being made. I’m glad to hear Fennessy did not attempt anything so banal as a “re-imagined soundtrack” to the movie.

Also here are three other pieces which may link together (apparently it’s a viola triptych) and may not be connected to Enrico Caruso in quite the same direct way. ‘Nox’ is written as the portrait of a musician, but the musician happens to be Garth Knox – who also plays it on his viola and adds peculiar syllables and French vocabulary from his intoning voice. ‘Haupstimme’ is played by the great Ensemble Modern with another viola solo from Megumi Kasakawa. Where ‘Nox’ is intimate and low-key, this one’s an all-out modernist freak-out in high fiesta mode. Part of the plan is to make the poor viola player work ten times as hard, simply to be heard against the unkempt blasters in this crazy group. The percussion section alone ought to restore your faith in avant-garde orchestras, if you’ve not yet found a recording of Varese that can satisfy your inner John Bonham. Really feeling the pull and push and warp-and-weft of this heavy tapestry, one that’s complex and high-achieving enough to hold its head alongside the work of Sam Pluta. Only ‘Nebenstimme’ doesn’t quite re-point the brickwork for this listener, although the combination of viola and celeste is an imaginative choice, and Knox turns in another superb performance here.

An excellent release, great musicians in the room, and an inventive composer at work, flirting occasionally with meta-music themes in an imaginative and productive way. (15/05/24)

She writes to me that she has a “southern hemisphere take on new music”, referring I suppose to her origins in New Zealand although she now lives in New York City, and hopes I enjoy the “diverse instrumentation”. Tessa Brinckman tends towards compositions that feature “synesthesia, dialect, and innate meter”, and also favours any work with a geopolitical subtext. This last theme is evident on several pieces here: her own ‘Taniwha’ composition, which refers directly to Maori myths of spiritual protectors and the afterlife; ‘Wade Through Water’ and ‘Zeuze’, which are critical of colonialist attitudes towards African culture; and ‘A Cracticus Fancie’, which manages to layer in references to Irish folk music and the 1930s American depression alongside a story drawn from Australian First Nations culture. Of these, ‘Taniwha’ succeeds in conveying a vague sense of eeriness in its wind-like utterances and halting rhythms.

There’s also ‘Tenderness of Cranes’, composed by Korde in 1990 and apparently something of a favourite in the repertoire of modern flautists, which cleverly manages to incorporate Japanese musical culture in a Western framework, doing much to evoke our sympathy towards these beautiful birds. (12/02/2024)

I like it well enough, but if I have a reservation it’s that the composer is mostly concerned with nuances of form; each piece is almost an exercise to demonstrate his mastery of such devices as repetition, short pieces, miniatures, diptyches, grid shapes, and framing. That said, he clearly cares about content and meaning too, to the extent that certain works translate successfully into mental images or themes – ‘Grand Action’, a highly “eventful” piece, is a tribute to another musician and piano technician, and ‘fiaili ceoil’ muses on the metaphor of weeds and the unstoppable power of nature to take over even the most desolate of ruined landscapes. There are three pieces themed on Winter, and also ‘Drinking The Stars’ – which promises a certain amount of critical thinking as it refers to the “tendency of modern society to digest false beliefs as truths”; this one has potential to tackle such modern issues as fake news, gaslighting, and the spread of misinformation across the internet, but McLachlan prefers instead to keep things decidedly light-hearted.

I could be wrong, but it seems to me that John McLachlan is not an enthusiastic experimenter or modernist; I quite liked ‘X’ on the second disc, and its use of a set of chords arranged in the shape of a letter X to determine its form reminds me a little of the sort of thing John Cage might do, or anyone preoccupied with graphical scores. His intellectual ingenuity in knitting together and ordering the elements of this particular miniature has been exquisite, but it still doesn’t quite satisfy my yearnings for severity, or abstraction. It might simply be that the highly talented Mary Dullea has too much expressive technique for my tastes, but that’s a minor quibble. ‘Grand Action’, mentioned earlier, is another high point; I seem to recall finding echoes of Cecil Taylor in its pre-planned complexity and its wild leaps across the keyboard range, which isn’t to say either McLachlan or Dullea have a jazzy bone in their body. ‘fiaili ceoil’, also mentioned earlier, is another strong piece you might find yourself returning to; the prospect of global environmental ruin, a theme which in other hands might have become a solemn or shrill piece of political hectoring, is addressed in a very elegiac fashion, each well-placed melancholic chord falling like another teardrop on behalf of the human race and lamenting our catastrophic failure to act as good custodians of the planet. Interestingly, one starting point for him here was historical baroque keyboard music such as that practised by Girolamo Frescobaldi.

Blue cloudy images on the covers are by Joanna Kidney. From 8th December 2023.

The latter might be specialists in early music (hence the “baroque” in their name”) – Jostein Gundersen plays recorders, Siri Hilmen the baroque cello, and Hans Knut Sveen plays the harpsichord. Indeed the entire commission dating from 2020 arose from an idea to splice early music techniques with contemporary electronica and electro-acoustic methods. In practice, this mainly amounts to live sampling and live electronic interventions, and the ingenious idea to get the acoustic part of the act to play through amplified speakers which have either been mounted inside a bass drum, or positioned in such ways as to allow the sounds to resonate through extra percussion such as cymbal or gong. Stephan Meidell did the recording, the re-processing, and credits himself with all the compositions too – it might have been his original idea to repurpose the music of Bergen Barokk in this manner.

Meidell is no stranger to the Hubro label, home to much altruistic and colourful instrumental music, and we have heard him as part of the Cakewalk trio on that label in 2012 and 2013. All nine tracks here are named after various plants, flowers, trees, and other such growths – even their Latin names are provided, perhaps to lend the project a shade more gravitas – and there’s the tasteful watercolour painting by Aurora Solberg which is strongly suggestive of plant life. These scant clues made me wonder if Temporal Gardening might have a quasi-scientific dimension (we have heard occasional forays by sound artists which where based on the notion of plant-generated music – for instance Silva Datum Musica by Plein Air), but to the contrary, this is all composed-improvised music and produced by human beings (interacting with machines and acoustical set-ups), and the “gardening” trope is just an added sweetener.

Admittedly the conceit of revisiting the art of David Munrow in this way has some novelty, and the surface sound of the album has some charms. I found it rather twee and sentimental; Bergen Barokk (who are experts in playing the music of Bach, Purcell, Telemann and others) seem to be out of their depth, forsaking their skill for precision and clarity in favour of this somewhat unstructured, half-melodic material. Stephan Meidell’s lacklustre contributions lack force, and do little to fundamentally transform the sounds being made. (06/09/2023)

Drawn from a number of prior releases on Rochelle’s Linoleum label, and featuring many guest artists, friends, and collaborators, it’s an entertaining flurry embracing free improvisation, pop, jazz, chanson, modern classical, circus-style bands, and more. Given Laurent Rochelle’s versatility – he plays a very fluid soprano sax, and there are some cuts where he plays all the instruments – one’s tempted for two seconds to liken him to Pascal Comelade, except that Laurent isn’t anywhere near as radical or experimental. Indeed, every user-friendly track here is more concerned with winning new friends as quickly as possible with colour, warmth, and dazzling chops. Look elsewhere if you want a complete shopping list of all the wonderful names here, but I will single out Denis Frajerman (see also Palo Alto, and the unusual Macau Peplum record) who appears early on with his ‘Quatuor No. 1 en Moultes Fractures’, a true head-scratcher puzzling string quartet piece which wins the “golden brioche” award as the soundtrack for a French art movie from 1977 that never was.

I’m not a huge fan of “sampler” releases like this one, and my interest with this one fades as we go further in and more instances of spoken-word or breathy songs from torchy types appear, but it’s a solid package of talent nonetheless. Rochelle also has a nice line in commissioning quirky cover art, and takes the time to give thanks to the “graphistes” who spilled their ink for his cause. (July 2023)

Kate Moore is a relatively prolific Australian composer and former sound artist, born in the UK and currently based in the Netherlands. Her works are performed by Asko|Schönberg, Bang on a Can, Icebreker, Slagwerk Den Haag, Ensemble Offspring, the Australian String Quartet, The Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and Groot Omroepkoor. She studied with the late Dutch composer Louis Andriessen. Ridgeway follows Moore’s 2021 album Revolver also on Unsounds, but she also has previous releases on ECM, Cantaloupe, 4 Tay Inc. and Ensemble Klang.

The music on Ridgeway consists of six pieces and is performed by a group of eleven players plus conductor, Gregory Charette. Moore states a deliberate connection between her “…memory of places and sensory experience…” when writing these pieces. The first, “Ridgeway” is at turns aggressive and taciturn, strident and delicate, at times bubbling with uncertainty. “101” pushes the ideas forward in an urgent and sometimes discordant way; making interesting use of bass – or pitch-shifted – guitar, full of ideas, keeping the tension up without release. The mood changes with the following two solo piano pieces performed by Laura Sandee; “Prelude” and “Sliabh Beagh”, named after a mountainous area in County Monaghan in the Republic of Ireland. The intriguingly-named “Bushranger Psychodrama” lives up to its appellation with eerie strings and organ, while “The Dam” – either referencing a dammed reservoir or perhaps an abbreviation of either Amsterdam or Rotterdam – is particularly intriguing. I have to mention that it is great to come across a piece of composition specifically for didgeridoo, which I feel is an unfairly overlooked and underused instrument – at least in the classical music world – with unique characteristics. The didgeridoo player here is Lies Beijerinck, self-styled “Didge Mother of Holland”.

Overall, a great addition to the Unsounds catalogue.

‘On Hirohito’s Famous Win’ is melodic and enjoyable lite-classical, and while ‘For Scodanibbio’ may include raunchy plucks and stabs, they’re certainly not deployed in the service of abrasive or dissonant music. I take note of the player’s great sensitivity and discrimination when it comes to acoustical nuances; he recorded his solo turn at the Ghent Opera while it was empty, so that “every note, attack and vibration comes through, including the creaking of the wooden floor.” Even his strings (‘Tempera’ strings made by Gerold Genssler) come from a lineage of traditional gut strings, another hallmark of his hand-woven authenticity and commitment to his craft, and he’s slung his tuning especially to enable freely resonating strings.

Vermeulen does get vaguely avant on ‘On Integration’, but even as he tries to follow the trend towards rigourous minimalism, he still can’t help forming tunes and he can’t help filling spaces. Neither Bruno Duplant, Hannes Lingens, or d’incise are likely to select Nils Vermeulen for any of their projects in the near future, but on the other hand, he did appear on those Tonus records by Dirk Serries in 2018. Superficially a very user-friendly album of music results, but also deficient in tension, heat, or engagement. (28/04/2023)

Not sure if the classical audience has been crying out for an update on the music of Joseph Haydn, but here come Boyd McDonald, Joseph Petric and Peter Lutek stepping up to the plate with a double CD, Heretic Threads (ASTRILA RECORDS), of the music of this 18th-century Austrian. Joseph Petric does it all on his accordion on the second disc; we heard him doing contemporary music on Seen (from July 2023), and as before I’m feeling all the technical accomplishment of this gifted player, with none of the spirit or personality. Might be worth waiting for ‘Sintering’, where he’s joined by the piano of McDonald and the digital electronic manipulation of Peter Lutek; not especially radical or challenging as experimental music, but at least it’s an antidote to the rest of this rather twee and banal set.

On Souvenir (REDSHIFT RECORDS TK528) you can hear a sample of compositions by the Vancouver composer Christopher Butterfield, who studied under Rudolf Komorous and Bulent Arel. Seems to have followed an unpredictable path and remained open to all forms of modernism and many forms of music in his career, including a composition inspired by the poetry of Dadaist Kurt Schwitters (not here), and also the ideas of Walter Benjamin and John Cage. If anything can be said to unite these four diverse pieces from 1995, 2013, 2012 and 2001, it may be something to do with controlled chaos; the title rack, for instance, makes use of improvised music, and electronic equipment going slightly haywire. Likewise in ‘parc’ the composer is pleased with the way that this percussion piece “keeps falling off the rails”, as if he realises that our attempts to impose order on the world are doomed to failure. The John Cage dimension is confined to ‘Frame’, and though you might expect to find an interest in chance and random methods, in fact it’s based on a very specific compositional approach to do with “vertical attacks”. ‘Port Bou’ is even more ambitious, attempting to weld together the two forces of serial composition and chance procedure in a single work. These ideas sound good on paper, but I’m not very excited by today’s spin; the music just seems disjointed, mannered, dry, and pointless. The players are the Aventa Ensemble led by Bill Linwood, while Rick Sacks tackles the percussion piece with his vibraphone and pieces of wood. Hopefully, future listenings will do more to uncover the complexities of this respected composer.

All three Canadian items above from 28/02/2023.

His Hearing Landscapes is all electronics, making extensive use of the human voice; it’s saying something about the landscape for sure, but refracted through the ancient culture of Chinese landscape painting, also including references to the folk music of his own country, and his understanding about underwater acoustics. He has a residency at the Qualcomm Institute in California, where they’re using the latest tech to probe and better understand the environment; probably this is how Lei Liang got his field recordings from the ocean surface of the Chukchi Sea. Delicacy and poise, coupled with deep respect for nature and Mother Earth, could be said to characterise the music of Hearing Landscapes, and he strives to involve the listener by his ingenious use of spatialised stereo fields, without making a huge fetish out of audio technology. Absorbing, occasionally beautiful; he manages to sublimate his ideas well and create a simpatico portrait of a lonely planet whose life hangs in the balance.

On the second half Hearing Icespaces, that “deep respect” side to his work has been passed over to three performing players David Aguila, Terese Diaz de Cossio, and Myra Hinrichs, who use trumpet, flute and violin to respond to the sound environment which Lei Liang proposes, with his field recordings of the arctic ice around Alaska. Wind, ice, animals – not only creating diverse and astonishing sounds, but also reminding us once again about the fragility of existence. “Liang’s investment in this sonic world is an act of deep empathy for this threatened environment,” as the press note has it. As they respond to these sounds, the trio of musicians find a way to co-exist with the ice and the wind, imitating the sounds they hear, and effectively using the field recordings as a form of prepared score. Hearing Icespaces takes a long time – nearly one hour – to complete its processes, but for this duration you will be transported to another place. (15/02/2023)