Actually this set Braxton Et Al. (RECORDS AND OTHER STUFF ROS6) contains just one Braxton composition, the piece ‘Composition No. 107 for two Multi-Instrumentalists’ from 1982, although it’s also used as the basis for a ‘Korperstudie’ by Riegler, a new composition which I assume is intended as a homage. Well, Braxton’s complex music is hard to fathom, but these Viennese fellows have elected to perform the composition almost by rote, turning it into a cold, cerebral exercise; despite some flashes of technique, they don’t have a jazz bone in their body capable of fully interpreting the score. Maybe they were intending to be respectful, but it seems to have inhibited them from playing freely.

The group do loosen up slightly for ‘Korperstudie #1’, where the set themselves the task of living the Braxton dream of “comprovisation” – this great African-American made great inroads into resolving the conflict between jazz improvisation and modern composition (as many today are still attempting to do). For the four segments here, Studio Dan show us some more engaging instrumental interplay, unexpected harmonies, and a few snakes in the boots as they wriggle around in the recording chamber. ‘Fassung Fur Quintett’, also by Riegler, is much more like “jazz” than anything we’ve heard so far and this one might sell you on the record, assuming you have a taste for clever cross-patterns and expertly-woven rhythms. Once again the group seem to be oblivious to swing feeling, but it doesn’t seem to matter so much when the material is so rich. ‘Mr. Sierpinski’, another recent work this time composed by the pianist Tiefenbacher, likewise leans closer to conventional jazz moves and is a shade more intelligible, but they still can’t resist doing the stop-start herky-jerky thing with their dynamics, as if to exhibit instrumental prowess.

There’s a lot we could extract from this dense and complex music, but the takeaway for the day is mostly emotional – there’s a lot of energy and anger, expressed as a desire to make the music challenging and indeed somewhat “visceral”. Merivale talks of “crossing the line”, in what appears to be a feisty attempt to shake up the cosy world of modern classical music, and in particular to excite the audience simply by presenting them with a certain amount of difficulty. The players in Desdemona not only embrace this strategy, they proceed to manifest it with heart and soul. I think it’s fair to say that Adrianne Munden-Dixon is more than an interpreter of Merivale’s scores, and she deserves to be credited as an active collaborator in these ideas. I suppose ‘Do You Hear Me Now?’, a piece partly intended as a slap in the face to critics and establishment figures who brushed Finola Merivale aside simply for being a woman, is one of the immediate audience-grabbers here, but bend an ear also to ‘Arbores Erimus’, which is Munden-Dixon playing solo with live electronics. Inspirational starting points here were a drawing of a tree and a line from a Thomas Hardy poem, but the composer and musicians have developed these images and ideas into a unique piece of mysterious, trancey, slightly menacing music, using technology to help push at the edges of the frame. (08/06/2022)

He lists a substantial number of instruments on his credit list, and these are mostly combinations of a commercial brand name with a descriptive name indicating its function, such as the “Oberheim Xpander” – but I am totally clueless as to what these devices do, so I’ll settle for “analogue and modular synthesisers”. Gotta admit he’s really found a way to make the “virtual group” notion pay off in triple jackpots – there’s a lot of bizarre, noisy action going down and plenty of curious, fascinating sounds bursting out of their respective pods, like alien flowers on Planet Venus. His “ensemble” approach means his music doesn’t resemble “classic” electro-acoustic music from the old Schools (by which I mean anything from Koenig to Stockhausen by way of Bayle and Parmegiani), where quite often the projected sound can appear rather lonely and isolated for some reason. Perhaps it’s the cold formality of an academic experiment that induces that loneliness. Contrariwise, Scott is happily bouncing around inside his studio unleashing the tongues of a dozen or more gabbling voices, trills, birds, beasts, and pots of clay.

Kinda surprised I never heard of this Scott before, as he’s been hovering around on many “scenes” and locales of exciting endeavour since the 1980s, one of which was the London Musician’s Collective, and another was releasing his “underground cassettes” since the late 1980s. As to the LMC, seems he used to parp the saxophone as his chosen machine, and studied it under Elton Dean and Steve Lacy. As to the cassette thing, this may have grown out of his teenage post-punk band period. I mention these strands as they all point to one thing – his love of playing and playing in groups, and that brings us round to the whole point of this album. He’s pretty much replaced his friends and collaborators with machines, which is the best way to go as people will always let you down in the long run. More recently, our man has found time – when he’s not mutating his own nervous system into a circuit board so he can enjoy a closer bond with his little friends – to set up and operate his own record label Sound Anatomy, active since 2015 and a good breeding ground for improvisers and electronic composers alike.

I realise after all this verbiage I still haven’t said very much about the form of his music here, which is (to my superficial lugs) extremely complex and dense, and probably containing more ideas per square inch than the human brain can comfortably process. I’m reminded in places of Thomas Dimuzio, except Scott doesn’t “do” noise as such and doesn’t want to waste a single second of music time if he can’t occupy it with multiple voices unearthly sounds twisted into super-intricate trillamagoos and curliblodgens. And he’s also pushing the form – no tunes, no melody, no patterns, no repeats, just generous scads of atonal modernism pushed through the oscillators and filters. Did I mention he was bowled over when he first heard Stockhausen on the wireless? Well, that and Cabaret Voltaire, and erm, Jon Hassell…seriously, I’ve no doubt that Professor Karlheinz would have been impressed by the complexity, largesse and sheer ingenuity on offer here. From 4 May 2022.

American composer and performer Soper has come our way before as part of Wet Ink Ensemble (she’s a co-director of the group), where on Relay (noted by us in 2014) she performed her soprano vocals to great dramatic effect, and had a showcase for her own composition ‘Only the Words Themselves Mean What They Say’. She’s in demand as a soprano vocalist for new music in many forms, but she also has her own ideas, as amply demonstrated on today’s disc. We could attempt to summarise it as a blend of highly theatrical performance, focussing on the voice declaiming in a stylised and very “rhetorical” style, but with particular attention paid to the text – the selection of the text in the first place, and then a very thoughtful (and dramatic) manner of presenting it. On top of all this, her performances are often interrupted, undercut and distorted by use of electronic effects, and the interventions of Pluta, whose live electronics appear on two tracks; and the flow of each piece keeps changing midway, through the versatile skills of Soper and her restless, protean style of attacking the texts. The album amounts to an exhausting, dense listen; I am left with the same drained feelings as I usually get with hearing a powerful Wet Ink Ensemble release.

The whole set is strong, but the pieces that have worked particularly well for this listener are ‘Dialogue I’ and ‘Dialogue II’, and the opening tour de force ‘The Understanding Of All Things’. The two ‘Dialogue’ pieces include the electronics of Pluta, and are billed as improvisations by Soper and Pluta; the second one allows to enjoy the “uncut” delights of Soper’s wordless vocalising mingled with sighs, groans, and breathy murmurings, plus her unpredictable piano stabs sitting alongside the untamed abrasive buzzery from Pluta’s mixing table. The first ‘Dialogue’ however is a good example of how Soper deconstructs and reconstructs her texts; the starting point is the work of George Berkeley, philosopher from the age of Enlightenment, describing the contents of dialogues between Philonous and Hylas (imaginary characters, but possibly inspired by Greek classical literature) to expound a particular mental conundrum. In Soper’s mouth, what starts as a “straight” vigorous reading of the text soon takes off into an ever-increasing spiral of vocal distortions, treatments, electronic noise and other forms of controlled mayhem; all the better to illustrate the meanings of particular words, phrases, or concepts. As the text is about the supposed inability of the human frame to genuinely perceive reality, Soper’s take on the subject is all the more poignant, as her voice spins off into a cosmic metaphysical whirlpool of sound. Powerful stuff.

A similar approach has been used on the title track, based on a short text by Kafka. Through fragmentation, repetition, stating and restating sentences with her strange emphasis, Soper shows how she can scramble common sense and invite us to question how we perceive things, yet still arrives at a coherent statement in the end. The fact that she does it in a near-histrionic fashion, keyed up to fever pitch throughout, compels us to pay attention.

In the middle of the album sits a longer and quite challenging piece ‘The Fragments of Parmenides’, nearly 20 minutes, which is a very layered contemplation on the deep meaning of things whose nuances of meaning, I must admit, are defeating me for the time being. It’s a deliberate juxtaposition of a text by Parmenides with a poem by W.B Yeats, involving conventional song-form performances from Soper and aggressive free-jazz styled piano work, all taking place in the framework of a “lecture” styled format (the same method as on ‘Dialogue I’, in fact). This lecture form seems to come naturally to Kate Soper, able to deliver a persuasive presentation with all the force of an academic, except that she illustrates the drift of her topics with piano, singing, and a mannered form of song-speech. As noted, I’m unable to grasp the thread of this diatribe, but I note that Parmenides (Greek philosopher born 515 BC) was renowned for his interest in ontological conundrums and paradoxes, areas which I feel sure appeal to Soper’s mind.

An exceptional record by this very individual creator. The cover art uses an image by Toby Sisson, the woman artist from Minnesota. From 21 February 2022.

The plan here is to create musical depictions of certain figures from Greek mythology – Daedalus, Mercury and Narcissus are three of them, plus there’s one at the end for Ananke who was more by way of being a “primordial deity” and a personification of the notions of Necessity and Inevitability. There’s even a musical duo for ‘Ephemera’, who as far as I know wasn’t a character in Greek myth but a way of expressing transient information of no lasting significance. Lest we accuse Aylward of reinventing the Planets Suite, he’s attempting a more layered intellectual exercise – his ideas derive from the writings of Italo Calvino, the excellent Italian writer, specifically his analysis of the writings of Ovid in the Metamorphoses, and (I suppose) what this means for story-telling in general. Calvino is a literary hero to me, one I put in a seraglio with Umberto Eco and Dino Buzatti, and a fiction writer who seems capable of effortlessly turning the form of any story inside-out and upside-down, while remaining very entertaining, witty, and eminently readable.

John Aylward’s takeaway has been something to do with “elementary properties” – perhaps a way of thinking about literary archetypes – and it’s this process that has fed into his music. It’s evident that there’s a lot of “musical information” packed into these dense musical episodes, fast-moving too, and at 54:01 mins of listening there’s a lot for the thirsty brain to drink in. If he’s attempting to tell new stories about the Greek myths, or “reanimate” them as is claimed, this aspect may have simply passed me by, or I’m simply not able to follow them in the abstruse twists and turns of his very non-linear and disjunctive sequences of notes. The notes praise his distancing technique, putting the listener “at several steps of remove from the original source of inspiration”, meaning what we’re absorbing is Aylward’s reading of Ovid filtered by way of Calvino (and presumably recast to some degree by the efforts of the excellent musicians here when they interpret his scores). But it all leaves me mostly cold; no denying the force of his intellect, or Aylward’s composerly skills, but all five of the pieces just sound too similar to one another, characterised by the same flourishes – over-elaborated woodwind runs and astringent string stabs. I’m not feeling the engagement with the subject matter, in other words, and to me it’s more like a formal exercise for rehearsing a series of rather stilted musical phrases. From 9th February 2022.

The five pieces, all new, have been provided by composers who are close to the group in one way or another, and not unconnected to the Switzerland hub – Nik Bärtsch lives in Zurich, Stephan Thelen moved to that country after living in the USA. Mannheimer Schlagwerk have modelled themselves after Steve Reich’s Mallet Quartet to some extent, but the claim is they are “using his template to lift off into new territories.” While the music here may resemble Reich on the surface, with its regular simple patterns and pulses, it’s true that it’s far less “minimal” than Reich was, and doesn’t insist on stark basic repetitions to make its statement clear. Matter of fact some of the pieces, such as ‘Russian Dolls’ by Thelen, are downright melodic, dynamic, and extremely accessible; Thelen’s other piece ‘Parallel Motion’ is exciting too, making use of what I assume is very ingenious syncopation to produce genuine sensations of movement and an impression of great complexity.

Markus Reuter, conversely, is noticeably more restrained on his ‘Sexgott’ piece in three parts which namechecks the gods Mars, Venus and Eros in its short, thoughtful passages. Where Thelen and Bärtsch both like to keep the Ensemble busy and give them an abundance of notes to play, Reuter prefers to leave more gaps. If the piece really is about “sex gods”, then they’re very thoughtful lovers and not prone to lose themselves in an ecstasy of erotic passion. Interestingly, Reuter mentions both Robert Fripp and Frank Zappa in the notes here; I think he went to one of Fripp’s guitar workshops, and Zappa was no stranger to complex percussion runs (Ruth Underwood, who met every musical challenge that Zappa threw at her, was one of the group’s unsung heroines). The Reich comparison only goes so far though, as despite invoking the “template”, and hinting at systems music with an album title that uses the word “numbers”, the music here doesn’t strike me as especially modern, minimal, or systems-derived. None of which is necessarily bad.

There is more information about the players, and the compositions, in the 64pp booklet that’s enclosed in the slipcase of this lavishly-presented release. From 11th January 2021.

Accessible and user-friendly art music from Tania Gill Quartet on Disappearing Curiosities (NO LABEL TJG001), led by pianist Tania Gill of Ontario…they mostly play a form of melodic and upbeat jazz, composed by Gill and played by Lina Allemano (trumpet), with Rob Clutton (bass) and Nico Dann (drums). Tania Gill is evidently well-informed about climate change, and some of her titles and tunes allude to aspects of this very global problem, exhibiting sympathy with those who protest it. If you live in Toronto, you may have encountered Gill in the Brodie West Quartet, See Through, or Deep Dark United. Gill has a gift for unexpected changes, intervals, and clever melodies, and I suspect it’s good fun for the musicians to play.

Eldritch Priest from Vancouver has made Omphaloskepsis (HALOCINE TRANCE HTRA026), a single 54-minute piece which I think is composed and played entirely by himself. We might describe it as a form of electroacoustic composition with much emphasis on the electric guitar; think of it as a very discursive guitar solo, with the phrases stumbling out in fits and starts, with some accompaniment from a virtual digital backing band. Digital treatments allow for some queasy alterations in sound, producing rather unnatural and nauseating tones. I have no idea if this lengthy discourse was composed or improvised, or even if it matters; the general effect is one of severe disjunctiveness, and it’s nigh-impossible to follow the train of thought of the player and you have no idea where it’s going to turn next. It’s impossible to get a purchase on this abstracted and slippery music, which deflects your normal expectations at every turn. Apparently this is entirely in line with Priest’s intentions; the press note speaks warmly of his “disorienting” music, using terms like “wayward” and “restless” to give some indication of its protean ways. Priest is also a scholar and a university professor, in which position he muses about (and publishes books on) experimental music and philosophy. In 2013 he wrote a book called Boring Formless Nonsense, and the title of today’s record is a Greek word for “navel-gazing”. The Arditti Quartet, and the Quatuor Bozzini, are two Canadian ensembles who have been brave enough to tackle his abstruse compositions.

Very accomplished harp playing from Ellen Gibling on her The Bend In The Light (NO LABEL). She plays traditional Irish folk tunes and dance music, alternating with compositions by friends and fellow musicians. Gibling was born in Halifax in Canada, and studied classical music at first, but it was after moving to Montreal that her interest in Irish folk music started to grow, leading to a visit to the University of Limerick in 2019. We heard Gibling before in 2020 as part of the New Hermitage group, but that was quite a different proposition – acoustic improvisation in the service of an eco-dystopian idea. No improvisation here though, nor can we say that Gibling is really adding anything of her own to the tunes – she’s not a post-modernist interpretative-folkster like Sharon Kraus, Cath and Phil Tyler, or Jacken Elswyth. Interestingly, Gibling has settled in the same territory as the Mi’kmaq people, a First Nation population of the Northeastern woodlands of Canada, and sales from this album will be donated to help a music program in Eskasoni.

In recent times, Zabelka has professed a strong interest in what she calls “scientific music”, sometimes described as the “interdisciplinarity between music and science”; to that end she is making ever-more bold experiments with all sorts of technology, the better to interface with it and extend the reach of her music, exploiting the potential interaction between man and machine. The Quantum Violin manifests this in many ways – there’s the large number of effects and treatments applied directly to her violin playing, and her own experiments with the Ableton suite, but also the extensive computer-based technologies employed on this album, for which she has brought in the technical expertise of Glen Hall. He’s explicitly credited here with operating the “Quantum oscillator”, which to my non-scientific brain sounds like a device on a par with the Hadron collider, but in reality it is used here to create powerful synthesis effects on certain tracks. Hall also uses a number of cutting-edge editing and audio transformation tools, such as CataRT (used at IRCAM), SPAT and Omax, which I have to assume are firmly rooted in the realm of the digital and require a certain amount of programming skills to make them run, let alone perform as well as they do here. At least one of these tools works on the machine-learning principle, and its AI features must have appealed to Zabelka at some level.

14 examples of “Quantum Violin” exercises are presented here, and the underlying pattern of the music is one of profound change and alterations – we seem to be experiencing a process where the music is rendered down to its constituent parts (if we could express it as digital images, we would be talking about pixels, or even atomic particles), subjected to radical audio treatments and bold cut-up actions, and rearranged into exciting new shapes in a wild array of fast-moving events that are taking place in real time. For one thing, this real-time aspect points to the improvising roots of Mia Zabelka – she probably still wants the music to remain “live”, no matter how insanely the surface of the audio may change, and so she refuses the more sedate techniques of the modern electro-acoustic composer, who enact these changes after the fact, sitting regally behind the console as they embroider their over-considered and convoluted works. The exception to this observation, I suppose, would be the final track which is an earlier work from 2017, which has been “restructured” by Hall; it’s a tribute to Zabelka’s mentor and collaborator Pauline Oliveros, and is a suitably slow and dignified hymn of praise.

For the most part, the album is wild stuff – some frantic playing from the violinist, taking shape as some of the most extreme and alien sounds she’s ever put down on record. Her quest for exploring “scientific music” has brought her to this point where she is able to make the technology perform like a tame tiger, rather than becoming the passive servant of a laptop and its attendant programs; the science has enabled her to expand her imagination and grasp at new forms of music that might not have been possible before. It’s not entirely inept to make comparisons with Stockhausen and the advances he made when he discovered such devices as the ring modulator and the potentiometer, utterly transforming what he could do with acoustic instruments, voices, and recorded sound. The press notes describe this project as “a virtuoso escape hatch out of our imaginations”; my advice would be, jump right in. From 22 November 2021.

Initially released as Zolder Ellipsis by U.S. keyboardist/composer/producer Tom Aldrich, this prog nouveau instrumental workout began its life as a tip of the chapeau to Frank the Zee’s final meisterwerk Civilisation: Phaze III. Like Topsy, this conceptual project grew in unexpected/diverse ways, where other influences and impressions made their presence felt. A melange of melanges if you will, in which improv jazz gets into compromising positions with strands of deviant circuitry then combines forces with krautrock and the avant metal scene, Oh, and did I mention ancient Greek and Roman music too?

Almost as if one eye was on a stopwatch, Tom (see also collaborations with Bang on a Can and Mann & Weil (!)) began the Entropy remit by engaging the considerable chops of guitarist Sean Moran (also Bassoon and the 4 Bags), bassist Chad Langford (also Sixth Sense), synthesist Ivo Bol and drummer extraordinaire Theo Lanau. These guys then met up for the very first time during mid-2019 and with their asses clearly on fire, proceeded to record the whole album (at Wedgeview Studios, Woerdense Verlaat, Netherlands) in two days flat! Just one of those rare, charmed instances where everything group-wise just clicked into place.

Even though each bandmember is a composer in his own right, there’s no sign of anyone jostling for the alpha male position. I have heard a lot of contempo prog/filigreed metal and what have you on local radio’s specialist programmes, where that mode of thort is all too prevalent – woe to ye Anathema and your ilk !! Thankfully here, there’s not a banana skin in sight. Zolder seem to operate from a strident and, at times, breathtakingly complex standpoint. Dazzling heights of band interaction are scaled effortlessly, which can’t help but induce a form of light-headedness in the listener, (that’s a good thing by the way). In “Craig gets Reanimated”, the near funk arrangement sees some testy Frippesque dive-bombing which is neatly framed by a more dislocated version of a Herbie Hancock piece (circa Sextant). This makes way for a very brief “Zip Gun” blast and an even shorter “Q + A”, where its notation is broken down to an odd hyperactive squiggle. More manic activity breaks out on “Android Coronation Ball” and the epic “The Antidote Game”. Both finding Mr Bol’s feline purrs and squeaky latex sonics firmly in the school of the great keyboard-less synthesists in which Messrs DikMik, Ravenstine and Simply Saucer’s Ping Romany reign supreme.

And yes, the erm, concept does deal with “…different types of automation – symbolised by robots (artificial mechanisation) and zombies (reflexive obsession)…” and yes, James Stokoe’s sleeve art does portray said zombies running riot all over a very angry red planet – but… puh-leez don’t let the cartoony graphics detract from what is most certainly the definite article. Love this.

A full appreciation of the nuanced works of Roberts would require more musicological skills than I possess – the notes here speak of such accomplishments as his investigations into “pitch vocabulary” and “developing motivic ideas”, but what comes over to this listener is a certain boldness within the permitted limits of melody and harmony, without becoming sentimental. Adam Roberts may steer clear of the severities of 12-tone serialism, but he takes wild leaps with his tunes that requires an equally gifted player to realise them. I’m especially taken with the curlicues and elaborations on ‘Oboe Quartet’, performed here by the JACK quartet, which was originally scored to be played alongside a Mozart piece; and the complex patterns and layers that are hidden in the harp solo piece ‘Rounds’.

Then there’s the brilliant use of clashing string tones from the violin/viola team of andPlay (Maya Bennardo and Hannah Levinson), heard to great effect on both parts of the ‘Diptych’, where the two gifted players execute near-impossible feats of microtonality and fast-moving scales. We get to hear some rare examples of “extended technique” where the kind of scraping noise we’d usually associate with a free improviser is brilliantly incorporated into the score. A strong set that demonstrates the composer’s lyrical and expressionist themes. (12/11/2021)