Swedish jazz combo STHLM Svaga here with their take on Afro-American free jazz. To their credit, Johan Jutterström and his team of competent players have managed to commission new compositions from living jazz legends Ron Carter, Roscoe Mitchell, and Archie Shepp – hence the title Plays Carter, Plays Mitchell, Plays Shepp (THANATOSIS PRODUKTION THT33). Not content with that, they assay a late Coltrane piece ‘Jupiter’ with just sax and drums. Anyone who’s heard records by Shepp, Art Ensemble of Chicago or one of the many releases where Carter played (2814 credits on Discogs alone) might be drawn to this recording, but may be disappointed in the lack of spirit or energy on show here. ‘Desert Lament’ simply sounds like “nice” cocktail lounge music – Linda Oláh has a sweet singing voice, but she’s no Abbey Lincoln. ‘Never Sound More’ is a lugubrious funeral dirge, played haltingly and uncertainly; I’m not feeling the emotion, and the musicians haven’t earned the right to feel down-hearted. The Swedes seem to snap out of their self-conscious stilted mode for the lively Shepp four-part suite ‘Die Rechnung – Chrystal Stairs – Blues – U-Jama’, and there’s something to admire in the way they carefully negotiate the tricky dynamics and rhythms of the composition. But they act like novice drivers following every command that issues from their SatNav; it’s a long way from truly “free” playing, far too polite and respectful, with no hint of the anger and fire that underpins Shepp’s music. I would like to resist this whitewashing, this blandification of jazz history.

For fans of minimalist drone, here’s a European slant on the music of Phill Niblock. Looking for Daniel (UNSOUNDS / ECHONANCE FESTIVAL 81UEcho) contains two very long pieces; the album is intended as a tribute to the composer, and he managed to supervise a lot of what went down before his death in 2024. Multi-part recordings, many instruments layered together, human voices – all the things that make a Niblock what it is. I’m particularly keen on ‘Biliana’, all played and sung by one woman, the heroic Biliana Voutchkova whose impressive improvising work on the violin we’ve been enjoying since around 2013. The piece was written for her, natch, and we’re invited to “read” it as a portrait of this great woman. ‘Exploratory, Rhine Version, Looking for Daniel’ goes even further down the polyphony route, requiring two chamber ensembles – The Ensemble Modelo62 and the Ensemble Scordature – to realise its multiple musical strata, using woodwinds, brass, electric guitar, organ, keyboards, and voices. 20 separate scored parts merge into an astonishing shimmering haze of drone, with hidden dissonances at every turn, and effortlessly occupying the same space as many a “spectralist” composer can only dream of (except my beloved Gorecki, of course). For some reason I rarely revisit the Niblock records I have on the Touch label; I now think it’s because they’re too hemmed in, solid wodges of blocky sound, lacking the air and space I’m finding here on this great record.

All the above from 02/04/2024.

Within this rather schematic frame, the acoustic shaker-driven pulse keeps coming into view with the insistence of a swarm of tiny green grasshoppers, or an anemic pared-down version of a Steve Reich composition. At certain point where humming human voices join strings for an uncertain watery drone, it’s an extended ethereal moment – their pleas for temperance, mercy and hope are knocked back by the occasional crack of percussion and sudden surge of dark tones from the lower registers. The thought crossed my mind that Acceleration could be a reference to “accelerationism”, that very extreme Marxist-critical-intellectual plan to hasten the demise of Capitalism in some way (don’t ask me; it was espoused by Mattin, that noisy Basque trouble-maker from some years ago), but if the title refers to the structure of what I assume is a semi-composed piece, it’s remarkable how slow the actual acceleration is, as if we’re gradually sleep-walking to the edge of the cliff in slow motion, and without much ado. That in itself might be a good metaphor for our society’s pathetic collective response to the dangers of climate change, or something. (11/11/2022)

Free improvisation between two Italian players Enrico Fazio and Giancarlo Nino Locatelli – both performers with a lot of achievements in their careers, and old friends of each other too. Despite friendship they seem to have drifted apart as all of us do over time and the session from 25th April 2014 – now released as 7 Rocks (WE INSIST! RECORDS CDWEIN22) – marks their meeting up after an extended period of time. Yet here they are still carrying on their musical conversation as if the years or distances beyond the seas counted for naught. One hopes it was a joyous reunion. Interestingly, once they made it into the studio, they decided to sit a long way away from each other, obliging Fosca Massucco to work that shade harder with his mic placement and mixing desk. Locatelli speaks of “fresh, intense and light music, full of surprises”, a flow of creativity in the midst of which they sat as they played.

About two years later (no-one could accuse them of rushing things), they re-listened to the music and came up with the titles, which are something to do with the properties of rocks, how minerals are distilled into rock form, clearly implying that their own wonderful music is closely aligned with this metaphor and underscoring it with the remark “not reducible to formula, with the presence of impurities”. I’m glad these two old friends managed to meet up again, but I wish the music could have been a bit more exciting; I don’t doubt their performing and improvising skills, but much of what they play is derived from stale jazz moves, played in a bitty and disconnected way. There’s also a sense of politeness and stiffness dogging the session which they can’t seem to shake off, and it stifles them from playing anything truly adventurous. The music just lacks tension. (14/11/2022)

15 short instrumental cues, but in each short episode of compacted information Chaney exhibits a certain skill with conventional orchestral music (very elegiac and melancholic tunes) as well as the expected “atmospheric” tones, smuggling in as much dark ambient material as the constraints of a British horror film will permit. The orchestral parts might all be played by Chaney himself – I’m unable these days to distinguish a string synthesiser from a full orchestra, and in any case everything here has a lurid patina produced by careful digital tweaking that conveys a thrillingly unsettling mood. Not his first soundtrack album – he’s done a few other shorts and TV shows, plus the 2016 movie Clutch – and Neil Chaney has passed into this line of work from his background in power electronics and industrial music, thus following a similar pathway to the New Zealander Graeme Revell, originally a member of the brutal industrial act SPK and now a well-respected and prolific Hollywood composer. I see Chaney was a member of Satori, though not the original 1980s incarnation – it got revivified in 2006 by Justin Mitchell, who wasn’t even an original member, but the two of them managed to turn it into a successful touring act. Before this Chaney enjoyed a brief career in the early 1990s as Pessary, releasing a few records for Dirter Promotions and tapes on Robert Maycock’s Mindscan label.

As to Aura the movie, which I never saw (though it sounds like it would have appeared on the Horror Channel), it’s kind of unusual that it uses Kirlian photography as a plot point, an element which does surface in Chaney’s cue titles here, but the remaining titles – such as ‘Nightmare’, ‘Asylum Visit’, ‘Demons and Entities’, ‘Blood Vision’ etc. betoken more conventional horror fare. From 24th June 2021.

Krafft was a 2016 commission in response to heads of state in France, meaning it got premiered in Paris and Marseilles. The last time, I think, we heard an all-classical piece from Reinhold was Quatuor Diotima – Reinhold Friedl which arrived in late 2017, a vehicle for three of his complex and very difficult string quartets, managed with skill and firebrands by the French Quatuor Diotima players. As I recall it the string players were required to undergo physical stress and bodily contortions to make the necessary shapes for this extremely challenging music. On today’s Krafft, the emphasis is quite different. The music is a gigantic, carefully arranged wodge of sound. Everyone plays their notes together, for short passages of discordant, mixed harmonies and tones; their doing so is what creates the hoped-for “unstoppable power” vibe, the feeling of a tidal wave lurching forward in slow motion. The thing that varies is the combinations of instruments, the blending of sounds and voices; this is what gives the music its sense of forward motion, its weird dynamic. It doesn’t exactly proceed in a smooth, comprehensible manner, and its bizarre movements are more akin to those of a large snake, or an overweight coypu.

Both the Zeitsters and 2E2-ers make their way through this dense constellation of composed information with incredible ease, not a foot faltering as they digest this intense melange of data. I use the word “data” advisedly, as Krafft was apparently computer-assisted in no small part of its writing. The Textural Transformation Machine program has been used to realise the work; this software happens to be developed by Friedl himself, as part of his doctorate at Goldsmiths in London; and it wouldn’t be the first time he has used computers to get himself where he needs to be in his ambitious works. For instance. they were used when turning Metal Machine Music into a performable score that could be read by the Ensemble. However, don’t let this coding aspect lead you to expect some form of electronic music (it’s all acoustic), nor let it detract from the power of the central “textural” blast that Friedl is weaving here on the stage.

Even if decoding the structure is not your bag, nor unpicking the subtleties in his incredible mixed harmonies, the sheer weight and volume of these combined orchestral sweeps and their inexorable rhythmic progress should flatten out your over-long toenails in short order. The underlying message is something about “unseen forces”, which might be governing the world (be they political or physical) in ways which we can’t apprehend or understand. If it can help us at least glimpse that process, or become aware of it on some level, that can help us. Music like this is thus one more vital tool in our survival kits, which we will need as things become more unstable and uncertain in the increasing insanity of the 21st century. Excellent. From 19th October 2020.

Lest one be tempted to anticipate a pastiche or worse, a tribute, aside from the odd passing resemblance (guitarist Chris Sharkey does a good turn as John McLaughlin; trumpeter Charlotte Keeffe as Miles), Anthropology Band is not about historical re-enactment but of analysing the play of variables such as group format. Archer presents two versions of the composition: 1) a septet (control group) and 2) an orchestra, which makes Anthropology Band an authentically experimental work. Even the title is redolent of scientific enquiry.

Also striking is the force of the septet, which rocks, swings and takes flight in roughly equal measures. The music is notated and often bass-driven, yet loosely structured enough to allow ample room for soloing – guitar pyrotechnics being a specialty. While the set loosely adopts the Bitches Brew jazz fusion formula, it’s reminiscent of contemporary equivalents like John Zorn’s Electric Masada, which augmented his free jazz/klezmer fusion quartet with abstract electronics and hard-rock grooves. Although never so raucous, Anthropology is a high octane vehicle of its own with a steady clip of flighty highlights. Yet even when the pace slows, as on the simmering ‘Fire on 88th’ (all rolling bass and liquid trumpet), the mood(iness) never lets up.

The second disc drops the energy of the septet to address the Gil Evans question and the results are suggestive of a number of possible musical directions; soundtrack for one. Keeffe reprises her role here as trumpeter and co-orchestrated the pieces with Archer, which effectively makes her the project’s Davis and Evans. This signals a significant departure in sound as well, making this the less immediate of the two versions. As the jazz fusion element shifts from rock to classical, there are hints of sluggishness under the weight of so many participants, leaving a sense that the orchestra is but a (stationary) vehicle for the jazzier pyrotechnics. However, it does work up a good head of steam before long. ‘Behind Another Sun’ is a particularly bracing fusion of contrasting tendencies – nimble bass balanced with coordinated stabs of brass. All told, it’s a fascinating point of comparison and sibling to the septet version.

As with most of Archer’s work, Anthropology Band is a refreshing proposition for tired ears and the Miles mythos alike – so much so that this project saw Archer removed from the studio to which he’d long since retired to undertake a short tour earlier this year (ironically, shortly before the current lockdown began). While I sense that this project satisfies Archer’s curiosity regarding the Gil Evans question, I wonder whether there’s further mileage to be drawn from this niche? What if Teo Macero had produced Kind of Blue, perhaps?

Of course, the contemporary British avantist doesn’t really need to have a smattering of the intuitive capabilities of a Bletchley Park boffin, but if by chance, he/she does…well, it’s aces all the way. Especially so when tenor saxist/composer Matt London’s graphic score for “Rituals” is laid out for fellow band members of Orchestra Entropy to inwardly digest. A ‘get out of jail card’ when notational drafts were found to be slightly wanting. “Rituals” is cut from the same cloth that had its origins with a number of kindred spirits from the late sixties/early seventies. The bewitchingly colourful charts of Crumb, Ligeti, Earle Brown and Berberian (C), now surely deserving of equal billing with anything hugging precious wall space in art gallery world. As sleeve note details are a little skimpy, it appears that Matt’s requirements of the players were contained on just “two hand-drawn panels”… which relayed “various open notations and graphics plus two trio sub-pieces for the performers to decipher…” The sole aim being to chip away at the improvisations, so that the resulting music builds and transforms itself, with the composer coming on not as some mad-haired tyrant shooting lightning bolts from his baton, but instead as a kindly tour guide, not too worried if a few of his flock deliberately wander off route occasionally.

A live recording, made at Jerwood Hall, LSO St. Lukes, London in 2018,, this nine-parter sees the expanded version of Ensemble Entropy on a relatively unhurried blimp ride over a series of fairly level playing fields, with the five brass/woodwinders (positioned in the gondola section naturally), calling most of the shots. Be they “Part One’s” rumbling belches from the trombone of Sara Gail Brand or the green-faced queasy blarts and snorks of “Part Seven”. For me, the most arresting fragment is the oddly named “Skelf”; which plants the spotlight beam on Moss Freed’s tweaked out-of-shape six- string and what might be a tiny army of key-wound percussive toys with drummer Matt Sanders simultaneously channelling Crimso’s Jamie Muir (minus the moustache wax and blood capsules…) and those light of touch Chris Cutlerized interludes found on “Legend”; Henry Cow’s debut sock hop.

Racking up its eighty-fifth release, you don’t really need me to tell you that Sheffield’s premier imprint has continued to maintain its strong manly grip on quality control. Orfeo 5, The Keith Tippett Octet, The Caines/Archer Axis, Weavels…and now The Entropy Ork! Another piece clicks firmly into place.

The piece I enjoyed most is called ‘Air Glow’. A number of brass players are joined by one electric guitar player; the brass section really comes up with some exceptional mixed chords and interesting clashing sonorities, with moments of shimmering beauty. The guitarist, natch, pulls things in a different direction. By this point I felt I had an inkling of one of Du Yun’s signature themes, which is to have two (or more) contrasting dynamics in everything she composes; almost every piece here is pulling in two directions, and some of them take it further – like a classical Greek hero wrestling with an enormous snake. Bend an era to ‘Vicissitudes Alone’ for a stark illustration of this; Daniel Lippel plays a steel string guitar, while Du Yun supplies the pre-recorded sections of zheng playing, that famed Chinese lute. Just two instruments, yet it verges on a form of musical anarchy, not least due to the energetic way Lippel is pulling on his “axe”. The piece may also be expressing something about the clash of Eastern and Western cultures, attempting to co-exist on the same page.

Also digging the nocturnal atmospherics of ‘Dreams-Bend’, which is mainly an excuse for our heroine to recite her very personal and stark text about dreams of flight and fear. Much anxiety and uncertainty in the chords suggested by simple clarinet-violin-cello set-up. Another one that’s nocturnal and macabre is ‘Run In A Graveyard’, on which the flute of Claire Chase is lightly treated with some understated electronic enhancement; delicate atmospherics seem to tell a ghost story. As for the title piece, considering it has a thunder-lizard in the title I was hoping for something of the grandeur and heft of a T-Rex, requiring at least two chamber ensembles to do it justice. Instead, it’s a solo work for the alto sax. Ryan Muncy works overtime to create endless whining from his melancholic bell, occasionally varying the high-pitched tones with a lower-register roary glomp eruption. From 1999, Du Yun boasts that it’s the earliest work on the whole CD and assures us “it still rings true” – an explanation that leaves one hungry for further detail. From a distance you could mistake this sax solo for a free improvisation, even though it is composed – but Du Yun also embraces free improv, as evidenced on one piece called ‘The Griffin’ (rather lugubrious anthem to this mythical creature, but it’s always good to hear a viola da gamba on record) and another one called ‘The Naga’. This second one is just great – unusual (in this context) set-up of table-top players with live electronics and objects, including a typewriter. For a few glorious moments, it rattles like a subway train to paradise. Shame it’s so short.

Lacking the musicological skills to appraise this highly contemporary work, I feel I am missing something vital with these subjective appraisals. You might get a better steer from the verbiage on the press release, which often describes the music of Du Yun as “gestural”, and alerts us to her “finely tuned sense of structural pacing”. From October 2018, available via New Focus Recordings.

Trois Hommages (FCR214) is an excellent set of challenging piano music. Georg Friedrich Haas is the composer, the works are played by Mabel Kwan from Ensemble Dal Niente. Haas is an Austrian contemporary composer with big and adventurous ideas about advancing classical music, taking liberties with equal temperament, insisting on unusual tunings for instruments, working with overtones and microtones; as an earnest of his deep commitment to complexity and difficulty, there’s a 1994 piece whose name cannot even be pronounced. On Hommages, the work demands two pianos, one of them tuned down by a quarter tone. This retuning may not sound like much on paper, but it has the effect of “doubling down on equal temperament”, and one result is a 24-note scale.

To advance his ideas about deconstruction of this system, which he evidently regards as a mere convention of history and a compromise which we have accepted through centuries of conditioned listening, Haas pays homage to three composers who have achieved similar benchmarks in this area: microtonal genius Ligeti, twelve-tone devotee Hauer, and serialist Reich, and the intention is that these be seen as three movements of the same composition. On the Ligeti section, there are some highly complex sonorities to savour as these two pianos create dense clouds of weird mixed chords through the largely percussive attack that’s required; it’s as though the two instruments are struggling to find common ground, resulting in perpetual tension. Dramatic and intense…certainly I found it preferable to the Hauer piece, which is a rather dry series of arpeggios and scales, that are mostly used to demonstrate how pronounced this quarter-tone difference really is. Apparently Josef Matthias Hauer was more of a diehard 12-toner than Schoenberg, even; he couldn’t wait to issue his “law of twelve tones”.

Though Haas’s piece may seem a bit schematic, at least it sticks to the point with a certain rigour and focus; if you like to combine your academic studies with music listening, this might be just the piece for you. The CD ends with the 22-minute Reich homage, which stresses the rhythmical pattern-making side of this maverick American composer. At this point I’m prepared to award the Golden Patience-Of-Job award to Mabel Kwan, who falters not for one instant on what must be an incredibly demanding performance of intricate compositional designs threaded across two keyboards. To put it mildly, she’s like a superhuman sewing machine trying to embroider a medieval tapestry. With this Reich piece, I’m digging the repeated figures and ghost patterns that appear in the ever-shifting flow of tiny high notes, though it’s some way from the benign minimalism I associate with the American school. Could be that Haas is over-simplifying Reich in order to prove his point about the exigencies of equal temperament; I do sense something rather pinched, rigid even, in the music – like a closely-argued point of philosophy that admits of no debate. Even so, the point remains tattooed on the listener’s forehead, and no amount of scrubbing will remove it. Where now for the future of Western composition?

Clarinettist Marianne Gythfeldt performs a number of contemporary compositions on Only Human (FCR 220), a set which is subtitled Electroacoustic Works For Clarinet. In each case we hear her interacting with various set-ups, be they live electronics, computer-generated music, or pre-recorded electro-acoustic music. The contributing composers are John Link, Mikel Kuehn, David Taddie, Elizabeth Hoffman, Eric Lyon and Robert Morris, and Gythfeldt’s stated aims with this set are largely personal, deriving from the satisfaction and intellectual curiosity for what she calls “discovery of new sound worlds”. One of the pieces has links to Benny Goodman, another to Stravinsky; a third attempts to comment on the work of Walter Benjamin in the form of an audio essay. Of all these, only the Elizabeth Hoffman piece appealed to me; her ‘And When White Moths Were On The Wing’ has a delicacy and restraint that transcends the mechanics by which it was made, and it is informed by a certain amount of poetry, mythology, and interest in dreams. Further, Gythfeldt contributed directly to its creation with her improvising skills. The remainder of the programme, while very competently done (Marianne Gythfeldt is an immaculate performer), appeared to me as a set of formal exercises in technique, and the electronic dimension was not explored in a particularly bold or innovative manner.

Dalia Raudonikyte-With is a Norwegian-born composer who grew up in Lithuania and spent a number of years in New York City, enabling her to form connections with members of the International Contemporary Ensemble. Her Solitarius (FCR186) contains six compositions, mostly realised for solo performers, although ‘Grues Et Nix’ is an orchestral piece, and on ‘Ventus’ the saxophone playing of Rolf-Erik Nystrøm is supplemented with live electronics from the composer herself. I gather one of her techniques was to begin with a compositional theme, and reuse short segments of it throughout the work to create new structures and thus advance the “underlying plot of dramatic development”, as the MIC Lithuania describes it. Of these, I liked moments of ‘Ventus’ because of the way it explores timbral changes created by saxophone and electronic pairings, but I couldn’t get too excited; Anthony Braxton and Richard Teitelbaum did this on Time Zones with far more boldness and passion. The rest of the set struck me as rather ordinary chamber music.

All the above from 5th October 2018.

Besides doing the compression / editing / rearranging, Mitterer has also added electronic elements, thus introducing a more contemporary dimension to the finished item. Wolfgang Mitterer is a serious composer, keyboard player, student of electro-acoustic music who studied in Vienna and Stockholm, and is widely regarded as an expert in electronic music among his fellow Austrians. No denying the seriousness of his ideas and intent, nor the thoroughness of his craft, but much of Nine Of One fails to catch fire for me. I blame myself, for not being at all familiar with this important canon of classical work; it means I can’t tell where the joins and elisions are falling, thus can’t really appreciate what makes this such a radical statement. True, one recognises certain famous phrases and themes which emerge from time to time, but they only highlight for me the general incoherence of this record. I mean it’s full of frustrations, thwarted moments, where one’s conditioned responses to the crescendos and climaxes of classical music structure are consistently denied and disappointed.

Presumably this is the entire point of the record. But to my mind Mitterer doesn’t really go far enough; it’s as though he’s a shade too respectful to the original source, and doesn’t really care to commit outright vandalism, cutting a huge swathe of Dadaist chaos through this body of work. A corpus which some might regard as the epitome of bourgeois academic conservatism. Instead, polite re-ordering is the mode of the day. And yet it’s sold to us as a “roller-coaster ride”, in a press release promising a lot more in the way of excitement, danger, and shocks. Well, let me for one moment refer you to Stockhausen’s Opus 1970, sometimes known as Stockhoven-Beethausen, a masterful deconstruction of Beethoven’s music which was more interesting to listen to, more subversive, and a lot more fun than this. From 3rd July 2018.