Today’s first item is a piano record. The player of the piano is Dante Boon. It’s called Düsseldorf Recital (RHIZOME.S #21) and it was recorded by Bruno Duplant at the Jazz-Schmiede in Düsseldorf. Six compositions are tackled by this performer, and of the composers’ names the only ones I can say are remotely familiar are Eva-Maria Houben, associated with the Wandelweiser school; and Gil Sansón, who wrote the score to Balancing Act With Controlled Dynamics (winds measure recordings). The others are Coleman Zurkowski, Anastassis Philippakopoulos, Assaf Gidron, and Jack Callahan; most if not all of these also have Wandelweiser connections. The resulting recital is very much of a piece – not to say all the music is interchangeable, but there are shared / overlapping concerns between the composers, such as use of silence, very slow and precise performances, still/isolated notes hanging in the air, environmental sounds allowed to “intrude” on the listening experience, including occasional audience coughs and chair rustling. I’m beginning to perceive Wandelweiser as some kind of Herculean effort to create a super-John Cage entity, to create John Cage “squared” and see what the world makes of it. But it’s also to Dante Boon’s credit that he’s able to create this very convincing programme of music, making it appear like six academic papers presented at a symposium by highly knowledgeable researchers, all of them considering aspects of the same thing (or things). This isn’t to imply Boon is imposing his “technique” on the works, his personal style. Far from it; in fact I suspect this is the kind of music where conventional technique is the last thing that the composer requires.

I find that Boon is a Dutch pianist and a highly regarded interpreter of contemporary experimental music, and a composer in his own right, and also part of the Wandelweiser collective. So far this is much less daunting than the “barely-perceptible” releases we noted from the label last time, and the set contains many moments of musical pleasure (assuming that “pleasure” is the apt word when faced with such austerity and crystal purity); some of it I could even recommend to followers of Morton Feldman, with its dry patterns and delicate symmetries. I suppose the last piece, Callahan’s ‘Blue Dream Excerpt With Proportional Ending’ is the most difficult work here, with its yawning abysses of silence and tense moments of what’s-happening-now, which are used to section together some poignant musical phrases of dissonance and illogical progressions. Of the six, this one might be the “thesis” work, closest in spirit to demonstrating some of the tenets of Wandelweiser which remain rather opaque to me.

Sarah Hennies is an American composer, primarily associated with percussion music, though she did produce the guitar composition for Cristián Alvear (Orienting Response For Guitar) noted here by PKM. One feature of that slow and quiet piece was Hennies’ attempt to explore hidden percussive potential inside the body of that instrument. Hennies has also interpreted some of the 20th century “greats” of modernism, including Cage and Lucier, but has also performed pieces by some of the Wandelweisers (Radu Malfatti) and more recent minimalists, such as Ellen Fullman. She’s here today with Nests (RHIZOME.S #20), a joint piece realised with Tim Feeney, another American percussionist who has performed with Vic Rawlings, Dominic Lash, Howard Steltzer and others, and has at least one release on Another Timbre (the excellent crossover label that draws no lines between improvised and composed music).

I see that Nests was recorded at Silo City in Buffalo, New York. Never visited; apparently this complex of former grain silos is now a tourist attraction and there are guided tours of these “historic” buildings. Silo City has been reclaimed as a music venue, theatre and poetry space, and has been used for film locations. I mention this as it may account for the “natural echo” we hear on the recording of Nests. The content of the music is minimal – a series of plain percussive tones produced by means I know not, but there is a faint trace of “woodiness” in the dying fall of each echo suggesting it may have started life on a woodblock, marimba, or such like. But there I go looking for some sort of comfort zone, some point of familiarity in this very alien music. Over one hour, a network of “clops” starts to spin a spider’s web of sound across this vast imaginary space. Somewhere in the background is a chirping sound like grasshoppers or cicadas, which may be pure accident, or intended, or even produced by an electronic instruments. This is a piece of cryptical near-ceremonial performance on a grand scale, aural Black Magic, such that it’s almost baffling to the outsider; perhaps Hennies and Feeney went there at dead of night and performed it in total secrecy, with only an audience of crickets to witness the event (and even those insects had to sign a waiver afterwards). This is the only way I can account for its blankness, its refusal to engage with a potential audience; it really is sound for its own sake, insisting on its stony presence in the confines of a cold and uncaring world.

Other item in this envelope is a duo between Bruno Duplant and Pedro Chambel. These two are the co-founders of the Rhizome.s label and have made numerous recordings together. This one is a CDR made for Eter-Lab, a Spanish (I think) laboratory thing which acts as a focal point for experimental actions, recordings, installations, and ideas expressed in image, sound, and text. Their website is one of the most mysterious things I’ve seen in this context, refusing to explain things in much detail; its seven adherents, acting like a quasi-religious cult, deal in symbols, allusions, and obscure esoterica. When they allude to “invisible” releases you know you’ve entered the other side of the mirror and we as an audience are suddenly obliged to engage with metaphysical riddles and puzzles. This record, All We Have Learned And Then Forgotten is however much less impenetrable and minimal than the above records, and may even appeal to regular Sound Projector listeners who enjoy noise and drone experiments, for instance those of Basque player Miguel A. García. Duplant and Chambei made this continual 44-minute piece using an organ and electronics; a steady unwavering block of distorted drone is the resultant emission. With García, they might share an interest in intensity and severity; unlike him, they don’t feel the need to explore or develop or change the tone too much, and simply want to sustain it for as long as human endurance will permit, and then keep going beyond that point. Passing your mind over this gravelly terrain will indeed have the effect of erasing your memory, as the title seems to be implying; you can feel brain cells being corroded and corrupted as you are drawn deeper into this terrible vortex of inhuman force. Yet there’s a savage beauty to this power as well, which may be why you can’t break free from its magnetic pull.

Estinto is an interesting title for this disc, as it means “extinct” or “(a debt) paid off”. However, what or whom Pierre-Yves Martel is paying off with this single 54 minute piece of music is not acknowledged. Treble viol and harmonica played simultaneously by Monsieur Martel, in a room, while sitting on a chair, probably; whilst being recorded by Ross Murray. It’s kind of like a pulsing sub-Wandelweiser silence-followed-by-signal-followed-by-silence piece; so if you imagine a guy sat there on his chair playing harmonica and treble viol simultaneously for 54 minutes. More like durational performance art, which arguably you might prefer to experience on dvd.

If you look at his website he is presenting himself more as an artist – it’s that ubiquitous term: “sound artist”, rather than “musician” although he does say that “he also works outside of instrumental music altogether, using a variety of objects rife with new sonic possibilities, from contact-mics and speakers to motors, wheels, surfaces and textures.” Like the label, he is Canadian; from Montréal I believe? The label is based not far away, in Hull, Québec. It is a piece of work that has a little trouble with its own existence outside of the artist’s head… I hesitate to use the word “conceptual” because there isn’t really much of a concept here. Clearly he’s playing with silence – the idea of using silence as a compositional tool which as I said before, is an idea I think he may have seen used by members of the Wandelweiser collective – although its equally possible that he came to this way of working in his own logical or logistical process of development – it is interesting to me (for reasons that admittedly have nothing to do with this disc before me) that Wandelweiser have gained or encouraged a reputation for using silence or quietness when quite a lot of their output is undeniably maximalist; Michael Pisaro’s A Wave And Waves for example – you couldn’t get much more maximalist than that, or at least this is the Greg Stuart rendering of it that I’m thinking of.

Pierre-Yves Martel’s work here is aimless, lacks the thrust of development and is somewhat repetitive. There are only two major changes that happen; although as an architectural tool compositionally this strategy works well. Overall, perhaps it could occupy the function of background music for an art gallery, say, were it not for the fact that sonically, it is so strident. This is a challenging piece. Do I applaud the artist’s decision to produce this piece of work? Yes. Yes, I do. Will I listen to it again at home for pleasure? I’ll let you know.

In the case of Hako To Oto (CRUSTACÉS #8), the small object in question is a music box. If you spin the tape, you might hear the occasional note issuing from said box within the confines of the “rural hotel room” in Portugal where it was recorded. Mostly though, you’ll hear a lot of silence, a lot of room tone…this is also part of Akama’s plan, creating “situations that magnify temporal/spatial experience with silence, time and space.” I found this release very testing, with nothing in the way of aesthetic enjoyment to reward one’s patience. But I expect I’m approaching it all wrong. It’s very clear she has virtually no interest in the music played by that music box, and wants the sound to break up the silence, or to punctuate the silence in some way. Maybe she intends this punctuation to take place on a grand scale, as though drawing a map of the hotel room, using sound as callipers.

In a way I have to admire Ryoko Akama’s determination to refuse conventional “beauty” in this work, and it obstinately declines to become anything more than just a tiny music box making occasional sounds in a silent room; no existentialist “meaning”, no transcendence through repetition, no deep listening, not even an appreciation of the silence, which Francisco López might once have insisted on. If any of this is near the mark, then it’s possible that Ryoko Akama is setting out a new benchmark for what minimalism might mean in the area of sound art. For more of her compositions, text-scores, installation pieces and so forth, see her site; she has performed Alvin Lucier’s Music on a Long Thin Wire, but that composition seems positively eventful compared to this. Arrived 29 July 2016.

Stefan Thut
Un/even And One
RUSSIA INTONEMA int018 CD (2016)

Swiss cellist Stefan Thut debuted his score Un/Even and One in St Petersburg in 2015 with a bevy of (somewhat more) local musicians who do a top job of sounding like they aren’t there. A short Youtube clip reveals much to this theory: for the 5-strong assembly, virtue is expressed in restraint from virtually any physical movement at all; just a young lady pushing a box around in the foreground while five instruments receive attention only spasmodically. I sense that the concept behind Thut’s scoring is one of meticulous refinement; that of distilling full bars and phrases into the merest of gestures, upon the blank canvas of near-silence. We should not be surprised to learn therefore of Thut’s affiliation with the Wandelweiser group, for whom such matters are a preoccupation.

Silence is, in fact, is one of two canvases common to Thut’s work. The other is ‘the box’. There’s one drawn on on the cover, with semi-explanatory text describing how Thut ‘joined the sounds from transcribed language played through the surface of a moving cardboard box’ to add to the enigma. As I understand it, the musicians’ fingers were prerecorded rubbing words into the surface of cardboard boxes, which recordings were played back during the performance, effectively encompassing the space in conceptual cardboard. The value of the symbol of the empty-box-as-pure-potential is appended by the actual movement of the box throughout the performance, its location at any given point conferring on each musician the right to play.

Over 40 minutes, silence intersperses with sounds barely identifiable: low-volume cello massage and rummaging beneath a layer of tape hiss; a mass of slippery shadows, exhaling emphysemically and pierced by sine waves in a dark basement that yawns with an ancient hunger. What the recording may lacks in terms of immediatism, it at least makes up for by stirring the imagination.

Is It Over?

Michael Pisaro
Mind Is Moving IX
RUSSIA INTONEMA int017 CD (2015)

Something of a go-to for less voluble composers, guitarist Denis Sorokin facilitates a recent work by another of the Wandelweiser composers, Michael Pisaro, for the novel combination of electric guitar, radio, stones and whistling. No prizes for naming the other, unnamed ingredient as silence (or a recorded approximation of) in immodest volume. The piece was refined in performances over two years (2013 to 2015) before being deemed medically fit for recording, in which: you’ve guessed it, the instruments/sound sources are addressed only sporadically between far lengthier and more considered pauses.

That the hapless listener might come unstuck is occasioned by the fact that the performer’s means of interpretation and the composer’s means of evaluation are equally nebulous. At what point is the performance deemed ‘acceptable’ and how is the listener to know when the standard has (not) been met? When the form of the piece stands so readily to baffle, it is difficult to gauge and this much is neither divulged nor easily relatable. However, one senses such judgements rely at least partially on attaining the ‘Goldilocks’ balance between pause and play that ‘the listener’ stops wondering whether the piece is contiguous and/or continuing. Reaching this sweet spot presumably necessitated a good deal of fine tuning of both composition and intuition.

Thus, the recording takes its place in Pisaro’s ever-satisfying catalogue, alongside fine companions such as 2016’s Melody, Silence by Cristián Alvear. Along with the Stefan Thut CD, it also brings further respectability to the Russian label Intonema, based in St Petersburg, where many of these performances are recorded. Limited edition run, needless to say.

Both Jurg Frey and Radu Malfatti enjoy reputations as composers and performers of quiet soundspace music so listeners should not be surprised that when these two gentlemen from Switzerland and Austria meet to work on an album together, the result is two discs of quiet music. As with many other recordings Yours Truly reviews here (you all know what I have in mind here), the sound volume really has to be turned up to The Max or Eleven on a scale of 0 to 10 to fully appreciate this work. Malfatti presents one disc of pure tone and subterranean musing and rumble and Frey answers back with field recordings, everyday background ambience and various instruments including clarinet and piano. Since all the music is improvised and was recorded over a 2-day period, I assume Frey had a group of people (uncredited in the album’s sleeve notes) helping out.

Malfatti’s disc “shoguu” is broken down into five tracks for ease of listening but can still be a forbidding listening experience for most people. In this most minimalist of minimalist music, the extended cautious tone drones, limited in their range and expression, are separated by spaces that seem completely empty of mood, ambience and meaning. One’s ears still abhor a vacuum and even the most seemingly context-less pieces, on the surface nothing more than a musical binary code of tone and not-tone, end up with meaning assigned to them by the listener’s own imagination. Safe to say then that no two people will hear “shoguu” in the same way. The same person’s perception of “shoguu” will also change each time the disc is spun, depending on the person’s mood and the circumstances accompanying each occasion the disc is played. At this point, it would be fair to say that many people, faced with music such as this, lacking a narrative and context that more or less suggest to them what to think, what to feel and how to respond, will end up bored and restless.

Frey’s disc, labelled “instruments, field recordings and counterpoints”, is a slightly busier but no less quiet audio experience. Thanks to the continuous background ambience of outside traffic and people shifting instruments and furniture about – perhaps that’s why Frey’s “helpers” are uncredited since he would have had to go outside and get the names of all the pedestrians and vehicle drivers who happened to pass by during the recording of his piece as well as all the tradespeople walking in and out of the building – the whole disc presents a continuous tapestry of sound textures all kept together and unified by various tones played by Frey and his instrumentalists. Or is it that the field recordings unify the sounds Frey & Co generate? One’s attention is entertained by these polar opposites along with the silence-versus-noise paradox – which is noisier, more disturbing: the actual noise itself or the silence? – while Frey’s side runs its course.

This is one of those recordings which, to be fully understood, require some knowledge of the musicians themselves: Frey and Malfatti are members of the Wandelweiser collective of musicians which formed in 1992 to investigate and explore the potentials of quietness and silence as an essential element of music. Though they have been members for 20 years, I am not sure they have actually played or collaborated together very much. This disc expresses not only their interest in silence as an important creative element in their music but also their parallel “non-collaborating collaboration” contributions to it. The label Erstwhile Records becomes a significant actor in bringing the two musicians together and probably should have been credited in an active musical capacity beyond merely performing its usual support and distribution label function.

I guess while I’m at it, this is also one of those recordings that might have been better served as a DVD release so that listeners have something to watch and can appreciate the processes that Frey and Malfatti use to demonstrate their ideas and beliefs about the roles of quiet and noise in their music. As a pure listening experience, this set really is very demanding for those of us with short attention spans. I know I usually have to get up and do something while playing these discs; the downside is that I end up devoting less attention to the music because it is so quiet and monotonous.

Contact: Erstwhile Records

Paul Khimasia Morgan is owner of the UK’s Slightly Off Kilter label, and also occasionally makes music and sound-art himself. Empty Frame (ENGRAVED GLASS EG.PCD008) is one where he aurally professes his alignment with Mark Wastell, Rhodri Davies, Burkhard Beins, and others of the “reduced” playing school by making three tracks of extremely quiet and mysterious process-based music, floating in a midway point between improvisation and that unclassifiable activity that involves the manipulation of small objects, and tiny microphones to capture the sounds from those manipulations. On the first track there may be some motorised components involved, but the second cut ‘The prospect of dim sum’ is more of a serene, slightly processed, electronic drone whose origins are untraceable by the ear. The label is largely a showcase for the work of its owner, Jez Riley French, who declares his love for “infinite detail” and sounds that are “often overlooked and hidden”, but he has also released work by Richard Kamerman, Anne Guthrie, John Grzinich, and many others. From 17 January 2012.

One Speak for Both

Speaking of Mr Kamerman, here’s another release on his Copy For Your Records label. Un Lieu Pour Être Deux (CFYR) is credited to Antoine Beuger, who appears to be a Dutch flautist and composer associated with the Wandelweiser Group, an international team of hard-core ascetics who profess a very extreme doctrine of silent music. We’re passingly familiar with the work of one member, the trombonist Radu Malfatti who in turn has had some influence on Mattin, so that gives us some reference point; Malfatti’s testing music is sometimes the equivalent of a death sentence, executed with incredible slowness. The composition (if such it be) by Beuger is realised here by the guitarist Barry Chabala and Ben Owen (of Winds Measure Recordings), who plays synthesizers and contributes field recordings. The 47-minute work seems to have been executed in a single day in New York, and the field recordings are all urban in nature; the distant sound of traffic forms the basis for much of the piece. I think there may be some sort of “imaginary map” or psycho-geographic connotations to decode as well, but the minimal information and cover in this instance is giving nothing away. As a musical performance, it’s quite some way from any familiar sort of improvised music, and the players are both slow, deliberate, and almost cautious in their utterances, drip-feeding small chunks of synth tones and guitar notes that are studiedly inscrutable. I think we have to process this as a conceptual composition, where even the field recordings don’t mean what they appear to mean, and most aesthetic pleasures are being strictly denied to us, or at best being rationed out very carefully. To put it another way, this seems to be a rare use of field recordings as a compositional element, rather than something to be heard in its own right, which is an encouraging development. Strangely compelling to listen to, this perplexing work holds us in a state of considerable tension and concentration for its duration. 150 copies only and mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi, an apt choice as he represents the Italian wing of this school of emptied-out music. From 16 January 2012.

An Aerie Skit

Two more of the items from the & Records label of Montreal which arrived here 20 January 2012. The record Ave W (&10) is credited to Tiari Kese, who apparently plays all the instruments – keyboards, French horn, electronics and samples, but it’s more likely to be all the work of Michel F Côté, who’s a Canadian electro-acoustic composer. A biography of alleged Bulgarian Tiari Kese can be found online, but with its Stockhausen, Beatles and Debord connections it’s all too good to be true and is probably just another internet hoax. The record does have one glorious track title, ‘Dreams of Spartacus’s Spacecraft’, but I mostly found it a rather turgid listen, directionless and shapeless digital layers of drone that amount to less and less the more they’re piled up. The instrument-playing has been processed and denormalised to an extreme degree, sucking the humanity out of everything until we’re left with echoed and orphaned horn tones floating aimlessly on a sea of samples, light distortion and glitch.

The City Wears a Furry Hat

Even less enjoyable is Solitary Pleasures (&RECORDS &15) by Fortner Anderson. It comprises several short 90-second vocal recits by the poet Anderson while accompanied by electro-acoustic noise played by a non-jazz trio of Alexandre St-Onge, Sam Shalabi, and Michel F. Côté again, this time playing the drums. The release accompanies a book of poems published at the same time. We’ve encountered Fortner Anderson before in TSP15 where we noted the baffling Six Silk Purses, recordings of his spoken word exploits provided to sound artists to add their musical interpretations; in fact the same musicians were on that release too. Fortner’s short couplets are expressed here in diary form, each segment beginning with a calendar date announced in solemn tones, before proceeding with his free-form observations such as “I had forgotten the calculus of transcendence…”, alternating with mini-stories about life in the city and the characters he meets. It all feels oddly old-fashioned, like one of the forgotten Beats. Fortner attempts some jazzy syncopation in his delivery, even as the music drags itself along like a three-legged dog on a hot afternoon. Kenneth Patchen it ain’t.