From Canada, the record Slow, quiet music in search of electric happiness (REDSHIFT RECORDS TK497) is mostly about the idea of distance and separation.
The four instruments – electric guitars in this instance – were positioned in a large performance space such that the musicians were sitting as far apart from each other as possible. The idea is that the music reaches out and fills the space, or perhaps more subtly emphasises the impressions of space and distance. Part of this is using the reverberant acoustics of the performance area, and exploiting a seven-second reverb delay. I think this was originally done inside a church, although the recording on the CD was done a few months later in a large amphitheatre, and the reverb was enhanced digitally. Tim Brady, the director behind this project, has been interested in various manifestations of surround-sound and immersive music for nearly 30 years, and although he has worked with 100-guitar orchestras to do it, he’s now formed a dedicated version of Instruments Of Happiness with just four players, that is himself, Jonathan Barriault, Simon Duchesne, and Francis Brunet-Turcotte. He’s also refined his ideas to the point that he’s now calling it “spatialised music”.
For him, the pandemic and social distancing turned out to be an opportunity for him to realise the “spatial” aspects of his concept in a very meaningful way, although the plan to invite four composers to contribute their long-form slow-moving pieces seems to have started in 2018, some time before the COVID bug began to bite us. The composers – Louise Campbell, Rose Bolton, Andrew Noseworthy and Andrew Staniland – were all given the exact same guidelines by Brady, with the form determined to a large extent by the idea of four guitarists sitting vast distances away from each other. Even the length of each piece (14 minutes) was a strict part of the rules, and governed by the stopwatch. A highly varied programme of music results – from the troubling and discordant tones of Campbell, to the outright abstract scrapes and groans of Noseworthy, and the melancholic romantic sighs of Rose Bolton, and ending with the solemn low-register sternness of Staniland, with his grim vista ‘Notre-Dame is Burning’.
These pieces all exploit the capabilities of the players and their echoing plangent guitars, and although the mood is emotionally downbeat and rather heartsore, it’s also quite romantic in places, and generally very accessible contemporary music. I also like the discipline of working in 14-minute stretches, as it prevents the music from becoming too ambient or drifty. From 20th December 2021.