Three items received from Cyril Bondi.
Swiss team of Cyril Bondi and D’Incise continue their composerly career with Zgodnosc (INSUB.REC.CD17), a piece played here by the Italian Blutwurst Ensemble. Slow-moving acoustic fare supplemented with a background tape provided by the composers. The Polish word Zgodnosc may have connotations of “compatibility” and “accord”, and indeed the music does convey a reassuring sense of collaboration between the players in its open-ended slowly-unfolding tones. Simple statements, basic repetitions, and much deliberation show us how it’s possible to reach this accord; if only other human beings, in politics, business, and education, could learn how to do likewise. The specimens from a natural history museum on the cover are a poignant reminder of mortality, but also have a kind of poetic significance, as if the skeletons were still alive and swimming in black, murky depths.
Here’s the second part in the series of the Alvear/Bondi duets, which appear with potter’s wheel images on the covers. They continue to showcase modern compositions by their colleagues in Switzerland and Chile. ‘Sin Titulo #26’ is by Nicolas Carrasco from Santiago; played with just tuned bowls, pitch pipes, and an electric guitar, it realises a surprisingly rich harvest of ideas from very simple repetitions of just a few notes, placed just so in an otherwise “empty” stage or landscape or canvas. Cristiàn Alvear exhibits his usual close-lipped poise, playing slightly muffled repeated notes with the insistence of a gifted child genius trying to communicate something to his dim, uncomprehending parents. When he modulates suddenly into a chord – or what passes for a chord, attenuated and washed-out as a bleached mosquito skull – the effect is almost shocking to the ear. A truly enigmatic puzzle of a piece, advancing us towards an unknown end by means of cryptic crossword clues, riddles, and gnomic utterances; yet it’s also as clear as day with its implied meanings. As they near the end of the piece and step up the tempo of their musical thoughts, moving from a crawl to a meander, what results is like a stuck-groove from the finest post-punk record never made in 1980.
The CD is pressed with no index points, and the musicians and composers aren’t about to do anything so obvious as letting us know exactly when ‘Ground In Cis’ composed by Anna-Kaia Meklin begins, though it may be roughly at 30 mins through the 50-minute programme. She herself plays the viola de gamba alongside the harmonium of Bondi and Alvear’s electric guitar. Meklin lives in Basel just now, so she fits the theme of Swiss composers, but she was originally born in Finland. I think it’s great to find another modern musician skilled in playing the viola de gamba, and it’s now increasingly inept for me to claim that it’s “rarely heard” in the fields of improvisation and modernist composition. She learned to play it studying under Paolo Pandolfo in the Schola Cantorum in Basel. With its continuous tones and elegant harmonic interplay, this piece is quite different to the elliptical Carrasco piece above. It’s like being surrounded by a huge, near-white sheet of linen which somehow turns into the whole world; much warmth, compassion, and simpatico emotions are imbued in every fold, and yet Anna-Kaia Meklin still manages to retain her clear-eyed view of the world. Undistracted by bogus sentimentality, she creates a truthful and honest picture of what she sees.
For third and final CD in this batch, Bondi has found himself released on Edition Wandelweiser Records along with five other artistic colleagues – Rachel Gordy, David Marchetto, Margaux Monetti, Luc Müller, and Sarah Waelchli. Ce Qu’il Nous Restera (EWR 2127) might not be a conventional musical composition as such, perhaps more of a conceptual exercise, making use of overlapping voices and short statements taken out of context. It’s intended as a form of “conversation” among these six creators, except the sounds weren’t made by anything so prosaic as sitting them together in a room so they could discuss the creative impulse. Instead, Bondi has captured what he can from their unguarded moments – rehearsals and warm-ups and other “rituals”, focussing on moments that weren’t intended to be made public. If art is about making an exhibition, here are some sonic “glimpses” into the more private life of a creator. I’d imagine he’d have captured their brain-waves during sleep, if he could, emulating the surrealists. Not all of them are musicians, even; Margaux Monetti and Sarah Waelchli are dancers, David Marchetto and Rachel Gordy are actors. A multi-lingual tapestry of murmurs and whispers is accompanied by strange, minimal sounds, percussive interludes, pattering of feet (presumably) and semi-musical bursts, punctuated with many silent pauses. All of this may seem unpromising, but somehow it amounts to a very sympathetic evocations of the creative process, suggesting how ideas and inspirations work in real life. Instead of announcing themselves in a loud thunderclap of creative energy, they are there embodied in the small gestures of boring everyday life, and may begin as short, half-formed phrases, whose deeper significance may not be clear until much later in the artistic process. And it’s interesting that Bondi has found all of this richness in the intersection between music, dance, and the spoken word.
All the above from 10 February 2022.