Contemporary classical album from Bekah Simms, composer from Newfoundland and based I think in Glasgow and/or Toronto just now. Her Bestiaries (CENTREDISCS CMCCD 30622) arrives with a bizarre cover image produced by Dan Tapper and perhaps depicting some imaginary form of evil plant life bent on wreaking revenge. Inside, the photo portrait of Simms herself shows us a formidable poise and self-assurance, resembling the reincarnation of Yma Sumac looking out on her creation with implacable gaze.
The three pieces here are a snapshot of a compositional method where she used sampling and quotations in her work, and given this happened 2018-2020, it seems she’s already moving away from it. But two of the pieces here are enlivened with electronic noise joining the chamber orchestra. There’s also her interest in metal music, exhibited on the opening cut ‘Foreverdark’ – matter of fact she loves Bathory and System Of A Down about as much as her buddy Amahl Arulanandam, who plays the cello solo here. The work was written for him and is dedicated to him. I’m at a loss to account for this bizarre ‘Foreverdark’, which at times appears like a grotesque lumbering beast with its ill-fitting moving parts, yet the craft with which it’s been scored and assembled is considerable. It’s nothing so naff as transcriptions of metal guitar solos rescored for the cello, and instead she’s aiming to replicate amplified noise and feedback. I’m fairly sure that most metal fans would be baffled by its internal dynamics and unfathomable complexity. Yet it’s maximal, powerful, and informed by a darkness that comes from somewhere more profound than a simple love of metal records. Perhaps Simms has done something to capture the wild spirit of this contemporary music form, and recast it in orchestral form.
That piece is played here by the wonderfully-named Cryptid Ensemble, who also play ‘Bestiary I & II’, with the soprano singer Charlotte Mundy. This is Simms’ take on looking at strange books of medieval animals (probably including gryphons and unicorns) and filtering the information through the music of Joanna Newsom (of all people), specifically her Ys album. I guess this is what Simms means by “sampling and quotation” – it’s about re-interpreting external source material. I might have been half-expecting a conventional musical portrait like Poulenc’s Carnival of the Animals, where we get a different musical theme for each friendly beast. Instead, Simms seems determined to say something about the general weirdness of everything, in a single 11-minute suite that exploits Mundy’s evident talent for forming wordless mouth-sounds as well as crystal-clear enunciations of cryptic phrases. Decidedly odd.
There’s also ‘From Void’, which has no electronics at all and is played with taut precision by woodwinds, strings, and percussion. The Ensemble Contemporain de Montreal sound like they’re cutting a living organism to pieces on the table, and taking an unhealthy relish in the action. Rebecca Saunders, an English composer now living in Berlin, composed the original ‘Void’ that this is derived from; Simms tells us she made a “digital analysis” of that work, and indicates that it was full of errors, deliberately so. I’m already lost, though as a process it sounds to me like something Reinhold Friedl wouldn’t shy away from, especially if computers are involved. But in any case that was just the starting point. What Bekah Simms wanted was to get under the skin of the acoustic instruments in some way; judging by the audible results, and the fact that she speaks of “making them whirr and buzz like some insectoid machine”, she seems to have acted like a watchmaker taking apart the cogs of a clock, then rebuilding it as an engine of war.
Press release for this item is full of superlatives like “visceral” and “uncompromising” and “extraordinary vision”, but here’s a unique record which does a lot to live up to these claims. From 21st September 2022.