Four new items from the art label Sublime Retreat in Wroclaw Poland, operated by Taras Opanasuik. Three of them feature the work of Bruno Duplant, that French minimalist composer who is a regular name in these pages; his arrival through the letterbox spreads consternation in my kitchen. All arrived 31 October 2022.
On The Memory Of Things (SR013), Duplant has teamed up with Seth Nehil to create three puzzling tracks, one of which is titled ‘The Limits of the Sea’. Photograph artworks depict details from floor and ceiling of a nondescript, grubby indoor space which might be an unkempt art studio or an installation space. Our two creators are in pursuit of another almighty intangible – that of human memory. “It is not the memories themselves that are important, but the way we connect them,” writes Frederic Tentelier a propos of this drifty, disconnected music; “we build a memorial and sound structure by piling one layer of the present on top of another.” Tis true Frederic, yet what he writes implies some form of structure (perhaps with a foundation and solid base), yet what Duplant and Nehil are doing comes across as very evanescent, fleeting, vaporous. Like memory itself, perhaps. If we all struggle to recall certain distant events or things which we’re sure are embedded in our precious memory-banks, then here is the sound our brains make when they’re doing that. American Seth Nehil is a name we’ve heard in association with his compadre John Grzinich, and ND magazine (of which I happen to have some copies, thanks to mnortham). For his personal history here, he stresses his work (since 1990) tape, found instruments, old recorders and bric-a-brac. Listening to The Memory Of Things is frustrating and challenging, since it undermines your expectations (deliberately) at every turn, but if you can get on its wavelength then Hermes himself will reward you with a bag of fruit.
Synchronicité (SR010) may be more to your taste, assuming you’re old-fashioned enough to cling to the idea of people playing musical instruments. Have I ever heard Duplant playing one before? He’s here on the droning organ, while Rutger Zuydervelt supplies electronics, and the duo produce a single brick of digital slabbery timed to last precisely 50:00 mins. Two Duplant photos here too, one on the cover and one on the insert, both of them charged with nostalgia and poignant sorrow, mainly due to the way he’s distressed the surface, blurred the focus, distorted the image; and kept the faces of his human subjects hidden from us. Such intrigue. It’s tempting to see these haunting images as extensions of the “memory” theme contained in the above item, but it seems our men aren’t attempting anything especially conceptual this time, rather a very impressionistic sound-image of “a dark park at night or a frosty forest in the morning”, according to their own notes. What they’re pursuing is something equally evanescent, “traces and echoes of something fleeting and barely noticeable”. Zuydervelt (often recording as Machinefabriek) has form in the area of lengthy processed drones and might be seen as the ideal partner for such a fey project, and I’m happy to note he’s reined in his mufflers for this episode and turns in a very clean result. As for Duplant, his organ playing would make Olivier Messiaen smile, and with his romantic leanings on this record he’s emerging as a post-modern successor to Satie, Ravel, and Debussy.
Now here’s Machinefabriek teamed up with Gareth Davis on Standards (of sorts) (SR012). It’s quite a different proposition to the above items. It’s still pretty conceptual though. As you may know the history of jazz music in America is full of “standards”, that is well-known popular songs from Tin Pan Alley or Broadway which were used by musicians – everyone from Charlie Parker to Miles Davis and John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk – as the starting point for extemporisation. Any good jazz combo would have memorised the chord changes, melodies, and structures of these songs, starting off with the “head” so that the audience would have something recognisable, before departing into their improvisations (which, after be-bop, became progressively more free and experimental). This process is now rethought and even perhaps détourned by today’s record; the two musicians are trying to recast the whole idea of “thriving on a riff” and put it into a new perspective. For starters, they didn’t use songs by Cole Porter or Arthur Schwartz, and instead inform us that they “use pieces of contemporary classical music as the material for [the] point of departure.” Which pieces? We don’t know; are we hearing their take on a Stockhausen score, or are they reworking a loop from a CD of Mozart concertos? However, the link to jazz is still (just about) intact, as Gareth Davis plays the clarinet, occasionally even freaking out in a manner that wouldn’t seem out of place on a 1969 BYG LP. But Machinefabriek’s electronic music is strange and alienating, confirming the very experimental nature of this release. There’s one other tenuous popular song connection as track two is titled ‘Klangs That You Are’, obliquely referring to the 1939 hit by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, but including the German word for “sound” and reminding us (in a rather humourous manner) that this is a sound-art experiment. These two have been paired before (e.g. on Ghost Lanes from 2011) and we’ve heard Davis blow his clarinet on many experimental, improvised, semi-classical and avant-rock records in the past.
Lastly here’s Bruno Duplant again, solo, with Le Jour D’Après (SR011), once again packaged in evocative cover art of wispy washed-out photos. Outside is a face staring into the distance with longing eyes, inside is a flower that may have been pressed in the pages of a scrapbook. At first listen this lovely 30-minute miniature seems to be another exercise in wispy, romantic, nostalgia, with its faded minimal tones evoking lost memories. Music and field recordings blend perfectly to form a seamless whole. I particularly like the disconnected piano notes with their slight wobble in the recording, as if emulating the workings of a faulty memory. For some reason, I find myself reminded of the dreamlike and haunting music of Joe Frawley, the American composer, although he’s much more explicit about his surrealist and literary influences, often setting out to tell a story with his melancholic piano and tapes. That said, one online reviewer (Peppe Trotta) discerns literary and cinematic subtexts here in the wistful music of Le Jour D’Après. Hearing this romantic side of Duplant, I feel we’re now quite some way from the severe Rhizome.s record which I heard in 2017, or the very minimal work Soleil Clandestin made for Editions Wandelweiser in 2020. But the composer hasn’t abandoned his compositional skills, and this one is made with the same rigour, care, and attention to detail. Very moving and a great success.