New chamber music from Eren Gümrükçüoğlu, the Turkish-born composer, on Pareidolia (NEW FOCUS RECORDINGS FCR343) played by JACK Quartet, Mivos Quartet, Ensemble Suono Giallo, Deviant Septet, and others.
Born in Istanbul, Gümrükçüoğlu is an academic teacher as well as a composer, plus he has a strong improvisation and jazz background, knows about the traditional folk music of his own country, and understands about how to use modern technology. Several of these traits show up in the music here – for instance, the jazz elements appear in “refracted form” according to the notes, so that his orchestrated music may throw shapes according to jazz-like rules about rhythm and harmony, yet still remain in modern classical mode. As to the technology, electronic music shows up here also on two tracks, ‘Pandemonium’ and ‘Asansor Asimptou’, played by the man himself. However, the title track might be a good place to begin your investigations; there’s a string quartet, but there’s also the formidable synth playing of Conrad Tao, the woodwinds of Z. Baghirov, and the drumming of Thom Monks. At 23:34 mins, ‘Pareidolia’ is a pretty extensive demonstration of the composer’s plan to “intersect diverse musical styles”; splicing severe avant-classical modernism with a form of jazz, except it’s like jazz rethought as a chess problem, where the participants are strapped into chairs and can only move a piece through telekinesis and brain-waves. I love the sound of Tao’s ill-natured synth wheezing its way in like an unwelcome badger scratching at the door, and the percussion and woodwind parts are trying to fit in like very tall guests at a cocktail party in a bungalow, bumping their heads. Extremely dissonant; the harmonic scheme is hard to follow, and the skeletal music is worryingly strange. As far as we know, this piece doesn’t explicitly set out to convey the notion of that condition that allows humans to see meaningful images in a random pattern, but just imagine the troubling pictures that must have passed before the composer’s eyes for him to dream this one up.
I’m drawn to the two all-electronics pieces, for reasons I can’t fathom – they seem to present an unmediated version of the composer’s intentions. ‘Pandemonium’ is pitched here as some kind of “dystopian factory” picture, as if that theme hadn’t been done to death by a thousand Industrial cassette bands since 1980, but I do like the unpredictable way he’s getting these disjunctive results by his very idiosyncratic approach to sampling. It’s mostly done by clashing sounds based on maximum timbral contrast, as if fitting together fields of colours in a collage to make those chromatic values clash and sing. ‘Asansor Asimptou’ is equally strong, making bold use of the “spatialised stereo field” as he pushes his elements from one speaker to another as if they were billiard balls, and he’s using a powerful sharpshooter’s rifle as a cue. Not as wildly scattershot as ‘Pandemonium’ perhaps, but I like its austere feel, its single-minded determination – almost the sound of a remorseless computer virus at work. I can’t help thinking that Conrad Schnitzler would have applauded it.
Remainder of the programme is mostly more conventional string quartet fare, still packed with the modernist tones and clashes which I assume are the business of every good post-serialist, though I kinda like the political rant thing ‘Ordinary Things’, which showcases spoken word input from Recep Tayyip Erdogan. This fellow has been president of the country since 2014, and apparently he’s an example of the populist right-wing blight that has been undermining trust in governments across many countries lately – Trump in America, Johnson in the UK – crazy, narcissistic, authoritarian windbags who use sentimental nostalgia to manipulate the crowds, and rely on their so-called “charismatic” charm to push their troubling agendas for the erosion of human rights, the advance of deregulation, and the removal of judicial checks and balances from their corrupt regimes. Eren Gümrükçüoğlu uses his quartet to mock Erdogan, and the crazy over-emphatic music is intended to present him as a buffoon, even as it cleverly matches its rhythmic constructs against the pattern of his speaking voice. An easy target, perhaps, but we need to use every weapon we can against such figures, and musical satire is a good way to go. From 27th October 2022.