Crystal House

Two new cassettes from the Presses Précaires label in Montreal. Both arrived 10th January 2023.

Alma Laprida has lived in Buenos Aires for ten years, but moved to Maryland USA in 2021. Full marks to her for being a composer to make use of the Tromba Marina, also called the Nun’s Fiddle, and more colloquially the “trumpet marine” which despite its name suggesting a member of the brass family is in fact a stringed instrument, and since it’s been around since medieval times is reckoned as one precursor of today’s bass fiddle. However, the music on Ensayos Baschet does not feature that unusual instrument, and instead showcases Laprida playing the “Cristal Baschet”. If you’re a collector of obscure and wonderful sound art records, you’ll already be familiar with François Baschet and his brother Bernard and their sound-sculpture inventions, given a slightly higher profile by the efforts of Jacques and Yvonne Lasry and the records released as Structures Sonores Lasry-Baschet in the 1960s and 1970s (though there’s also a nifty glass organ French EP from 1957 one would love to own).

Glass rods, a metal frame, fibreglass cones…you play a Cristal Baschet by simply stroking the rods, having first remembered to wet your fingertips in a nearby bowl of water. Uncanny deep drones and spectral high tones result, quite beyond the reach of most conventional musical instruments, following no known scale or pitch. Alma Laprida performed and recorded herself playing at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires, and in the background we hear guided tours taking place as children and other art patrons mill about soaking up the culture. The combined effect of these two basic sound sources is very … pleasing. It adds a kind of spatial depth to the record. I think if we just heard the Cristal Baschet by itself it would seem very strange and alien, but having this unusual manifestation occurring in an otherwise normal environment is especially poignant. The schoolchildren and other visitors – assuming they can hear this unearthly sound – seem unaffected by the music, untouched, as it they’re existing in another dimension. Maybe Laprida is in another dimension herself. Eventually though they will hear it and then they will be changed. Given time, Alma Laprida could probably effect a beneficial change across the whole world, one corner at a time.

Julián Galay is also from Buenos Aires but now living in Berlin it seems, where he produced Eine Stadt, Ein Haus – his audio tribute to his new home. His plan is to include the house, the neighbourhood, and the entire city. He did it in 2022 in the Pankow district on Brehmestrasse and the resulting tape is a “live” recording, and tuning forks and sine waves were also used…thus providing, one assumes, an additional layer of processed or naturally-resonating drone on top of the urban field recordings…

Galay was guided by the text scores of Craig Pedersen, the Montreal musician who happens to be an improvising trumpeter as well as sound artist and who runs the excellent Mystery & Wonder label with Elizabeth Millar. Galay and Pedersen did correspond in friendly manner and these compositional ideas were one outcome of that happy union. I think the basic structure to this work is a very simple one, highlighting a difference between “inside” and “outside”; you have to hear the first side to get the flavour of life out on the street before you enter the fawn-coloured walls of the “inside” environment on side B, be it Galay’s kitchen where hot coffee awaits, or his living room where rugs may throw. In short, play all 24+ minutes of the tape to enjoy the full effect. What’s oddly striking is how the freedoms and possibilities of the street (sunshine, birdsong, children at play) are soon curtailed by the vaguely ominous menace of the indoor set, where the sine waves hover like unwelcome visitors and each metallic strike of the tuning fork is like a step in a magic ritual which Julián Galay is performing with care and deliberation. Good microphones evidently essential to capture that elusive “room tone” you hear so much about.

Note how the cover design to this one is a series of stations on the underground, or points on the street map that lead us to who knows where. And if you think that’s a clue to his psycho-geographical inclinations, you’d not be far wrong – one of his aims is to reveal the “unconscious of architectural spaces and institutions”, and he does this in a very intuitive and personal manner, which is commendable. I mean he listens to his dreams as if they contain secret information to guide him. We might add that Julián Galay is classified here as an “undisciplinary” composer, which may mean that he works in several media and not just one (and he does – sound, video, installation, performance), but hopefully it also means he’s given to fits of unruly behaviour, throwing ashtrays around like a true maverick, upsetting many gallery curators and critics in the process.