Reading Music might be a trio of Swedish players, Johan Arrias, Lisa Ullén, and Henrik Olsson – I’m not entirely sure as they call Reading Music a “platform” and have ambitions for collaborative work, seeking to blur edges between composition and improvisation, use graphic scores where possible, and declare they are open to any form of hybrid methods that may obtain in the performing arts context.
Volume 1 (AUSCULTO FONOGRAM AUF007) seems to be their first release, and to their credit they’ve managed to secure commissions from some heavy names – Hanna Hartman, Nomi Epstein, and Michael Pisaro-Lui, one of the godfathers of the Wandelweiser crew. Reading the extensive sleeve notes here leaves me baffled, but that’s probably not a real problem – I’m gleaning some commonality between the three composers, in their use of instructional charts and diagrams, and some exceptionally open-ended parameters to each piece – whether that’s Epstein and her “labyrinth of options” or Hartmann and her “abstract instructions”. A situation which suits our threesome just fine, as they are very keen to bring their own interpretations to each piece, wielding their saxophone, piano, contact mics, objects, and a garden hose as freely as they wish. Though a part of me finds the general vagueness here a bit off-putting, I must admit that Hartman’s ‘Foreign Fridges’ is winning me over, with its suggestion that it occupies some halfway house between a circuit diagram and a drawing of a fridge. We’ve heard this contemporary Swedish genius before on a percussion record by Noam Bierstone, but this odd vision of hers, with its confusing information about the best way to read the notation, is a small gem of eccentric mind-mapping.
In like manner, ‘portals’ by Nomi Epstein feels more like an intellectual version of a treasure hunt game, where the clues are deliberately intended to send all the players on a walk around the country where they very quickly get lost. The descriptive text here can feel like a very stilted description of how musicians listen to each other when they’re playing, but our plucky trio embrace the situation with the gusto of three hares running over the hill. To put it another way, they actually like getting lost, as they feel they’re ending up in an unexpected place with no idea how they got there. Lastly there’s the ultra-minimal ‘Der erste Stern is das letzte Haus’ from Pisaro-Lui. I’ve long been flummoxed by this composer’s work, and while a 2019 record by Insub Meta Orchestra did give me a glimpse of its possibilities, today’s piece seems vexatious and difficult. It may have something to do with fallen leaves, but it’s not clear if these leaves were scattered across the music manuscript as the first step in a Cage-like compositional approach, or even if the leaves existed at all. Maybe everything is just a metaphor for something else. The trio slow themselves down to a stop, making the previous two tracks seem positively over-eventful. Admittedly there are moments when the piano and woodwind arrive at a pleasing harmonic combination in among the endless stretches of blanked-out silence, but that pleasure might not even be the aim here. The composer appears pleased with the end result – at any rate, he speaks of ruminating on a poem by Rilke and alludes to “images that rise and fall in the mind”
We’ve heard two of these players before on the excellent Crystalline record from 2020 when they joined Angharad Davies, and also Lisa Ullén on that slightly mannered Swedish jazz record Step Up A Second!. Henrik Olsson appeared on the Muddersten record from Norway. This, from 28 Feb 2023.