Anthony Moore, former member of Slapp Happy and Henry Cow, and creator of amazing avant-pop/rock LPs such as Flying Doesn’t Help and World Service, now resident in St Leonards near Hastings, produces a drone record called CSound + Saz (TOUCH T33.21). He did it in 2022 at the Iklectik venue to help celebrate 40 years of the Touch label – or rather, he didn’t – he did not actually appear in person to make the date as he was stricken with COVID.
The piece seems to be some sort of dialogue between computer software and a real instrument, in this case the Turkish saz – a kind of long-necked lute associated with Ottoman classical music which probably has a history going back hundreds of years (an Armenian variant of it, for instance, is known to have been played in the 13th century). The software part of this is CSound, so called because of the programming language it was originally issued in, and it’s a popular open source free program for audio. Moore tells us he came up with a gui for CSound for this particular piece, and also reminds us he’s very familiar with the saz, having loved playing it for about 50 or 60 years. Also did I mention he used the e-bow to create jangly drones from the strings? The home recording made by the COVID-stricken artist was played back in the Waterloo venue, and now here’s an unedited recording of same on today’s CD.
Summa: (A) beautiful music; (B) an imaginative and interesting aural inter-weaving of the ancient and the modern, the acoustic and the digital; (C) given extra poignancy, somehow, by physical absence of Moore from the event. From 2 May 2023.