From Norway we have the LP Temporal Gardening (AURORA RECORDS ACDLP5114) – credited to Stephan Meidell, who does sampling and electronics, plus the trio Bergen Barokk.
The latter might be specialists in early music (hence the “baroque” in their name”) – Jostein Gundersen plays recorders, Siri Hilmen the baroque cello, and Hans Knut Sveen plays the harpsichord. Indeed the entire commission dating from 2020 arose from an idea to splice early music techniques with contemporary electronica and electro-acoustic methods. In practice, this mainly amounts to live sampling and live electronic interventions, and the ingenious idea to get the acoustic part of the act to play through amplified speakers which have either been mounted inside a bass drum, or positioned in such ways as to allow the sounds to resonate through extra percussion such as cymbal or gong. Stephan Meidell did the recording, the re-processing, and credits himself with all the compositions too – it might have been his original idea to repurpose the music of Bergen Barokk in this manner.
Meidell is no stranger to the Hubro label, home to much altruistic and colourful instrumental music, and we have heard him as part of the Cakewalk trio on that label in 2012 and 2013. All nine tracks here are named after various plants, flowers, trees, and other such growths – even their Latin names are provided, perhaps to lend the project a shade more gravitas – and there’s the tasteful watercolour painting by Aurora Solberg which is strongly suggestive of plant life. These scant clues made me wonder if Temporal Gardening might have a quasi-scientific dimension (we have heard occasional forays by sound artists which where based on the notion of plant-generated music – for instance Silva Datum Musica by Plein Air), but to the contrary, this is all composed-improvised music and produced by human beings (interacting with machines and acoustical set-ups), and the “gardening” trope is just an added sweetener.
Admittedly the conceit of revisiting the art of David Munrow in this way has some novelty, and the surface sound of the album has some charms. I found it rather twee and sentimental; Bergen Barokk (who are experts in playing the music of Bach, Purcell, Telemann and others) seem to be out of their depth, forsaking their skill for precision and clarity in favour of this somewhat unstructured, half-melodic material. Stephan Meidell’s lacklustre contributions lack force, and do little to fundamentally transform the sounds being made. (06/09/2023)