From Belgium, Porous Structures II (ASPEN EDITIES 019) might be the latest instalment in a long-running project by Ruben Machtelinckx, a composer and performer who’s been working on it since 2019.
Three long tracks, all played on acoustic guitars with steel strings – apart from the percussion, by Toma Gouband. Frederik Leroux and Fredrik Rasten are the two other guitarists joining Machtelinckx in this plan. There seems to be something almost evanescent about this Porous Structures concept – the composer gets there not by writing down musical notes on staves (I think), but simply by exploring sound with other collaborators; he likes to keep things very open-ended, and often reaches for the metaphor of trees and stones to convey the drift of his ideas. The term “eco-system” is never far away when he enters the room and the musical conversation gets started. The opening track here is a bit too wispy and fey for me, but ‘Falling Forward Becomes a Walk’ does manage to massage my knee-bones – at least it has some decent rhythms underpinning it, but they’re awkward and irregular stumbly rhythms, as if the entire piece were setting out to describe the first faltering attempts of early man to walk upright. This is kinda welcome if it moves us to a place sideways of the Steve Reich approach, which (much as we love his work) is stricter and less tolerant of any departure from the grid.
‘Void Of Narration’ is a tougher nut to crack – slow moving sheets of dissonant non-chords emerging out of an uncertain zone, resembling a lost steel zither record from the Lovely Music label. There’s a lot of interest however to be milked from the strange guitar tunings here, and it’s nowhere near as formulaic or boring as those mathematic-derived notions from La Monte Young or Tony Conrad. I guess I’m no nearer understanding the concepts of Ruben Machtelinckx, but he’s evidently very genuine about what he’s doing. P.S. – the cover art shows an imaginary space where there are several points of entry (see the upside-down woman’s head entering the frame from top left) and scale doesn’t seem to obey the laws of perspective (the billiards player bottom left). These visual clues may be an analogue to help us visualise the schema of Porous Structures. (23/08/2024)