In recent days a small amount of vaguely heated discussion has sprung up online regarding Matthew Mullane’s recent release on the free to download Homophoni label. The recording is called Double Negative and is credited to Non Group, a name chosen specifically because of the nature of the piece’s construction. The music is described as a work of appropriation, because it is actually a collage put together from samples of the work of forty two different improvising musicians. With the exception of a tiny bit of processing in the opening seconds, Mullane has not treated or altered the samples, merely edited them acutely and arranged them carefully so as to create a new piece of music from the sounds. I should start by saying that although Matthew contacted me about this piece some weeks ago, encouraging me to listen to it to try and work out how it was made, I only listened to it for the first time a few days back, after I had read about its method of construction. It certainly would have been more interesting to have approached the work without any prior knowledge, but such is life.
A bit of history first. Few people know this, but about thirteen years ago, when I bought my first computer and discovered simple sound sequencing software I used to mess about in a similar way to how the Non group piece was made, taking samples from my CD collection (Mullane might as well have used my collection given the list of musicians he sampled) and essentially trying to recreate the work of John Wall, who composed stunning collage works using tiny snippets from CDs. Like Wall though I worked hard to try and disguise the origin of the samples, processing them through basic tools, or simply sampling just tiny moments of sound so as to remove any sign of the original musician. Mullane has attempted something different here, taking sections of the musicians’ playing that are often easily recogniseable and putting them together without any processing. I should add at this stage that the amateur music I used to make was complete rubbish, but I learned an interesting thing from the exercise- often the parts that sounded better when I put the pieces together were the sections that fell together by accident, where two samples might have crossed by mistake but sounded good together so they were left in. Sometimes just combining random samples together produced results that would sound good, as if they were meant to have been placed together that way. from this I realised that there are certain common musical traits in improvised music that form when two sounds are placed together, even by accident.
Read more »
Well the good news is, this week will be my last in my current role before finally making the shift to a better work pattern and hopefully far less nights getting home at midnight, as I did tonight. Even better, before starting the new job I will have just short of three weeks holiday, which is badly needed to recharge the batteries and catch up with a lot of overdue bits and pieces. Over the next four days though I will be very busy trying to tie up all of the loose ends in my current role so I can take the time off without having to worry about what I forgot to finish. So this week might have one or two posts like this one, wherein I haven’t had any time to listen to any music, and instead have a bit of a headache and just want to get to bed as early as I can. As is the normal procedure here now though, when I post one of these “excuse” posts I always add a plug for something I like. Today’s plug then is for the Sixth installment of music from Paul Abbott, Benedict Drew and Seymour Wright at their Flat grey marked suspended pole holds tree (I swear those words keep changing their order) site. The rather fetching image above comes from the same place. I need a decent coffee like that one right now… Sorry for the brevity.
Well I did get up early enough this morning, but I didn’t count on quite so many Oxfordians attending an early Sunday morning concert of Schubert and Haydn, because, alas it was sold out when I got there. Not to worry, I took the opportunity, given it was a cold morning to take a wander around Magdalen College without the place being overrun by tourists. Although I know the buildings and quads very well, I have never been able to walk around quite so freely, able to enjoy the place without having to negotiate every step in case you walk into someone’ photo. Although I only had my iPhone on me I took the opportunity to snap a few photos myself, one of which sits at the top of this post. So as I didn’t get to listen to the concert, and because I then spent a while absorbed in Oxford’s bookshops I had to find something classical to listen to today. As i have also had to spend quite a bit of time listening to a couple of demos I have been mulling over I only ended up being able to listen to a small segment of a double CD set I have had sat here for a few weeks. the album in question is called The Essential Borodin, and is a mid priced release as part of the terribly named Double Decca series of 2CD reissues. The set includes recordings of all three of Borodin’s symphonies, a few other significant pieces and his second String Quartet. It is (of course!) the quartet that attracted me given the limited amount of time I have had. The version here is played by the Borodin Quartet, a group already responsible for some of my favourite chamber music recordings.
This third disc then begins with a piece of thoroughly uninteresting ambient drone music made with a laptop and electric guitar by Chihei Hatakeyama. The piece of music, named Last Night is seven minutes long and resembles a slightly faster, busier, digital version of Eno’s Apollo recordings. It is also mixed very loud, so loud I reached for the volume dial quite soon after the beginning. I must be honest this piece of music just aggravated me really. It is thoroughly generic, featureless and devoid of anything but the very worst kind of new age drifty dreaminess. The ending is really badly done as well. There follows another droney track, this time by Satoshi Kanda, though the nature of this piece is quite different. The track is named Milk bottle on bass guitar, a title that perhaps gives away much of what the music sounds like. The sounds seem to come more from the bottle than the guitar, a kind of buzzing vibrating sound that alters in pitch and intensity as the bottle is presumably moved about. Its a simple piece, one idea stretched out to six and a half minutes but it is nicely done with a fair degree of subtlety.
The third track is very different, and very beautiful. Simple Drawing by Shinichi Isohata is a three minute miniature for acoustic guitar that mixes gently picked, widely spaced notes and gentle little scraping sounds to produce something that sounds like a cross between Taku Sugimoto and Tetuzi Akiyama both circa the turn of the millennium. The playing is very delicate, carefully placed amidst pools of silence and oozes a delightful charm. Simple Drawing is a great title for the piece as it does lovely things with a minimal amount of resource in a small amount of space. There then follows a solo piece by Shinjiro Yamaguchi, who along with Takahiro Kawaguchi produced the rather good Hello album for Ftarri last year. His piece, named Hanarete seems to have been made using a mixer, but possibly with guitar sounds at some point forming the original source material for the piece, which is reduced here to a low oscillating tone that occasionally warps and decays into a less fluid form, with grittier, more abrasive sounds quietly rising from within it, cutting off dead before they peak. This is a curious little piece that doesn’t sound like much else I have heard before, which makes it even more difficult to evaluate. It works well though, particularly coming after the Isohata piece.
Although I have knocked a bit of a hole in the pile of CDs yet to be listened to recently, I am still very conscious that I have just lately been writing about CDs a week or two later than others might have done, and so just for a change, here’s a write-up of something very new, possibly not even released yet, on the excellent, somewhat prolific Entr’acte label. The disc in question is a duo work by Tomas Korber and Ralf Wehowsky named Walküren am Dornenbaum. It arrived a couple of days ago and I’ve been playing it a lot since. It is a piece of music that has clearly been considered and developed carefully, given that it uses source material recorded by the duo together back in 2006, but they have separately manipulated the soundfiles at a distance over the three years that followed. That said, the press release for the album claims that the CD “obliterates the borders between improvisation and composition, spontonaeity and careful planning.” How much the music achieves such an attempt at obliteration I am not sure, but certainly this is a thoroughly original, somewhat curious and decidely engaging set of six pieces of music.
Black, white, red, green, blue is a scored work written by Pisaro that is performed by Chabala on electric guitar. The title of the piece comes from a Rimbaud verse in which he seems to liken these five colours to vowels used in language. The significance of this to the final work here is not completely clear, but the music has a simple, elemental feel that reflects these simple building blocks of other artforms. The piece appears to be divided into five parts, one for each colour one would imagine (I have not seen the score). In each of the parts quiet guitar sounds are placed at regular intervals amidst the silence. The sounds are grouped together by their musical shape rather than their pitch. The first section makes use of gentle, ringing guitar notes that chime softly before decaying very slowly into the thick, thick silence. In the next part a faint note rises gradually from the nothingness before falling away again, dissolving into the quiet before the next arrives a few moments later. Other sections see the sounds become firmer and more present, elsewhere longer, the notes extended out into a virtually continuous sound that dips below audible levels only to resurface seconds later.
