I haven’t owned a television for about fifteen years now, but prior to that, I owned just two TVs in my life. The first of these I bought when really young, second hand at a car boot sale or something similar. It was a very beautiful old box from the sixties, black and white, and crucially without any pre-set channel buttons, which meant that if you wanted to switch sides you had to manually tune a channel in with a large dial, which in itself was faulty, so that if you left it untouched for a period of time it would gradually slip out of tune by itself. I was probably in my early teens when I first bought this set, and as you do at that age, I would often try and lay in bed at night watching TV when I was meant to be asleep, but drift off by accident leaving the TV switched on, with the volume down very low so as not to alert anyone else in the house. This meant that when I later woke, often in the early hours, I would be welcomed by a screen of detuned fuzz and a very quiet hum of white noise. Somehow this was very comforting back then, as the thought of it is now also. Fast forward about ten years and I was probably in my early twenties as an art student when I first became aware of the work of the painter Agnes Martin, who has ever since always been a huge favourite of mine. I didn’t ever equate those early experiences with white noise with Martin’s work, but now, spending some time with Catherine Lamb and Bryan Eubanks’ Untitled 12 (after Agnes) tribute to a Martin painting of the same name the link leaps out at me.

The duo’s first release on their own Sacred Realism label was released late last year. The album contains a single track that lasts exactly an hour. The piece is a generative work that has been realised here using a computer programme that somehow uses tuned white noise and sine tones to create what on the surface sounds like a single grey hum, and even after very careful listening doesn’t reveal a massive amount more, but what it does reveal is telling in itself. I often in these pages describe sounds as being grey in colour. I have never really clarified what I mean by this, but essentially I guess the sounds are somewhat bleak, textured but mostly featureless, and slightly industrialised in feel. Agnes Martin’s Untitled 12, painted in 1984 is a grey painting. It contains washes of overlaid grey paint that are then constrained underneath a very tight, precise horizontal grid of small, hand drawn pencil lines. At a glance, or from a distance, the painting appears monochrome, but closer attention shows a wealth of fluctuations and flaws in the grey base that are then given a strange sense of structure by the overlaid pencil frame. The music here has a similar feel. The grey blanket of soft sounds doesn’t feel completely smooth, it does feel as if minute little events are swarming around one another, but in truth, even with the volume turned up high it is impossible to trace these from moment to moment. Where there are changes however, are on a bigger scale. At three points in the recording, at precisely fifteen, thirty and forty-five minutes there is a tiny flaw in the sound, a short pop that then adjusts the greyness that follows very slightly, shifting the pitch only a fraction, but given the consistency of the sound before and after these moments the contrast is dramatic. This is a beautiful tribute to the Martin work, wherein the same phenomena seems to occur, as slight shifts in the grey tones feel like huge dramatic events if you study the painting long and hard enough. Not unlike the little flickers that would appear in that TV screen as the consistency of the white noise would occasionally falter.

Its hard to explain why I like this disc a lot. It is, essentially just a stream of low, white noise interrupted by just the slightest of intrusions three times. Similar to the solo sinewave material of Sachiko M, its not going to be for everyone, but if your appreciation of art can take in the incredibly detailed minimalism of Agnes Martin then I imagine you can attune your ears to this work. An exercise in attentive listening and the rewards that come when the details suddenly become apparent, Untitled 12 (after Agnes) is a beautifully understated, really admirable piece of work. It is also, perhaps surprisingly, a disc that I have been able to listen to many times and on each occasion enjoy the experience more than the previous time. Really very good indeed.

I have for quite a while been a staunch supporter of the work of Tim Blechmann in these pages, and his ongoing collaborations with Manuel Knapp in particular, so it was a real pleasure to receive a further instalment of their duo work here a little while ago, a disc named VIII on the Nada label. I have never really been able to properly articulate what it is I like about Blechmann and Knapp’s music. On the one hand, their laptop and electronics landscapes are nothing particularly unusual- mainly continuous, drone-like streams of noisy sound that rise and fall but primarily work though the layering of similarly abrasive textures. On the other though, while their music may not sound so inventive when described in words, there is a certain feel and sense of energy and purpose in their work that I don’t hear in many other similar recordings by other musicians. For sure, they have a very particular, and by now familiar language, but what they say with it has a certain gravitas that I think sets it apart.

VIII is one long piece, unsurprisingly the eighth that Blechmann and Knapp have released. Compared to their past works, this one is perhaps less episodic, and more linear than before, but its far from minimal. It starts slowly, but once it has picked up pace the music here really burns its way out of the speakers, roaring away not unlike the sound of an open fire with gusts of wind driving down the chimney. The sounds are all electronic in nature, but there is nothing kitschy or obviously digital at work. Rather the various layers range from white noise hiss to synthetic hums to gravelly distortion, with an undercurrent of several combined long sounds always present at the base, albeit with each element constantly shifting, and then various bits of digital detritus and electroacoustic scribbling scattered on top. Again, it is difficult to pin down in words exactly what make this music work for me, but its something to do with how the various sounds combine, the choices made to connect certain textures with each other, and the tendency to always push things on to one level further- so just when the music seems vitally urgent and vibrant, so another jagged pulse is added in to make things seethe even harder. Cooking analogies spring to mind- a pot of bubbling aromatic Indian food changes colour as every spice is added, every ingredient adds more body, every increase in temperature makes it bubble a little harder. This disc is to me what all good noise music should be like. The sounds used are carefully thought through, the ingredients carefully combined, the intensity added to slowly, the end result as perfectly balanced as it is fiery.

Whether VIII adds anything new to Blechmann and Knapp’s canon I doubt, and its possible that I slightly preferred the more disruptively violent structures of their last release together, but still this is fine music, uplifting in a very simple, elemental manner and a fine example of two musicians perfectly in tune with one another who are working towards a very particular, refined goal. It also sounds damned good in the car.

Will we ever run out interesting conceptual ideas for making CDs? The music on Kazushige Kinshita and Seiji Murayama’s duo disc on the Ftarri label appeared a good few months ago now, but I have only recently found the time to spend with it. The release is credited as a duo, with the compositions written by Murayama, but there is a strong argument, having read the online notes that accompany the release for it being a trio release also involving the sound engineer Makoto Oshiro. The translated notes on the composition are not entirely clear, but from what I can tell the two musicians improvised freely inside precise time frames, with large silences left in places. A microphone was also placed outside during the recording, which is not heard for most of the time, but in certain places the sound we hear cuts from the indoor recording of the musicians and instead we hear the twittering of birds, yapping dogs and the light rush of distant traffic. There are also long digital silences. It would seem that Oshiro has cut the sound of the improvisations in places, so we hear nothing at all, while the music continues without us getting to hear it. What isn’t clear is how the various forms of silence here were dictated. Did Murayama compose everything? pointing out where to switch to digital nothingness? or were post-recording decisions also made by the sound engineer? However the whole thing came about, its a curious construction.

Murayama plays a single snare drum in his familiar sparse, rigidly brittle manner. He steers mostly away from any kind of rhythm here, working primarily with sudden cracks and scrapes. Kinoshita plays violin, mostly in an atonal, crunching and scraping manner, but with a similar feel to Murayama’s pointillistic playing, never really settling on one sound for more than a second of so, and with large white spaces left between each of them. The two play together very well, their approaches merging very nicely together to the point if it becoming hard to separate the two, but their playing here is delightfully undermined by the way the music is broken up so often. Normally when jump-cuts and the sudden post-production juxtaposition of sound and silence are used as compositional tools we are presented with music that leaps suddenly around, with vastly differing elements careering off of one another and the silences arriving like sudden chasms int he music. Here however, while we do find the music suddenly halt, sometimes these silences are merely the result of the musicians stopping playing as dictated by the score. Sometimes then we are hit by the grey wall of traffic, and sometimes there is nothing at all to be heard and as listeners we are left feeling disconnected and uncomfortable. It never feels like a stream of rapid cuts however. Rather, the different elements here all seem to flow very nicely, and the improvised playing actually feels so much better for having been filleted out into small chunks.

The end result is a curious affair. While at some level the music feels organic and well balanced,  we are repeatedly made aware of the post-production knife-work at play here. Listening for the first time, without the aid of the notes about the music I wasn’t sure what to make of it all. Part of me felt like the music was poorly edited, but another part kept noticing, sometimes interestingly late that the outside recordings had suddenly replaced the sterile atmosphere of the indoors. As a result, while on one, fundamental level this album is a very nice listen, full of great little sounds and strong playing, it is also a disconcerting and disorienting experience to listen carefully. the closer you get to the music, the more out of sync it all feels. This was obviously the intention of those involved in its creation, and the end result is a satisfying challenge to the listener.

The first release on the very promising new Suppedaneum label in Chicago comes from a friend of mine, Sarah Hughes, so when I say that I think this one of the best things I have heard so far this year you are free to apply the appropriate caveats as you see fit. <<Accidents of Matter or of Space>> consists of a white CD attached to a large (11″x14″) letterpressed card and a similarly sized sheet of text written by Dominic Lash, about the music here. It is at once both beautiful and awkward, but a very nice way to present such a work. The album contains four tracks.  I first heard the first of these, a twenty minute long solo improvisation for zither a few years back, and fell in love with it then. Criggion (after Only) was recorded in a transmission station in Powys, Wales. The station was originally a wartime long wave radio broadcasting site that continued in its secret practices until just a decade ago sending out coded messages to nuclear submarines. It is now disused, partly demolished and the remaining parts in a state of disrepair, yet it has a certain derelict beauty that somehow transmits itself into the music here. Hughes’ use of zither is minimal and spacious. Recorded acoustically, E-bowed tones are frequent throughout the piece, as are scattered plucked notes, smaller bowed sounds and probably tones created by rotating a glass tumbler against the strings, a technique Hughes used around the time of the recording. Also present though, is the room itself. Recorded in a large brick space in the station with a high ceiling, the room clearly acts as its own amplifier, but I am a little unsure as to why so many industrial sounding bangs, crashes and groans seem to fill the room, into which the fragile sounds of the zither blend. The transmission station is some way out in a remote part of a rural location, and it had long stopped operating at the time of the recording, but you would be easily forgiven for thinking that this piece of music was recorded in a working factory of some kind. Wherever the sounds here originate from, its a stunningly beautiful work.  At once both filled with a resonant warmth and a fragility betrayed by the thin slithers of instrumental sound, the piece seems to hang in the air, all of the sounds seemingly existing together and yet not really progressing through or into anything, with neither Hughes’ playing or the sounds of the space ever dominating proceedings over the other.

There then follows three realisations of Hughes’ score (can never exceed unity) by a quintet of musicians of musicians that recorded several tracks for Another Timbre’s Wandelweiser und so eiter box, but do not actually include Hughes amongst their number. The group is made up of Rhodri Davies (harp), Neil Davidson (acoustic guitar), Jane Dickson (piano), Patrick Farmer (electronics) and Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga (zither). The score consists of a very simple set of instructions. One musician is told to play a single tone or sound for a predetermined period, which should be half the length of the realisation. The other four players are then allowed to play however they choose, but the second player can only play for half as long as the first, the third half as long as the second, and so on. The score instructs the musicians to “play freely”.  The three realisations here then each see the musicians swap roles within the work, and each is quite different in subtle ways to the others. In many aspects, the pieces have a strong Wandelweiseresque feel, in that they contain a lot of silence, dictated by the time allowed to the musicians, and the presence of the one sustained tone found in each of the versions. However the actual sounds used here are far from all pretty and unobtrusive. Dirty, gritty electronic splurges burst out of nowhere, grating, faintly metallic sheets hang in places, hammered knocking elsewhere. There is certainly a freedom present in the music, as predetermined by the score, and some real character in the playing, and it is purely the score, and its time restrictions on each musician that gives the piece its spacious feel. This is truly modern, thoughtful and challenging composition that gets the best from improvisors while giving the composer enough of a hold over the structure of the work to dictate an overall scope for how the piece might sound.

All in all the music here is thoroughly rewarding. If Criggion (after Only) is as beautiful as this area of music gets, then the three realisations of (can never exceed unity) betray that beauty by scattering it with brutal surprise, awkward silences and strange collisions. The two works heard here are quite different, both in feel and the way they were constructed, but they also fit together perfectly, complimenting each other as easily as they also sit in confrontation. Only one hundred copies exist. Ensure you don’t miss out on one.

** Please note that in the title line of this review, the opening and closing parenthesis that should be part of the album title have been removed because they cause problems with the html formatting of this page!

Around the turn of the millennium I was a big fan of Kevin Drumm’s music. His first two or three albums, and some of his collaborative releases were highly influential on me, and I followed his every move. Then, at some point, he released what is probably his best known, and most popular album, Sheer Hellish Miasma. For whatever reasons, most of them probably related to the sudden upward shift in volume Drumm underwent with that release, I just didn’t connect with the disc, and while others all shouted from the rooftops about it, my copy disappeared onto a shelf somewhere. I should probably listen to the album again, through less prejudicial ears, but I currently can’t find the disc anywhere here. It will turn up. So as I pretty much gave up following what Drumm was doing. I don’t necessarily regret this. We can’t all follow everything (as best as I try) and I found (and to a degree still do find) it very difficult to connect with very much of the output of the North American noise music scene. Anyway, over the last few years a seemingly constant stream of little CDr and cassette releases have appeared, most of them self released from Drumm’s own, nameless label, sold through a completely uncommercial blog page that is littered with the inevitable spam that follows a successful blog around. Always a sucker for when musicians self release a pile of their work (cf: Malfatti, Houben etc…) I put in a couple of orders recently and a pile of material now awaits my ears. So far I have heard the one disc.

The CDr in question is a two track work named Humid Weather, that is indeed something of two very different halves. The first piece, clocking in at near enough exactly twenty minutes opens with what sounds like drips of water pouring onto something metallic, but probably isn’t, until a couple of minutes in, much to my surprise on the first listen, this strangely rhythmic sequence is overlaid by a field recording of a thunderstorm that rolls around the recording menacingly for several minutes, joined by the sound of pouring rain, little bleeps and whistles and who knows what else as the piece curls up into a cauldron of activity. At around the eleven minute mark, it all then cuts dead and falls immediately into an incredibly mournful, single, distant electronic wail, that itself is later joined by a unintelligible female voice, maybe recorded over a telephone, or radio perhaps, and then more rain-like sounds. It is, all in all, a thoroughly enjoyable piece of slow, flowing musique concrete complete with a couple of unexpected jump-cuts. It gets wild for a while, but its never chaotic, never overly loud and while thunderstorms on CDs are far from original, the music harnesses that natural energy with just enough added to it to make the piece a good listen.

The second track is very different, and while on one hand it doesn’t sit in the comfort zones I usually enjoy as well as the first piece does, it may actually be the better track here. The piece contains what sounds vaguely like racing car engines swooping past a microphone, repeatedly, at different pitches and with the fidelity of the recordings slowly degrading. The piece decays as it gains momentum, spiralling often out into digital twists and careering around with more than a degree of venom, but it doesn’t ever slip into any kind of lazy pattern, and indeed surprises you again, when after six of seven minutes it cuts to the same distant burbling sound that opened the first track, only quieter, before returning with a wall of white noise infused splatter seconds later.

My failure to connect with the more aggressively abrasive side of the noise scene when it first began to enter my consciousness a few years back had quite a bit to do with the sense of aggression and violence that seemed to come out of the music and its associated imagery and posturing. A little older, a little less susceptible to that kind of annoyance I have slowly (perhaps very slowly) found myself acquainting with the more interesting elements of the noise scene a little easier. If you asked me beforehand, I would have expected to have got more from the first piece here than the dense mesh of electronic sounds that is the second. Somehow though, as long as I can sense depth and detail in the music, and so long as it really doesn’t feel like one big testosterone fuelled surge of otherwise pointless energy, I am enjoying wallowing in this kind of material. It has a spiteful vibrancy to it that shakes me as easily as it annoys the hell out of my hi-fi speakers. This release from Kevin Drumm obviously deliberately places two contrasting approaches alongside each other. Maybe there is a connection beyond the tiny glimpse we have of the first track in the moment’s lull in the second. Perhaps the source sounds for the latter track are the same as those in the former, this indeed may be the case, but the music here at least feels like it has some  meaningful structure behind it, a thought-through plan brought to fruition over the two months it took to make in 2012. Apologies then for working through my own failings and misgivings in a CD review, but this is an enjoyable disc. A dozen or so more Drumm offerings await me, and we shall see if patience wears thinner than prejudices as I work my way through them, but if you can find a copy of Humid Weather you probably should.

An unexpected release this one, a 2005 recording of the Prévost/Tilbury incarnation of AMM alongside an Italian trombonist named Giancarlo Schiaffini, released this year under the trio name PST on an Italian label that seems to primarily release DVDs featuring artists as diverse as Oscar Wilde, Bruce Springsteen and David Bowie. A curious arrival then, but the forty-five minute piece here makes this one well worth tracking down. If we know how the AMM duo will sound, Schiaffini’s trombone is new to me. He is frequently active, mixing bubbling little notes and occasional swooping attacks with lighter breathy sounds and more brittle, metallically muted sections, but while his playing touches on the busier, more talkative end of improvisation he never feels too much here. If barely a minute ever passes without a contribution from Schiaffini he still leaves plenty of space throughout, and his light, non-aggresive playing is acutely fitted around Prévost and Tilbury, who are both on top form here.

AMM do what AMM do here, but this is actually a fine performance of them playing in the style I prefer- with John Tilbury playing more than the accompanist role, frequently leading the way with excursions in and out of the piano that range from the usual sudden crashes, little repeated arpeggios and unusually, at one point a section of floaty melodic clouds that overwhelm everything else. Eddie Prévost is far more restrained than later duo discs have allowed him to be, laying off the heavy use of bowed metals he has worked with over recent years and adding softer colours through struck sounds and carefully pitched tones. All together its a light, neatly structured affair that never really utilises the arcing patterns of AMM recordings. I am reminded of the Such release from years back which paired Prévost and Tilbury with the shakuhachi of Yoshikazu Iwamoto, not because the trombone here is anything like the shakuhachi but because of the way the three musicians allow light to shine through the music, building fragile weblike structures that are beautiful without ever overpowering anything. Live in Rome is an exceptionally easy and enjoyable disc to follow. Its forty five minutes seem to just fly past. This is exceptional acoustic improvisation then, beautiful, expertly crafted work and a very worthwhile addition to the collection of any AMM follower.

Now this is a very nice CD. Once again its a release involving the French multi-instrumentalist Bruno Duplant that was probably created one way or another over the internet as the musicians involved are all in different countries. The liner notes indicate that the music here  is two twenty minute long versions of the trio’s response to a Duplant score, but beyond this we know little more. As seems to increasingly be the case with this kind of musical construction as they become more and more common- the means by which it was created don’t seem to matter. As a listener we can obviously just sit and listen to how the sounds here combine and take what we wish from them.

Now the last time I reviewed a release on the Rhizome-s label, a similar trio involving Duplant and Chambel but with Julien Heraud forming the third part of the trio. During that disc I was sure that I heard a cat mewing. Five minutes into the first of the two realisations here a cat appears again. Maybe Duplant always writes a part for feline voice into his compositions. Anyway for this new disc Duplant is credited with an electroacoustic device and “phonographs” while Chambel uses a microphone and objects and Drouin an analogue synth and radio. For the most part the trio make texturally focussed music mostly made up of longer sounds layered over one another, the interest in the music coming from how the various layers interact with each other. So there is a lot of buzzing and humming, crackling and scratching, stopping and starting in little bursts, with the added surprise elements from Duplant’s field recordings bringing a degree of uncertainty and intrigue to the music. The music across the two realisations is a mostly quiet, if brooding affair. The first of the two, cat exclamation aside, is maybe the gentlest of the pair, with a few sudden leaps present, but for the most part the music is formed of the kind of softly purring tones and gently fizzing electronics we might expect, but just below the matt finished surface there is a tension formed out of the way little bits of synth and scratchy microphone abrasions trouble one another.

The second realisation feels less uncertain and more fully formed, which may or may not be a good thing, I have yet to decide. Here Duplant uses a long field recording of children at play, an old musique concrete favourite, which inhabits much of the second half of the recording. Chambel and Drouin continue with their whispery synths and crackling microphones which they allow more meat into, the volume rising up a little and the general dynamic of the realisation pushing at us more firmly. The recording of children comes and goes, filling the spaces left between the other two musicians, anchoring the music back and giving a more consistent sense of structure than the first realisation, which always felt close to collapse.

The differences between the two pieces are subtle, and will subsequently be read differently by each listener, but the music has a way of inviting you into it, easy on the ear as most of it is, for you to make your own mind up. Overall Field by memory inhabited is a very nice disc then, very nicely formed, albeit with the musicians at a distance to one another and well worth spending time with.

The inevitable thing when writing about Manuel Mota’s work is that the usual list of comparisons is pulled out. So, Derek Bailey, Taku Sugimoto, Loren Connors, Tetuzi Akiyama, John Fahey etc… That’s those out of the way first. The thing is, these comparisons are inevitable because of how clear the lineage is here. Mota improvises, plays generally quite quietly and intimately, and plays the guitar, nothing else. So yes, all of those comparisons are valid, though for me it is the first of them, Derek Bailey that stands out the clearest. The link to Bailey however feels closer to the spirit of exploration and freedom I hear in Mota’s music, even if aesthetically it is early Akiyama and particularly Opposite period Sugimoto that initially spring to mind.

This release is a real labour of love. Five (yes, five!) CDrs are enclosed in a white card box adorned with a suitably minimal illustration hand-drawn directly onto the package by Mota himself. Beautifully illustrated slips of paper slid into the box offer us a short, tenderly poetic eulogy from Akiyama and then the barest of information on each disc, but actually I don’t know what else there really would have been to add. Mota’s music probably needs to be listened to and absorbed rather than written about.

So that said, this isn’t easy music to describe with anything other than dull comparisons and links to past genres that don’t come close to encompassing what Mota achieves. The five discs each contain solo recordings, some of them in live settings, some studio (or rather at home) recordings. There is a lot of material, all of it sitting in a similar area, which fortunately is a great pleasure to listen to. He works with little fragments of half-melody, little sections of chiming notes that both work as little enclosed bubbles of activity and as parts of the whole, usually separated by short silences. Its enchanting stuff, and there is rarely a weak moment across more than five hours of music. There are slight stylistic changes from disc to disc, but as everything was recorded in 2011 and 2012, the differences are less in the form of the music and more to do with the different techniques used. There is one disc of acoustic material (which I personally prefer) but the electric guitar pieces occasionally allow wah wah pedals and the like into the equation. Overall though, the feel of the music is all relatively uniform, but its extremely easy and inviting to listen to.  Mota has been playing for more than two decades, mostly under the radar of CD releases or wider discussion. His playing is inevitably indebted to the musicians noted above, and his past in more distinctly blues oriented music plays a part as well. What comes across to me across the five discs here though is the personality that forces its way through the mists created by the quietness, the lack of liner notes, the restraint in the playing. I feel and hear a musician living every note at a very personal level. It feels as if each little cluster of notes just flows from the one previous to it, and so the tracks each feel like unbroken narratives rather than carefully composed “pieces”. Here is where the spirit of Bailey shines through for me. While the music sits in a very clear aesthetic area, one feels that Mota concerns himself less with the surface of his work than he does its shape and form.

Do we need all five discs? Probably not. I think the same impact could have come from two, one each of the acoustic and electric material, but hey I’m not complaining. While I don’t think I could listen to all five discs in one long sitting, spending time with Mota’s work here, between more abstract music has been thoroughly enjoyable over the past month or so. It somehow has a cleansing, pure impact that wipes the slate clean and setting you up to listen to something else again. While other releases get played a few times and then head off to a shelf they won’t come back down from in a while, I suspect I may keep Rck to hand to drop into the right moments over coming weeks. Beautiful work from an underrated musician.

]]> http://www.thewatchfulear.com/?feed=rss2&p=8430 0 http://www.thewatchfulear.com/?p=8425 http://www.thewatchfulear.com/?p=8425#comments Thu, 11 Apr 2013 22:17:23 +0000 Richard Pinnell http://www.thewatchfulear.com/?p=8425 CD
Intonema

The trio of Alfredo Costa Monteiro, Ferran Fages and Ruth Barberán have been making music as a trio on and off for more than a decade now. This is (I think) their fourth album together as a trio, but they have appeared together in quite a few other group formations along the way as well. This new recording was made early in 2011 by Simon Reynell in Barcelona. A further release featuring the Atolón trio alongside the Irish/Swedish quartet ChipShop Music has also just appeared on Reynell’s Another Timbre label. Costa Monteiro and Fages also work together a great deal under their Cremaster moniker, and recent work thy have been involved with has leant more often towards the electronic side of their canon, so in many ways its really nice to reacquaint ourselves with their acoustic playing, as Concret sees Costa Monteiro, Fages and Barberán put to use accordion, acoustic turntable and trumpet to use respectively.

Where Concret really hits the spot for me is through the way the trio work so seamlessly well together. There is in essence, nothing particularly innovative or unusual about the music here. The way the three combine their serrated edges and pockmarked textures is fantastic to wallow in, but it was this way a decade ago also. There is nothing here that is a surprise, no conceptual leaps forward, but like the way that opening a bottle of Chablis from a new vintage brings you familiar flavours and experiences, but with a new depth, so hearing Concret works in a similar way. We know roughly what to expect, but the intensity of the experience grows as the group build on their intimate internal musical relationships. These are three musicians that know each other very well indeed, and know how to push and pull at one another to create vibrant, intimately fascinating music. Let it just drift past your ears and its reasonably pleasing. Delve into it, savour each moment, untangle every knot of combined sounds, and like all well made improvised music its a joy to follow.

So the “acoustic turntable” sees Fages let metallic and other objects rub against a spinning surface. Costa Monteiro’s accordion wheezes and wails but never quite sounds a firm note. Barberán’s trumpet switches from gaseous clouds to brittle vibrations, again without ever sounding much like a trumpet, but the individual voices in here don’t seem to matter, the group come together and work as one seething, constantly morphing mass of twisted musical detritus. There are some nice surprises. the twenty minute mark sees the trio burst into an electrifying wall of vibrant textures- something held firmly and loudly against the spinning turntable, the trumpet wrenching metallic blasts, the accordion laying a heaving wall of wasp-like buzzes behind. Again though its the uniform way that the group come together here that is really inspiring. As if on a signal all three switch direction seamlessly into this fiery assault. Its not a case of one of the trio changing direction and the others following, it all just shifts gear at once. There then, in that section lies the pleasure I find in this disc. Knowing the musicians, knowing their relationships together, then hearing them find musical ways to project those relationships onwards through art is a wonderful thing to follow, a joy to be a part of as a listener. As I write tonight I have a stinking cold, a headache and partly blocked hearing, and yet playing this disc through a few times was still a pleasure.

Landscapes is one of ten new releases self-published in a short period of time by the Wandelweiser associated composer Eva-Maria Houben on her new Diafani label. The way the new label has started reminds me a lot of the first weeks of Radu Malfatti’s similar B-boim imprint, when the opportunity to get strong unreleased recordings that had been awaiting their chance saw him publish a lot of material very quickly,. Malfatti slowed down his output soon after, and in many ways I hope Houben does the same, as so much high quality music appearing all at once doesn’t make a reviewer’s life easy. Of the initial batch then, Landscapes is the most impressively captivating I have spent time with yet.

The CD comprises of four pieces, titled Landscape 1 through to 4, credited both to Houben and Bileam Kümper. Each of them is a composed work, the score to which I have not seen, but assuming one does exist I suspect it consists primarily of some kind of structure of time windows. The tracks then, the first clocking in at ten minutes or so and the rest all about half as long contain two elements each- solo acoustic instruments and field recordings, made by Houben and Kümper. The music is all quite achingly, simplistically beautiful. The nearest comparison I can think of could be Michael Pisaro’s Transparent City pieces, which saw him thread sinewaves through different urban field recordings, but there is somehow something even more elementally simple and yet exceptionally musical about the four works here.

The first of the four Landscapes sees the composer place her own noteless, breathy grey organ playing against recordings of trains. The field recordings are cloudy, distant, the sound of trains heard from a bit of a distance rather than their screech and roar up close, though in places a few buzzing textures could maybe be the purr of engines at rest. I know these sounds well, living as I do in a railway town, about a mile from the lines, so opening the window here, particularly at night sees the air continually filled with a similar soft hum. Houben and Kümper have arranged these recordings on a computer, fading the sound in and out carefully, so that the muted roars fade in and out of frequent silences. Houben’s soft organ playing, which matches the train sounds so well that often you cannot tell which you are hearing is then similarly placed over, around and through the field recordings. The overall impact is stunning. The way the two sets of sounds combine, separate, go about their ways makes them feel like they were meant to be together, and yet they both come from very different sources. The second piece here matches Kümper’s low, groaning tuba against recordings of the wind, sometimes just straight rushes of air, sometimes the sound of the wind forcing its way through tight spaces and so making similar notes of its own as it does so. Again the pair have maybe pieced these together to coincide with a written score, again following the simplest of systems to pitch similar sounds against one another.

The third track is a little different in that it places viola d’amore recordings, again played by Kümper alongside some kind of recordings of steps. Here the greyness and murkiness of the first two pieces is replaced by a strange set of rustling sounds and peculiarly warped, almost electronic sounds that seem to have human voices buried in them somewhere, though they most probably actually haven’t. This piece is more varied in texture and dynamic than the first two, and its a fascinating work. Exactly how the stringed viola is put to use here is anyone’s guess. I’d never have guessed such an instrument had any involvement here, and exactly what sort of steps appear in the recordings, or how they created these sounds I have similarly no idea. The sounds feel electronic, processed, but I don’t think they have been. The piece is much shorter than I would have liked it to have been at under five minutes, but while it lasts its both beautifully arranged and through the sounds put to use, delightfully unusual. The closing work, Landscape 4 pairs a sparsely used, gently scraped bar chime against a ‘balcony’, which seems to be recordings made of a city from a high balcony, possibly at night. Again we hear those featureless, humid hums that contain few precise details and yet sound so familiar. Listening here reminds me so much of nights spent in hotel rooms in unfamiliar cities, where the soft pulse of the urban area creeps in through the window. As we listen we become aware every so often of the higher pitch of the caressed bar chimes, played by Houben, but again these slip gently into the piece, emerging from the dense shadows. Here it really feels like the chimes were played in real time, on the balcony in question, but it seems that they were not and that they were added later.

Houben’s ear for how sounds, both instrumental and environmental can be put together has always driven her work. She has spoken and written about hearing music in everyday life and the silences between events in our lives and how she uses this in her work. Landscapes is then a very simple, and yet stunningly beautiful set of studies that extend these ideas. In Kümper she seems to have found a like mind and a valuable collaborator. Combining acoustic instruments with field recordings in this way isn’t a new idea, but the pair’s touch here, the ear for fragile beauty and the way sounds come together to form new sounds again make this a truly lovely release. The entire disc clocks in at under twenty-five minutes, and while longer would of course have been better this also suggests to me that only the finest material has been for inclusion here. There are one or two releases amongst the initial Diafani deluge I would recommend above the others, and this is certainly one of them.