Posts Tagged ‘Avant-garde’

Pierce Warnecke – Memory Fragments

Posted: 7 July 2016 in Albums
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Room40 – RM469 – 20th May 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

The liner notes describe Memory Fragments as ‘a collection of compositions from sonic fragments recombines, thinned, edited, rejected, re-listened to, improvised, forgotten, filtered, slowed, remembered, reworked, erased, detuned, undone, layered, cut, compressed, trashed, moved, accelerated, pasted, composed, played and exported – undergoing a slowly evolving transience and sedimentation to arrive at this fairly constant state.’ In other words, it’s a collage of fragments which have been utterly fucked about with and manipulated so as to render them unrecognisable. The notes also draw attention to the fact that as integral to the ‘finished’ work (and one must question when a work is the result of such a convoluted succession of processes, to what extent it can ever be truly considered finished) the process is, the listener cannot, and will never hear the process, and the process is something which the artist will only recall through the filter of memory.

These are extremely spacious compositions. To begin, a single note resonates…. And then silence. The notes are some twenty seconds apart. The listener becomes attentive to the silence. Gradually, subtly, but so quietly, the sounds build. The build, the delay… are these notes backwards, or is there extraneous noise loitering in the silence, which then becomes shrinking semi-silence? You listen. You need to listen. And then, to pause for thought. It’s not music to get down to, but to contemplate. It requires focus.

Elongated notes expand as they’re dragged and stretched across time and space. Heavy sounds hang and linger. The track titles are evocative rather than literal, cumbersome but descriptive. Again, some refer to the process, while others carry allusions to how either the artist feels or the sensation. ‘Built on Folds and Braids’ builds a densely-layered wall of tonalities, fizzing and hissing static tears through an ominous low-end and arrhythmic globular beats. ‘Sparseness Gave Way to Infinite’ carries the closest approximation of a tune, but it’s slowed to the point that the output is little more than a protracted groan. The thick, burr-edged electronic sawing of ‘Broadsided by Sudden Swells’ is a dank, fear-inducing sonic experience, bleak and weighty.

But with the seed of awareness sown, it’s impossible not to hear these sounds without returning to the process, and I found myself contemplating the original fragments, the source materials. Specifically, I wanted to unpick the recordings, to examine the ‘original’ Warnecke had done to them. But thinking backwards through the process only provides so much food for thought: as noted in the liner notes, the released version only represents a moment in time, a point at which the artist has deemed the material satisfactory for release. But where could the sounds be taken in future? Is this a ‘definitive’ version? What would the result have been had the project been continued? Such questions are of course unanswerable, but provide fodder to chew on while Memory Fragments unravel from the speakers to form a sonic cloud that’s almost impossible not to get lost in.

 

Pierce Warnecke - Memory Fragments

 

Piere Warnecke Online

無 (MU) – STEREO

Posted: 21 June 2016 in Albums
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Entertaining Violence

Christopher Nosnibor

I am often drawn to duality of interpretation or meaning, particularly when that interpretation hinges merely on emphasis. As such, I think ‘Entertaining Violence’ is a great name for a publisher / label, and looking over their small but select catalogue to date suggests it’s highly appropriate. Essentially, Entertaining Violence is concerned with art, and the principle functions of art should be both to entertain and to educate, or, perhaps more accurately, to provoke thought. Art and entertainment are by no means mutually exclusive, and nor should it be considered untenable for art to both entertain and provoke. Their latest release achieves this, although it does very much depend on one’s perspective as to just how much entertainment it provides.

To provide some context from the press info: in the summer of 2015, Sergio Calderón – founding member of London-based avant-garde band 無 (MU) – was invited to participate in the exhibition Not a State, But an Artists’ Colony at Intelligentsia Gallery 智先画廊, Beijing. Sergio conceived STEREO as a transcendental and meditative experience compromising a Two Channel-Video and Sound Installation. As such, STEREO is a soundtrack piece, which was recorded as a live improvisational work of guitar sound and texture recorded at Entertaining Violence Gallery, London the 15th August 2015.

It is not a work which builds at any point: there are no crescendos or bursts of sound, but there are infinite textures. STEREO is a work which explores tonality, in the subtlest of ways. The track drifts on, concentrating on the ebb and flow, the wash and drift as notes struck rise and fall, decay and reverberate in the space in which they’re created. It doesn’t ‘go’ anywhere: that is not its purpose or aim.

What this 47-minute piece really conveys is the tonal range of the electric guitar, when played minimally and given room to breathe. Some may call this drone, ambient; and certainly, the notes and chords stuck are left to hang in the air for an eternity. The tones, the sounds are in themselves muddy, hazy, murky; this is no crisp digital replication of a guitar’s sound, but a fading analogue sound, fuzzed and degraded by environment, by space, by recording technology. It reminds that the listener is never truly ‘in the moment’ when listening to a recording, they are not ‘present’ and the recording is just that; a captured version of events; a recording is not the event itself. A recording may accurately convey the sound, or at least he sonic experience, but it can never fully convey the environment in which the recording was made, it can never capture and convey the experience of being present in the moment the audio was captured. It will never incorporate the experience of whatever may be going on around simultaneously, it can never capture the emotion or the mental processes contemporaneous to and triggered by, the moment.

For all of this, however great the listener’s separation from the moment, a work like STEREO, or, indeed, specifically STEREO affords almost infinite space for the listener to lose, and find, themselves.

https://player.vimeo.com/video/165013545?color=ffffff&title=0&byline=0&portrait=0

STEREO — 無 (Excerpt) from Sergio Calderon on Vimeo.

 

mu01_stereo1

MU at Entertaining Violence Online

Watch: ‘Rogue Fossil’ by Virus

Posted: 25 May 2016 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Norwegian avantgarde rock/metal band Virus who release their new album  ‘Memento Collider’ next month have shared a new video made by Costin Chioreanu, who has worked with the likes of Paradise Lost, At the Gates, Mayhem, Spiritual Beggars, Roadburn Festival and many more. You can watch the video for ‘Rogue Fossil’ here:

 

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Apartment House – Antanas Rekašius: Fonogramatika

Posted: 6 May 2016 in Albums
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Music Information Centre Lithuania – MICL CD 089

Christopher Nosnibor

A retrospective collection is perhaps the most instructive place to begin when being introduced to the work of a late artist with a substantial body of work to their name. And so it was that Fonogramatika, 26-track collection culled from seven projects from between 1970 and 1981 featuring the work of Lithuanian composer Antanas Rekašius (1928-2003), as performed by the six-piece Apartment House ensemble came into my possession for review. My first contact with a composer clearly of some renown, but of whom I had absolutely no prior knowledge. A small amount of research revealed the composer is believed to have committed suicide, aged 75, after suffering poverty and depression.

There’s nothing depressive about the quirky music on offer here: indeed, there are humourous touches at every turn in Rekašius’ lively, unconventional and often quite audacious musical works.

Anton Lukoszevieze’s substantial liner notes (subtitled ‘Unsettling Scores and Unstable Tendencies’) are informative, and help to provide some kind of handle on Rekašius’ work, but needless to say it was extracting the disc from the incredibly heavy-duty and immaculately-presented four-way gatefold sleeve (really, the packaging super, and you really can feel the quality) and actually hearing the music therein which proved more instructive.

Rekašius’ style is often informed by jazz, but with a keen ear for atmosphere and experimentation, using the instrumentation of a chamber orchestra to create a range of effects. There’s a fluidity to the compositions, and a certain deftness which makes for rapid and often unexpected transitions from sparse, stark atmospherics to wild brass. The strings howl and mew, bend and bow, and Rekašius makes a trademark of combining dissonance and subtle melody. In fact, it’s the fact that there are strong, albeit brief, passages of melody, and a ken for swinging rhythms and off-kilter repetitions that render the works so beguiling: the listener can marvel at the scope and style of the compositions, the apparent randomness and the dynamics which are worked into the pieces, because yes, it is all very clever. But equally, it’s possible to simply enjoy the music.

Often, the music is jarring, but Rekašius invariably pulls back from the brink of spine-jangling awkwardness with cadent musical flourishes which are pure joy. Wild cacophonies, lumbering menace, twisted folk fiddle and notes that simply sound ‘wrong’ all contrive to keep the listener alert and entertained. ‘Atonic I’ (the individual tracks on each album are known by number only, with the exception of those from Phonogram) evokes the soundtracks of old, silent movies. If anything, Fonogramatika demonstrates just how able Rekašius was at turning his hand to different styles and making them work, while at the same time adding his own idiosyncratic stamps to them. The musicianship of the Apartment House players shouldn’t be underestimated, by any means: they play with nuance, intuition, and passion.

It’s now 13 years since Rekašius’ death. While his work has been performed in the United States, Italy, France, Finland, Sweden, Germany and Hungary, as well as Lithuania and Russia during his lifetime, his substantial output, which includes nine symphonies, 12 ballets, seven concertos and an opera-oratorio, Rekašius’ legacy seems rather limited in most territories. Perhaps the release of Fonogramatika will go some way toward addressing this, and earning Antanas Rekašius wider posthumous recognition.

 

Rekasius

 

Apartment House Online

Hans Tammen – Music for Choking Disklavier

Posted: 19 December 2015 in Albums
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clang records – clang031 – 6th November 2015

Christopher Nosnibor

This isn’t how the instrument was designed to work. Just as John Cage made the piano sing in ways it really oughtn’t by the addition of various foreign objects, so Hans Tammen has made the Disklavier his choice of instrument for desecration.

The Disklavier, for those who don’t know (and I’ve had to research this) is an electronic piano produced by Yamaha, which first came on the market in 1987. The way it works is key to Tammen’s project, and I’m going to quote from that fount of all information, Wikipedia, here, and accept any harangues over ‘lazy journalism’ because surely some research is better than none: ‘The typical Disklavier is a real acoustic piano outfitted with electronic sensors for recording and electromechanical solenoids for playback. Sensors record the movements of the keys, hammers, and pedals during a performance, and the system saves the performance data as a Standard MIDI File (SMF). On playback, the solenoids move the keys and pedals and thus reproduce the original performance.’

Tammen’s project is concerned with the ‘hidden sonic qualities’ of the machine. Tammen explains his methodology thus: ‘technically the Disklavier is fed too much information, and at the lowest possible volume. At this point the hammers do not have enough power to bang the strings anymore, and ideally they only vibrate to produce low a rumbling sound. Occasionally the MIDI brain stops for a few seconds – “chokes” – on a chord due to the data overload, hence the title Choking Disklavier’.

Calling to mind Reinhold Friedl’s 2011 ‘Inside Piano’, a colossal exploration of the prepared piano, Music for Choking Disklavier finds Hans Tammen make his instrument sing in unexpected ways, and with intriguing and often very interesting results. And it’s not all unlistenable, experimental noise, either. There are clear and definite tunes present here, albeit played in the most skewed of fashions.

A clumping rhythmic trudge provides the basis of ‘Ascending and Descending Chairs’; over what sounds like slow marching feet, delicate single piano notes rise crystalline into the rarefied air, The levels of dissonance and discord grow as the notes begin to emerge stunted, jarring. ‘Looking Down Sacramento Street’ resembles the whupping hum of a helicopter’s rotas; and so many of the sounds which occupy the album are rhythmic, mechanical, and owe little resemblance to a piano, electreic or otherwise.

The compositions make full use of the Disklavier’s diverse capabilities, especially when messed with. Swing goes south and ragtime goes out of time with fuzz and crackle, the sound of drunken piano being played with wild abandon in heavy rain, and thumping the low notes with a dogged persistence: these are the sounds that tinkle and topple precariously from the speakers at the hand of Hans Tammen. It’s an innovative work, which finds Tammen exploring ways of making new sounds by previously unexplored means and confirms, pleasingly, that originality isn’t entirely dead yet.

 

Tammen

http://tammen.org/

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