Posts Tagged ‘Composition’

RAMM – Bound To Never Rest

Posted: 18 April 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Eiga – 11th April 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Bound To Never Rest follows 2022’s The Fall of Europe and for this, their second release as RAMM (formerly know as Il Radioamatore), core member Valerio Camporini F. and Roberta D’Angelohe are joined by Filippo De Laura who brings percussion and cello, and Caroline Enghoff, who provides voice and lyrics on ‘Hanging Rock’

Here, they promise to takes us ‘to a very contemporary feeling scape – of being constantly on the verge of seeing your world collapse – but it does so through very a unfamiliar sonic landscape, so different that we struggle to put a label on it… The core of this work is to represent this ‘permanent state of flux’, a paradoxical condition we’re all experiencing now, when being unsettled is the constant in our lives.’

They go on to explain that ‘To achieve this purpose RAMM started with a scribbled set of compositional rules, with the idea of building a living organism, in constant evolution, some rules were abandoned along the way, some were retained.What comes through at the end is the sensation of being swept away by meandering, random, river. Trying to hold on to something, only to have to adjust to a new setting. It’s a compass with its needle forever trying to find its north.’

This, it seems, is like life itself. Even periods of apparent monotony, where it seems that life has been consumed by the treadmill of working, eating, and sleeping, and running just to stay still, the likelihood is that it’s your ability to see beyond the blinkers that’s been stolen rather than it being the case that there’s nothing else happening. In fact, the world about us is an eternal maelstrom. However, the last few years have witnessed the turbulence increase to a roar that’s beyond deafening, and it’s little wonder that there’s a mental health crisis assailing western society, and people are immersing themselves in more or less anything mindless in order to avoid news.

The title ‘Disturbed Tea Time’ somehow captures the way we often crave normality and routine in our lives as a means of having a sense of grounding, a sense of control over our lives. But when those familiar routines are disturbed, it can often feel catastrophic. And the more precariously balanced our safety is, the harder it becomes to deal with those disruptions calmly and objectively. Many of us experienced the destabilising effect of a rapidly-changing situation and contradictory guidance and (mis)information during the pandemic, and the ’shock and awe’ strategy being employed by the Trump administration right now is a perfect – and terrifying – example. People become more fragile, more sensitive, more susceptible, more fearful and less able to cope even with small changes when the entire world around them ceases to provide the comfort of familiarity. Sonically, this first track it’s a deft, almost soothing, minimal electronic composition at first, before doomy, overloading guitars rupture the tranquillity. And so it continues, smooth, airy vistas of serenity float in an easy, linear fashion, unexpectedly dashed and smashed by roiling distortion. The metaphor may be fairly straightforward in terms of concept, but it’s executed in such a way that when the blasts of noise to explode, you feel the tension through your whole body.

‘Permanent State Of Flux’ washes in on delicate strings, subsequently joined by piano, and a persistent pulsation, and as the piece progresses, the layers, textures – and moments of dissonance – build, while ‘Good Morning Ansa’ takes the form of a more darkwave synth piece with a flickering beat in the background. But this, too, changes midway through, with both the instrumentation and mood making a shift.

The only piece with lyrics and vocals, ‘Hanging Rock’ is tense, dark, and discordant. But none of the works are any one thing for their duration, and in this way, the structure of not only the individual pieces and the album as a whole come to represent the overarching theme.

There is a perfect restlessness about this album, and while for the most part volume, harsher textures, and discord are used only sparingly, rendering it a comparatively subtle work, the fact that any emerging flows are swiftly disrupted make it something that holds the focus and keeps the listener alert and just that bit on edge for its duration.

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Phill Niblock – Looking for Daniel

Posted: 25 January 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Unsounds/Echonance Festival – 2nd February 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s never a comfortable experience to learn of someone’s passing, even if it’s someone you’re only really aware of rather than familiar with. My knowledge of Phill Niblock and his work was relatively scant, although I had written about a few of his releases over the years. I wasn’t particularly enthused by Touch Five back in 2013 – an album I would probably appreciate considerably more now. This likely says as much about me as it does Phill Niblock, but does perhaps indicate just how artists who fully espouse avant-gardism are always ahead, and tend to only be truly appreciated later. And so, to learn of Niblock’s passing only this month, from the press release which accompanies this release was a… moment, a cause to pause.

And so as I read how this release serves to ‘commemorate the late Phill Niblock with this release made in close collaboration with the composer,’ and features recordings of some of his very last compositions just before his passing in January 2024. ‘The two works on this album, ‘Biliana’ (2023) and ‘Exploratory, Rhine Version, Looking for Daniel’ (2019) represent the hallmarks of his unique approach to composition where multiple, closely-tuned instruments and voices are used to create rich and complex sonic tapestries…

The fact that he was still composing up to the age of ninety is remarkable. The fact these two pieces don’t feel radically different from much of his previous work is impressive. And yet, in context, the fact that these final works are such long, expansive, and unsettling compositions feels fitting.

To understand and contextualise the pieces, it’s worth quoting directly: ‘In Biliana, written for performer Biliana Voutchkova, her violin phrases and vocalizations carve out a deep sonorous space full of fluctuating overtones. By emphasizing on the physicality and materiality of her sound, the piece gives us the sensation of stepping back to reveal a singular portrait of the musician. ‘Exploratory, Rhine Version, Looking for Daniel’ was recorded by two Netherlands based ensembles, Modelo62, and Scordatura ensemble from a live recording made at the Orgelpark, Amsterdam during the Echonance Festival in February 2023. It is a complex work comprising of 20 parts, where lines seem to emerge and disappear out of a landscape of harmonies and sonic spectra. There is also a voice hidden in this mass of instruments, just like in Biliana, giving both works an added human element – something that always emerges out of Phill Niblock’s seemingly dense musical constructions.’

Each piece takes a long form, extending beyond the twenty-minute mark.

A decade ago, I bemoaned just how ‘droney’ Touch Five was, how it was impossible to perceive any tonal shifts. Listening to ‘Biliana’, I’d have likely posited the same complaint, bit with hindsight and personal progression, it’s the eternal hum, the intense focus on the most minute and incredibly gradual of shifts, which are precisely the point and the purpose – and the things to appreciate. On the one hand, it is testing. It’s minimal to the point of a near-absence, an emptiness, but present enough to creep around your cranium in the most disquieting of fashions.

It’s not uncommon to lie awake and night or have deep pangs of regret which knot the stomach when you replay that awkward exchange, that time you said the wrong thing, the occasion when you plain made a twat of yourself one way or another. The same anguish hangs heavy over reviews where I’ve simply been wrong. There’s no way of undoing them – and to repost or revise down the line would be disingenuous, an act of historical revision. You can only correct the future in the present, and not in the past. We all know how rewinding history to make a minor alteration goes. Before you know it, your hands are fading and you’re about to become your own father or something.

You almost feel yourself fading over the duration of ‘Biliana’ as the eternal glide of string sounds hangs thick and thickening in the air and somehow at the same time remains static. Where is it going? Where are you going? Everything feels frozen in time, slowed to complete stasis in a slow-motion drift. Wondering, waiting… for what? A change. But why would change come? Breathe, let it glide slowly over you, however much you feel a sense of suffocation.

‘Exploratory, Rhine Version, Looking for Daniel’ begins sparser, darker, danker. Ominous, string-line drones swell and linger, here with scraping dissonance and long-looming hums. Nothing specific happens… but it crawls down your spine and you feel your skin tingle and creep. Nothing is quite right, nothing is as it should be.

Over the course of his long, long career as a defining figure of the contemporary avant-garde, Niblock was outstanding in his singularity, and the unswerving nature of his compositions, a vision which, as this release evidences, remained unaltered to the end.

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Christine Ott – Éclats (Piano Works)

Posted: 27 October 2023 in Albums
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Gizeh Records – 3rd November 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

While Christine Ott has maintained a steady flow of works over recent years – her fifth album arrives just two years after Time to Die – her latest offering has been a long time in the making. For example, we learn that ‘Die Jagd nach dem Glück’ (The Pursuit of Happiness) is an extract from her original composition for Lotte, mon amour, a film-concert created in 2014 based on 4 short films by Lotte Reiniger, a German director from the first half of the 20th century.’

It’s pitched as ‘a collection of twelve pieces for solo piano, twelve impressionistic miniatures, instrumental and cinematic fractals celebrating the beauty of life…

Éclats (Piano Works) is a kind of mirror image to Chimères (pour Ondes Martenot) (2020, Nahal Recordings).

‘Pluie d’arbres’ introduces the album with magnificently weighted, perfectly paces, rolling notes which balance grace and tension, and it’s a beautiful and engaging composition that comfortably slots into the ‘classical’ bracket not simply by virtue of its being a piano piece, but the delicacy of it all, and the way it articulates changing moods intuitively and with a depth of spirit.

The individual pieces follow one another in such a way as to create the impression of their being written to flow together, and while the tempo and tone may shift during the course of a single piece – there are flurries and flutters, moments of airy levity like the morning sun filtering through a curtain wafting on a gentle early summer breeze, notes coming suddenly in tinkling cascades – the album as a whole feels like a single, continuous piece. Rather than any one track being ‘dark’ or ‘light’, they each run through a succession of sensations, turning on a pinhead from brooding to playful, uplifting to reflective.

There’s an honesty about this, which speaks to the human condition. Yes, you may have good days and bad days, but most days are a series of peaks and troughs, highs and lows, unexpected and near-immediate switches that some about as the result of various but specific interactions – or, indeed, sometimes, a lack thereof. Éclats feels real because it doesn’t try to be any one thing, but more taps into the unpredictability of life. And Ott plays in such a way as to bring all of this out through the music, through her connection with the keys.

At times sad, at times uplifting, at times, it simply is… and this is the real joy of the experience of listening to Éclats. At its lightest, it carries you on rippling sonic clouds and pokes at the sky: at its darkest, it hangs heavy in your stomach. It’s hard not to be drawn in and fully engaged with this set of pieces, and it will take you anywhere if you let it.

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Clara Engel – Sanguinaria

Posted: 2 July 2023 in Albums
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Cruel Nature Records – 30th June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Less than a year on from Their Invisible Hands, and just nine months after Undergrowth, Clara Engel serves up Sanguinaria. The all-too-common ‘returns with simply isn’t appropriate here, since it implies absence, and Engel’s rate of output hasn’t only been consistent, but if anything has accelerated lately, with this being their eighth release since Hatching Under the Stars in April 2020.

The advent of streaming has unquestionably changed the face of the music industry, and it seems to be broadly accepted that the change is most certainly not in the favour of artists, with Spotify CEO suggesting that if artists want to achieve more streams and therefore more royalties, they need to be producing more content, and more regularly, famously telling Music Ally that it’s “not enough” for artists to release music “every three to four years” and that they ought to maintain “continuous engagement with their fans.”

This speaks volumes about his view of music – that it’s not art, but a commodity. And of course, his interest in artists cranking out product on a conveyor-belt is quite clearly in the profit it generates for his company and him personally, not those who produce it. It also shows a complete lack of understanding of the creative process: try writing and recording material while being continuously engaged. Moreover, many creative types aren’t extroverts by nature, and aren’t disposed to sharing endless videos and vlogs and updates on their time in the studio. And do audiences really want or need that anyway? We don’t necessarily need to feel like we know the artist or have a ‘chummy’ or direct connection with them: we just want the music and prefer a bit of mystery and distance.

In the 60s and 70s, it was commonplace for artists to prelease an album every six months, and there’s a very good reason this practise stopped: it simply wasn’t sustainable, and it was invariably the artists who suffered rather than the labels who effectively owned them.

But where I’m going with this is that every artist is different, and the creative process is a personal and individual thing, and sometimes artists experience huge creative flurries, while at others they may experience creative slumps. Clara Engel is clearly experiencing a flurry of late, and the remarkable thing about it is that they’re producing work not only in quantity, but of a remarkable quality.

If in terms of output, more may be more, the stark arrangements of Sanguinaria abundantly evidence that less is very much more in most cases. There is a beautiful achingness which pervades every moment of the album’s downbeat folk contemplations.

The songs on Sanguinaria are sparely-arranged and it’s Engel’s voice which is to the fore, at least in term of the mix. ‘The sky is huge, and the sea is green’, they sing in the reflective refrain of ‘Sing in Our Chains’, and it’s an evocative pastoral feel that nags at you and makes you feel… sad, haunted, makes you look inside yourself. You may not necessarily feel comfortable in doing so, but this is only one of several reasons why it’s worth spending time with Sanguinaria.

Although a solo album and a minimal one at that, Engel – a multi-instrumentalist who plays a fascinating array of instruments here, notably, according to the liner notes, ‘electric cigar box guitar, acoustic guitar, talharpa, gudok, cajón, wooden trunk with soft mallets, tongue drum, melodica’ – is accompanied by a number of contributing musicians who add subtle detail and essential texture and depth. The picked strings and sad-sounding violin forge a mournful dark folk sound on ‘Poisonous Fruit’ and it calls to mind Dark Captain, a band I still miss and feel were criminally underrated. ‘I Died Again’ is so simple, so melancholy, so human, it’s impossible not to be moved by it: Engel’s vocal is rich, but uncomplicated.

‘Extasis Boogie’ introduces percussion for the first time, with hand drums quietly bopping behind an understated guitar, while the lap steel drones on ‘A Silver Thread’ add a weight to the slow sadness that drips from every note.

These are songs which are carefully crafted, considered, and feel so natural and rich; there’s no hint of their having been rushed or being partially-evolved. As such, Sanguinaria feels like an album that connects the feelings behind its creation and the final output.

Engel’s soul is bare on this finely-poised and thoughtful album, and perhaps because of, rather than ins spite of, its minimalism, it’s a gripping work.

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David Shea – Piano 1

Posted: 4 September 2016 in Albums
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ROOM40 – RM476

Christopher Nosnibor

We seem to have been inundated with piano-based works here at Aural Aggravation recently. If that’s not remarkable in itself then the diversity of the music they contain is. David Shea’s Piano 1 is by far the most conventional-sounding of them. This is by no means a criticism: much as I spend the majority of my time immersing myself in and hugely appreciating experimental works, spanning the most abrasive noise to the murkiest of ambience and anywhere in between – even near-silence has its place, to appreciate any one thing, exposure to its polar opposite is invaluable. Piano 1 isn’t strictly a polarity against works like Antony Burr and Anthony Pateras’ The Long Exhale, Angelina Yershova’s Piano’s Abyss or James Batty’s Sanctuary, it is a very different kind of record in that it focuses largely on musicality over experimentation. It would also be erroneous to suggest musicality and experimentation are at offs with one another: even the most extreme avant-garde anti-music is born out of music, and often works best when its creation involves a purposeful breaking of the rules rather than an ignorance of them.

In the notes which accompany the album, Shea explains the significance of the piano throughout his life, that he grew up exposed to classical and jazz piano works, as well as the greats of the avant-garde, and, while his career has been centred around music, his primary focus has been on composition rather than performance, admitting that his compositional works often exceeds his ow technical abilities. As such, Piano I documents Shea’s repositioning himself in the role of musician, testing and pushing beyond his limitations. ‘I spent a year unravelling my past approach to composing for piano and explored my own phyucal technique,’ he writes. ‘No preparations, no samples, no extended electronics or reliance on overdubs or reliance on my past sample acoustic techniques. The result of this year of practice, writing, listening, exploring and recording is this CD’. As such, it’s a very honest and sonically unpretentious album which finds Shea exploring his relationship with the instrument in terms of composition and musicianship, and an album on which the piano sounds like a piano.

The first track, ‘Mirror’ is a sedate, rolling piece which is as much about the way the notes sustain and the spaces between notes as the notes themselves as he skips between the octaves unexpectedly, Shea exploiting the full span of the keyboard. The imaginatively-titled ‘Suite Pts 1-8’ manifests as a sequence of elegant, delicate pieces, the majority of which are short and fragmentary, yet feel like more than mere sketches. ‘Magnet’s represents the least overtly ‘pianific’ piece on the album, with a sighing, quavering drone.

The album’s second ‘set’ of compositions, the four-part ‘Tribute to Mancini’ (Henry, not Roberto) reflect a different style, also demonstrates not only the versatility of the piano even when played conventionally, but also Shea’s awareness of and ability to utilise the instrument to convey different mood.

At times, the lilting flow of the playing halts abruptly, and the sense of real-time playing, of rehearsal, is conveyed, and this gives the album a strong sense of intimacy. While Shea explains at length that he does not consider himself to be ‘a pianist’, the performances here demonstrate he’s an adept musician.

 

 

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North of North – The Moment In and Of Itself

Posted: 15 August 2016 in Albums
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Immedata – IMM006 – 4th July 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

‘Instruments that sound like instruments!’ boasts the sticker on the cellophane in which North of North is shrinkwrapped. It’s a good selling point, and I’m not being sarcastic. It’s not a matter of selling tradition, but what could reasonably be described as the album’s manifesto: ‘this is no random grimprov get together or free jazz blowout, this is a serious engagement with compositional parameters combined with instrumental virtuosity from a working band’, announced the press release. It’s a bold statement which is likely to rankle with a fair few in avant-jazz circles, but fuck ‘em. Isn’t that what avant-gardism is all about?

As it happens, there’s a lot of fucking going on with this release. The interior of the lurid pink gatefold cover contains the following uncredited quotation, impressed in silver text:

It doesn’t come from fucking somewhere else,

It comes from your fucking brain.

Your brain tells you what to do, and you fucking do it.

If your brains are fucked, then the music will be fucked.

And the music is a little fucked, but in a good way. In the way that this album is all about what the title states: ‘The Moment In and Of Itself’. It’s immediate. It’s real. The moment is the only thing that matters. The moment is history in the making. It’ a moment in time, captured, distilling the coming together of three musicians to create something – to create music. Nothing more, nothing less.

Featuring the talents of Anthony Pateras (piano), Scott Tinkler (trumpet) and Erkki Veltheim (violin), the album’s five tracks represent spirited, free-flowing improvisation – a subject they discuss at length in the three-way conversation (it’s not strictly an interview) in the 16-page booklet which accompanies the album. It’s all in the moment. It’s not pre-planned improvisation, guided, ordered, conducted. Naturally, just because the instruments sound like instruments doesn’t mean that this is a perfectly accessible work. At times in perfect accord and at others creating tempestuous discord, there are jazz elements in the compositions, such as they are. And of course, the range of sounds three instruments can name, individually and in combination, while still sounding like instruments, is immense, and at times brain-bending.

There’s certainly a strong element of playfulness which runs throughout the project as a whole. What lies North of North? It’s like the question posted in Spinal Tap when discussing the cover to their Black Album. And just as there’s none more black so there is none more North than North, unless you’re going to leave the planet completely. Which could well be the aim of these fellows, as they explore what it means to participate in ‘real-time composition’. I’m also reminded of the Bukowski book, South Of No North. Which is presumably nowhere or also off the planet. Whatever: location is a state of mind.

Leaping between brooding drama and fleeting, skittering leaps and transitioning from moody to frantically busy, with scratches and scribbly scrapes, fast fingerwork and mindboggling intuition are what make this album happen. And in the moment, they eke out extended crescendos and embark on wild detours and impromptu romps in myriad directions. It’s challenging, at times manic and eye-popping. But this is the real deal. It happened. And this album is a document of a moment, as it happened.

North of North