Discus Music – 27th September 2024
Christopher Nosnibor
One way to tell an avant-garde musical work from its title alone is when the title provides a quite precise statement relating to its compositional nature. And so it is that this collaborative set of songs by Keir Cooper and Eleanor Westbrook are structured around guitar and voice.
‘Willow Tree – A Dialogue’ takes the interesting form of – perhaps not surprisingly – a dialogue of sorts, in which Westbrook’s adopts two contrasting modes of delivery, with a spectacular operatic aria juxtaposed with a spoken-word interrogation as a counterpoint. The effect is closer to a simultaneous internal monologue running across the song itself rather than a dialogue in the conventional sense. Meanwhile, the delicately picked neoclassical guitar is subject to interruption by clunks and distortion and occasional whirs and bleeps and the operatic vocal strays off kilter and the dream which drifted in twists and flickers with darker shades: not pronounced enough to be truly nightmarish, but unsettling.
The pair continue to explore the contrasts of melody and disharmony as Westbrook squeaks, squawks, trills, and purrs an infinite array of vocal gymnastics and Cooper’s guitar work, which chimes and treads delicately from folk to flamenco via classical streams, stamps on its own beauty with sudden and unexpected stops and stutters and forays into wrongness with stray notes and dissonance.
‘Superstar’ strays into the space which soundtracks a sense of derangement, the territory where things make no sense, and that place of incomprehension instils an unsettling confusion that borders on anxiety. ‘Modern Translation’ follows a similar trajectory: it’s a piece of magical neoclassical chamber music that’s twisted as if performed in an auditory hall of mirrors. Everything is wrong: something that should be soothing and beautiful is warped in a that it becomes unheimlich, eerie.
It’s hard to locate a touchstone or reference point for this: perhaps there are elements of later Scott Walker present, blended with hints of The Ex with its more avant-jazz leanings. One can only muse as to how they came to create this work: despite its clear foundations in the realms of classical and opera, Star Quality ventures so far from this path that it often bears little resemblance to any given style. The pieces evidently do have quite detailed and complex structures, as there’s nothing haphazard or uncoordinated about the way the two play together, but it’s impossible to decipher them from an outside perspective.
There’s a grand yet ethereal theatricality to ‘Bordering the Afterworld’, and ‘O’ soars and swoops and squeaks and whoops its way theatrically – and somewhat crazily – across some sprightly, if vaguely gothic-sounding guitar picking that suddenly, from nowhere, begins to buzz and thump. ‘The Time I Gave Up the Stage’ draws the curtain on an incredibly curious and as far off the wall as is imaginable.
Star Quality clearly has theatrical inspirations and aspirations, but shows two artists who are more interested in exploring their outer limits than taking the limelight in a mainstream setting – and for that, I applaud them.
AA
Aural Aggravation 