The playlist: experimental music – Rhodri Davies, Common Objects, Radu Malfatti and more
|
Version 0 of 1. Rhodri Davies – Soaked Ruins of a Raft Welshman Rhodri Davies – the only free improv harpist in his village – used to pay the rent by backing Charlotte Church. These days Davies works between free improv and interpretations of open-form scores by the likes of John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Eliane Radigue and Christian Wolff, while this extract from his latest album, An Air Swept Clean of All Distance, demonstrates how comprehensively he has messed with expectations of what it is harps do best. And certainly Davies’ album title, as you listen to his obsessive reshaping of technique – fingers and thumbs falling deeper inside the raw physics of the harp, patterns already in flux as they are forming – is well worth thinking about. Common Objects – Repose and Vertigo Davies again, in the company of his violinist sister Angharad, with saxophonist John Butcher and Lee Patterson playing on what is described as “amplified devices and processes”, from a new release on the Another Timbre label. And I bet, never in your wildest dreams, did you imagine that free improv could be this darn beautiful. Historically speaking, the music Common Objects play owes some allegiance to the pioneering British free improv group AMM, of which Butcher has been an unofficial honorary member. If your hunch that each member of the ensemble is contributing to a hybrid texture is true, then each layer also retains its independence; Butcher’s saxophone flickers like a faulty lightbulb, a sound that finds common cause with Patterson’s electrics. Near the end of this extract, Davies’ harp breaks the mesmeric continuum with a bolt-from-the-blue thwack. John Butcher – Solo in Ftarri Butcher himself has just released Nigemizu, an album of unaccompanied pieces recorded during his 2013 tour of Japan. No samplers have been made available, but this astonishing solo was recorded during that same tour. In Butcher’s hands, the saxophone becomes a choir of possibilities. He pumps air through his instrument, then manages, as here at around 1min 25sec, to salami-slice the resonant tones generated, his lips obliging the upper harmonics of his saxophone to dance (a sound around which textbook saxophone technique prefers to draw a veil). Butcher is a bona fide improviser who builds constructions in sound by engaging in a dialogue with his instrument – the unfolding context tells him where to head next. David Borden – The Continuing Study of Counterpoint, Part Six David Borden’s 1970s work with Moog synthesisers was comprehensively overshadowed by the rise and rise of Philip Glass and Steve Reich; the dance-infused albums he produced with his group synth ensemble Mother Mallard were “too pop” for classically minded listeners but too rambling and downright eccentric for diehard popsters. The sixth instalment of Borden’s The Continuing Study of Counterpoint appears (as does Part Nine) as part of a Borden reissue on the Spectrum Spools imprint of the Editions Mego label entitled Music for Amplified Keyboard Instruments. And it’s quite the revelation. Arpeggios spin everyplace, and Borden uses the technology to reach inside the sounds and sieve out high resonant frequencies that are set free, to glow above the ensemble chatter. Kit Williams Fegradoe – Shruti From his forthcoming album Issa on Important Records, this track by the London-based electronic composer Kit Williams Fegradoe launches itself with radiant, bright-life arpeggios that gradually become dulled by subtle inclines of tuning, leading to a section that crawls painfully through slowed-down time – before a final descent into a densely orchestrated drone that crackles like charcoal cooling. Radu Malfatti – One Man and a Fly In an Oxfordshire church, one man and his trombone do battle with a stubborn fly that is apparently on a mission to dive-bomb the recording engineer’s microphones. Austrian composer, trombone improviser and onetime jazz musician Radu Malfatti is an arch advocate of what he has termed “reductionist improv”, an approach to free improvisation that erases material with the same zeal as it is assembled. Reductionist improvisers deconstruct conventional gesture because they want to open up the space – they distrust the push-pull emotive rhetoric with which music normally plays itself out. And this record, which you can hear in its entirety, is all about Malfatti in the environment of that church. You hear his body moving against his chair as he gently taps his trombone; cows moo, planes pass overhead and the occasional trombone note breaks for the borders as that persistent fly gives the music an extraordinary, and unlikely, sense of unity, like an idée fixe sent from nature. News from the Shed – Everything Stops for Tea During the 1980s, when Malfatti was transitioning from jazz musician to reductionist improviser, he played in News from the Shed, a quintet collective that also featured John Butcher. Although the group could let rip, they were working towards improvised music that expressed itself with chamber music-like delicacy and economy of means. Each gesture purposeful, not a note played in vain. Susanna Gartmayer – Aquie Bass clarinettist Susanna Gartmayer is a mainstay of the Viennese improvised music scene and Aquie, her debut solo release, is long overdue. Gartmayer is interested in exploring how positioning her mouth to outline different vowel sounds can shift the centre of multiphonic chords, an effect much beloved of woodwind improvisers that stacks notes on top of each other, using non-standard fingerings and embouchure positions. This piece opens with cascading note patterns – a springboard for Gartmayer to indulge in her wonderland harmonies and her palette of flinty percussive clicks and spits. Yarn/Wire – Currents Volume 1 Yarn/Wire are a New York City-based quartet: two pianists (Laura Barger and Ning Yu) and two percussionists (Ian Antonino and Russell Greenberg) devoted to not only creating a new repertoire for their ensemble, but also questioning the boundaries of what that music might be. Each year at ISSUE Project Room in New York they curate a series of concerts showcasing new commissions and the three pieces included in this digital release – by Thomas Meadowcroft, Marianthi Papalexandri and Christopher Trapani – are all chamber music, Jim, but not as we know it. Papalexandri’s Quartet for Motors and Resonant Bodies, a sly update of Cage’s prepared piano, devices inside the instruments come embedded with texture altering motors, stands out. |