1/12
conversation with Judith Hamann; notation from Raven Chacon; reviews; year-end lists
mumei TEN is available, featuring postcard pieces from Cao Thanh Lan, Carolyn Chen, Christian Kesten, Rasha Ragab, Rebekah Alero, Steffi Weismann, and Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec.
Recordedness recently published a new series of discussions, including: Ellen Fullman interviewed by Frantz Loriot; Luciano Maggiore by Eamon Sprod/TARAB; Sean Meehan and Theresa Wong in conversation; Barre Phillips by Emmanuel Cremmer and Patrice Soletti; Hannes Seidl by Raphaël Belfiore; and Eamon Sprod/TARAB by Tom Soloveitzik.
Simon Martin recently published the e-book, Treatise: Numbers-Based Musical Harmony. Additional information, supplements, and a link to support the work with donations can be found here.
The Free Jazz Collective organized a small celebration of “echtzeitmusik,” including blurbs and reviews from blog writers and questionnaires with Burkhard Beins, Mia Dyberg, Emilio Gordoa, Robin Hayward, Carina Khorkhordina, Annette Krebs, Magda Mayas, Matthias Müller, Olaf Rupp, Ignaz Schick, Sabine Vogel, and Eric Wong.
To celebrate what would be Pauline Oliveros’ 90th birthday, The Center for Deep Listening has issued a call for text scores, to be presented one-a-day for 365 days from May 22, 2022. More information here.
$5 Suggested Donation | If you appreciate this newsletter and have the means, please consider donating to it. Your contributions support not only the regular writers but the musicians and other contributors that make it possible. For all monthly income received, harmonic series retains 20% for operating costs, equally distributes 40% to the regular writers, and distributes 40% to musicians and other contributors (of this, 40% to interviewee or guest essayist, 30% to rotating feature contributor, and 30% equally to those that apprised the newsletter of work it reviewed). For the nitty gritty of this system, please read the editorial here. The newsletter was able to offer musicians and other contributors $2.00 to $5.32 for November and $1.99 to $4.64 for December. Disclaimer: harmonic series LLC is not a non-profit organization, as such donations are not tax-deductible.
conversations
Over video chat, cellist Judith Hamann and I talk about Berlin, in-between spaces, centering the performer, collectivism and collaboration, and listening and responding.
Judith Hamann has released the solos Hinterhof and A Coffin Spray as well as Heiligenstadt with BJ Nilsen and Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson in 2021 so far.
Keith Prosk: Hey! Can you hear me?
Judith Hamann: Yes.
KP: Perfect. How’re you doing today?
JH: I am OK. Sorry, I wasn’t sure if I should do the whole headphones thing or not, but is this fine?
KP: Oh, absolutely. It’s whatever you’re comfortable with. You just got back from a rehearsal?
JH: Yeah.
KP: Nice. What’re you up to if you can share?
JH: Maybe less a rehearsal, it’s sort of like… Cat Lamb has started this singing by numbers group, so it’s like we get together and sing ratios. It’s really lovely.
KP: Nice. Very cool. Cat Lamb might come up a little later. But, yeah, since you just recently moved there, how is Berlin treating you? I know you’ve got quite a few collaborators there in the Harmonic Space people, Sam Dunscombe, and Anthea [Caddy] and stuff.
JH: Yeah, I mean, it wasn’t necessarily the plan to move here, but of all the places that I could’ve got stuck during this time, it’s been great. And having so many collaborators and friends, people who are really old friends, like Anthea, Sam, for instance, they’re like family, so… but you know we were in lockdown from like October ‘til the end of May so it’s sort of just recently… I feel like the last two months have gone from like 0 to 100 immediately. And I feel like my tour and multi-tasking muscles have atrophied [laughs] I find myself super kind of like, oh my god I can’t believe how many things I’m trying to do this month. But it’s also pretty nice.
KP: Yeah, yeah. And it does seem like you’ve been pretty busy with music recently but I was interested in whether or not you’ve decided to pursue the locksmithing trade [laughs] I remember while reading that Tone Glow interview I found it a little poetic that someone who deals pretty explicitly with in-between spaces in their music would be interested in a profession that was literally dealing with liminal spaces.
JH: [laughs] Well, I still threaten to do it every now and then, but it would be a little bit tricky here because my German is coming along very slowly [laughs] and I think if I was in another place, maybe that’s something that I would’ve pursued during the lockdown but, yeah, it’s been sort of an empty threat for a few years now, even pre-COVID. Actually, I used to be quite handy with a butter knife and a phone card in my teens, and then touring a lot I sort of developed key phobia with a lot of unfortunate incidents with doors and not being able to open them. So I think it’s also something like - as well as the practicalities of it would be so nice to do a trade, you know, something reliable, people are always gonna have doors - I think part of it was also about like, wouldn’t it be great to be able to open any door? And also wouldn’t it be great for me to not be afraid of not being able to open a door?
KP: [laughs] Yeah, yeah. I guess - just since you’ve travelled quite a few places in the world - you probably have a better sense than most, I imagine, of what’s sustainable where. And is the Berlin environment a little more sustainable to actually be a full-time musician than other places that you’ve been?
JH: It turns out, yes [laughs] I mean, my previous strategy was to not live anywhere. ‘Cause I was like, if you don’t have to pay rent or anything then it does kind of just work, you know. I’ve never lived in Europe before and now that things are getting going I’m sort of like, oh, it’s possible here you know. It’s been a difficult year and a half but for the first time in ages I feel like my back isn’t totally against the wall in terms of how I am going to survive.
KP: That’s great. And does that kind of safety feed back into the music?
JH: Well, this is really recent. This is maybe like the first month that I’ve been [exhales in relief] [laughs] so I think I still kind of have that scarcity fear thing. I think it takes a little while to subside. But I’m also starting this residency in Stuttgart really soon, so that is also very stable. Housing. Stipend. Work space. So I feel like it might be OK to let myself relax. A little bit. Soon. But definitely compared to the United States, where I lived for a few years, Northern Europe, comparatively, for artists, it’s a completely different situation.
KP: Yeah. Yeah I know here it’s like music is relegated as a hobby type of thing, so everyone has a day job and then they go and have to put all their efforts into their creative practices.
JH: Yeah. I feel like the situation here does enable people to be full-time artists in a different way. But I also feel like there’s pressure in a way, that if you’re an artist you should be a full-time artist. And I’m still… I don’t think the locksmithing concept is a bad concept, still [laughs] and yeah I’ve never minded having other jobs and things like that. I think it’s kind of good, in a way. Maybe not an all-consuming one but it’s nice to have different kinds of interactions and to not have survival bound up so much in creative work. I would love to disentangle them if that was possible. I’m not sure it is.
KP: Yeah, I think in a way - not really with musicmaking in my case - but I always found that my physical jobs almost kind of provided a space to ruminate unconsciously on whatever I was doing creatively later. It’s almost kind of like sleeping on it while you’re awake.
JH: Yeah it’s like background processing happens. I worked in restaurants all through my twenties and then moved into teaching a lot in my early thirties and I think some of my best accidental thinking has come out of doing another task and being in a different social space as well, you know. I think that you can’t get into the same kind of bubbles if you’re like hanging out with a bunch of chefs, you know [laughs]
KP: [laughs] Yeah yeah. I guess, so getting back into the liminal stuff, I’ll dig into your practice a little bit if that’s alright.
JH: I feel like this is a funny moment for me ‘cause I haven’t been able to do any making for like two months. It’s just like everything’s flipped suddenly into performance world. I feel like I had so much time being so close to a particular kind of thinking and working and it’s like… I edited a tiny bit of audio for this collaboration that I’m doing with Marja Ahti, a Finnish sound artist and composer, which has been taking forever, partly my fault - mostly my fault [laughs] - but I felt so much better just after doing like two minutes of something and if you told me two, three years ago that making work in that way would become really important to me I would have been like, no no, it all happens in like a performance real-time kind of thing, and I think things have really shifted for me… But at the same time, just right now I’m kind of like, what is my work again? So feel free to remind me about what it is that I do [laughs]
KP: [laughs] That’s interesting, that might be jumping ahead to where I was eventually gonna flow…
JH: No, let’s go from… where were you gonna hop in?
KP: Well, I guess around the Shaking Studies, you talk about [Henri] Lefebvre’s tender interval, which is kind of like the spaces between measurable things or beats. And to me... it kind of struck me as relating to the way movement is described when you discuss movement in Tashi Wada’s Duets in your dissertation - kind of the oddity of the perceived tonal movement being opposite the physical movement on the neck, which I guess kind of calls into question what is musical movement right. And…
JH: Oh, like in terms of the discussion of descent...
KP: Yeah...
JH: Like how it maps sonically or visually or how we construct… the idea of musical space, how we orient ourselves, those kind of questions…
Read Judith Hamann’s dissertation, Double, Sync, Constellate: Realization Specific Works for More Than One Cello here.
KP: Yeah, yeah and, I guess, relating it back to the shaking bit, or something like beatings, I think it’s easy to perceive movement on like low frequency waves - you can hear that - but whenever you’re dealing with high-frequency beatings or even the scale of shaking, I’m not sure if I actually perceive any movement between the beats. It’s almost like my brain smooths it over like an integral curve type of thing. And I feel like in that moment because movement is kind of suspended, maybe the music is kind of suspended. Sorry, I guess all that is to say that it was hinted that the Shaking Studies was kind of exploring this interval between the beats, or the tender interval, and I’m wondering what you perceive is there, or what you’ve found there.
JH: I feel like also shaking and vibration and tremor occupies this space of movement and not-movement at the same time. Kind of what you’re describing, when something is in motion, we perceive it as kind of a continuous sustaining thing when actually there’s all this activity there. But I guess also - particularly in terms of that idea of tenderness - it’s also about the irregularity, or the inconsistency, or the interruption, or the pushback from the cello itself, or the space, or an unstable phenomena or interval or ratio that sets that kind of thing in motion where it’s like, is it movement or is it not movement? I think in terms of a performance practice, I think all of those things, things that only come into being when they’re sounding, is something that I’m really interested in. Or things that are sort of not necessarily desirable or the things that you can put in motion that then make other phenomena appear. So rather than being like, I do this and this is the result, I’m interested in what happens in between. And that extends to larger things like rather than, this is a score and this is the outcome - like the work object resides in one of those spaces - I’m interested in work that lives only in-between, if that makes sense. And it’s iterative nature - with the shaking in particular - that’s just something that emerged so slowly over like hundreds of performances you know. And each time I work with that material, something shifts or something new happens. But it’s not necessarily newness in terms of I made a cool new sound but it’s more like, ah another unexpected kind of space opened here. And the material and the cello and I kind of... we work together in that space. And I think tremor and trembling is such an interesting idea like conceptually as well as practically. But for me it definitely came from a practice-based thing to begin with and it sort of over time… you know when you’re interested in something and then suddenly it pops up everywhere?
KP: yeah yeah
JH: Or like you learn a new word and suddenly it’s there. So it’s sort of like not an active critical research project but over time you sieve things and it shakes out these nuggets of interest or ideas and then that folds back into the playing and it’s kind of like, ah is what I’m doing maybe this, or is it multiple things that illuminate different spaces. During the lockdown I’ve started getting really into Édouard Glissant’s writing and he has an amazing book, Poetics of Relation, I’ve been thinking about relation a lot... He’s talking about it in terms of archipelagic thinking and colonialism and all this other stuff but he has all this material around trembling thinking and he’s using it conceptually but occasionally he applies it to actual music as well. And it’s like the thought that trembles is something that is also multiple, it is occupying multiple stances or perspectives simultaneously, and I was like, how have I been talking about shaking for years and no one brought this up! [laughs] That’s been such an interesting thing to think about, shaking, or that space - movement or not-movement - instead of being a binary between those things it’s like could it be both those things simultaneously?
KP: mmhmm, like a motion blur or something, like the way someone might look like Janus or something, you achieve that through motion blur or trembling.
JH: Yeah. I mean it comes also from on a very practical level of taking this rate of shaking that the instrument has and if you put these things in motion what it offers up. If you take that rate of shaking that is endemic to the instrument itself, how does the instrument respond when you’re working with its own tremor, which also changes all the time. So it’s like this constant navigation as well. So, yeah, it’s sort of like physical phenomena that have led to a lot of different strands of conceptual thinking. Which is something I sort of have realized is my tendency [laughs] to do something intuitively, that’s very much in the body, in sound, and then sort of slowly find what the frame is that was already there [miming a frame] but you have to very slowly work your way outwards.
Read Judith Hamann’s presentation on Shaking Studies from the 2018 Gender Diversity in Music Making Conference here.
KP: Yeah, and just with the physical aspect of playing with an unstable shaking in the instrument or a tremor in your hand, is this a physically fatiguing music to perform? And then also I read how you related shaking to trauma as well, so it’s almost kind of like you’re walking this line between remembering or reliving that trauma and then also reclaiming power over it, which would seem super psychologically taxing as well…
JH: Yeah I guess in the beginning of this kind of work, that was very much there. I was recovering from a really fucked-up time, and I was shaking a lot. There’s a really interesting book called The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves that goes really deep into all these origins of shaking. But you know it’s how your body processes things in a way. It started out vaguely therapeutic I guess. In the beginning when I was thinking a lot about shaking, I was thinking a lot about frequencies, I was doing a lot of work with really loud subs and things like that. But I think over time it doesn’t have necessarily that association for me anymore, it’s sort of become something else. So that’s the origin story but now I think it’s not about revisiting something but about generating other things to occupy that space. And I guess in terms of the instability… working with instability, fragility, things that break, things that fail, things that reveal new and unexpected material is also for me partly about changing what my relationship is to my instrument. It’s a lot about undoing ideas of mastery. And I think those are really interesting questions, especially coming from a settler-colonial state of Australia, playing a European-heritage instrument like, what am I doing [laughs] in terms of those things. Like how can this instrument or this sound or this practice, how can that exist apposite or alongside pushes for decolonization and questions like that. And I’m not saying that what I’m doing is solving any of that or even approaching any of that at all. But I think even just the shift of relationship to make it more lateral, more responsive… responsiveness and care is something that I think about a lot. I think anything that shifts that dynamic of the expectation of control, or how we exert mastery over an instrument... the instrument becomes like a foil or a stand-in because it’s actually mastery over your own body, in a way. But then how can you make a more dialogic, complex relationship that also teaches you as well. Does that… sorry…
KP: no no no
JH: I wandered.
KP: No that’s perfect. I know you think of the cello and the performer as a kind of dyad, like you’re not just giving the cello information but the cello is giving you information as well and you’re responding to that as you would maybe someone else.
JH: Yeah, yeah. I think it’s collaborative, you know. It’s not about my idea or my vision. I think all the work I make is in some way responding to something else as like a partnership, whether that’s my cello or my backyard [laughs] yeah, I’ve never thought of myself as a composer with a capital c. It took such a long time before I was like, maybe I could make my own work, kind of thing. It’s like I had to sneak around my own brain, coming at it through more and more distant approaches - particularly repertoire or improvisation or things like that - but I grew up surrounded by all these amazing composer people who were bona fide geniuses like James Rushford and people like that, so I never thought of putting myself in that place. So by having this other approach or by thinking of things like studies or things like that, it’s a way to trick myself into not being a composer necessarily but into making things.
KP: Yeah yeah. And just going a little bit back to failure, and incorporating the collapse recordings. I get the sense that you don’t think of collapse so much as failure as more a convergence of spaces. And since you mentioned Catherine Lamb too, it almost reminds me of what she does in a live setting with the double rainbow synthesizer and converging spaces...
JH: yeah
KP: So I guess with a lot of field recording stuff, a lot of people I think they perceive that as a recontextualizing of the sources, but what are you exploring with your more phonography-based stuff?
JH: I guess I’ve been thinking about things in a certain way for awhile but maybe the idea of collapsing certain spaces simultaneously became clearer when I was making that Another Timbre record when I was in Finland. I have a longstanding interest in - and I guess this comes back to centering the performer again as well - but in kind of sonography work that isn’t about either representing something as itself or the pure morphology of recorded sound, something like Pierre Schaeffer, like we can make absolute music with decontextualized recorded sound, but I’ve always loved and been more interested in things where the recordist themselves is in the frame of the recording. And also domestic and quotidian kinds of things. People like Vanessa Rossetto or Graham Lambkin or crys cole, they make this kind of work really beautifully, these kinds of frames that are both real but unreal, they’re sort of like fictions but truths collapsed on top of each other in a way. They sort of reframe recorded material and it’s outside of that… I feel like there’s a lot of discourse that’s sort of like, either morphology of sound like musique concrète, or then acoustic ecology pristineness. And I guess I’m always interested in the things where the recordist is in the frame by bumping the thing or shuffling, which I know is not good field recording sound practice, but I also don’t pretend to be any good at field recording at all, it’s just that there’s some material that really interests me. But I’m also interested in unreality, or how you can use sound to build an imaginary surface, a different vision, or an impossible surface… I guess with the ‘Days…’ thing that was a lot about the weather of the island that I was on in Finland, so it’s just like collapsing different kinds of weather on each other in one way, and inside/outside spaces, all those kinds of things. And at the same time I was doing… part of my stay-sane program for myself at the time was drawing a lot, but I started doing lots of massive frottage drawings, like rubbings, of different parts of the island which is sort of like a rearranging of material and surface, but I was thinking a lot about the relationship to recording there because a microphone and a piece of paper can both be like a membrane for recording. Usually when you do a frottage of something, people do a rubbing of a famous plaque or gravestone or something so it’s a way of pre-photography recording in way. I think there’s a link there in terms of how I’m thinking about collapse not just as something that’s just like [exhales ‘boom’ while vertically clapping hands] but like what if you can both exist in multiple spaces at the same time but also why shouldn’t we use sound to do speculative fiction in a way and imagine or create different realities that might put other ideas and experiences in motion.
KP: mmhmm. I guess it’s another way of looking at the thresholds thing that we’ve been talking about, by eliminating the boundary or maybe crossing the boundary it becomes something else.
JH: Yeah and I guess for me I primarily think about myself as occupying this performer space, and for me this is another way of understanding recording work as having a kinship to that performance work in a way. Like building a similar space, just using different materials. So instead of using real-time and the cello and my body, it’s making this other kind of imaginary space that occupies the same kind of in-between, in-motion/not-in-motion kind of question. I guess a lot of it is questions as well. I’m not sure that these are necessarily always successful, whatever that means, I don’t even… what is success… I don’t know… sometimes it’s just kind of like, yeah, again, being in this sort of in-between space and having a kernel of an idea or a sound and it’s like instead of being a sculptor with a block chipping away at the outside I’m actually in there and I have to find my way out somehow [laughs]
KP: [laughs] Nice. And then the humming music also kind of reminds me a little bit about convergence - I know it kind of deals with thresholds of sounding the voice as well - but I feel like with the overlapping range of the voice and the cello, you’re almost kind of strengthening that dyad relationship between you and the cello. I guess as far as the humming aspect, what are you exploring there? Is it again part of these spaces in-between, or shared spaces?
JH: I think it became that. Actually, it’s funny that you mention Cat’s music and convergence because actually the humming thing started because I was learning this piece of Cat’s called Frame/Frames for flute… maybe it’s bass flute… one of the bigger flutes - it was a few years ago - and cello. And I was trying to practice this a lot by myself but the way that I’ve learnt to think about just intonation from working with Charles [Curtis] and La Monte [Young] is always super relational, so I needed the flute notes to be able to understand how my ratios were in relation to them. So I was trying to hum the flute part, badly, badly, but it still helped me with learning the piece. But in the process of doing that I was like, ah there’s something really interesting here about the instability, the fragility, the hiddenness. Partly… it’s funny actually I feel like in some ways, now I’m talking about this and today at this singing session, to be able to sing a note with as few overtones as possible you really have to close your mouth almost all the way, you know. And some of the people in the group are proper singers, you know. I’m amateur hour. But it was interesting because one singer was talking about but when you hum, you have to have your mouth open a tiny bit because otherwise all the partials resonate in the top part of your face and come out of your nose. This is all stuff I’m learning that I didn’t know at all but I think intuitively I stumbled into this space where I was like, oh all the summation tones are resonating, or this beating is happening, with this particular sound. So it kind of came from there, just trying to figure out how to learn a piece and then I just became more and more interested again in this unstable, in-between space. Like setting something in motion and then these artifacts that emerge become the focal material, rather than being like, I’m going to play this interval and then hum this ratio. It became very intuitive and more about what can I uncover. But it’s also very strange because I finished that record in isolation, in lockdown, and when you’re humming it’s like everything is happening or resonating inside your own head. I had no idea whether these pieces would actually translate to an audience or listeners. It’s only really recently that I’ve started playing them live and so I feel like they’re also now entering another space and they’re asking for different things and shifting what they want to be in these interesting ways.
KP: You kind of mentioned this a little earlier but centering the performer. And it strikes me that all of these - and these are all separate projects with maybe a common theme with the thresholds - but they’re also all physical, like with the breath work on A Coffin Spray, the humming, and the shaking. It makes the performer the musical material, I guess kind of collapsing that performer-composer chain almost like the music is not an absolute that can happen without the performer or the performer as a replicator, but the performer themselves is the music. I guess, is that intentional or do you think about that at all?
JH: Yeah I’ve thought about this a lot [laughs] Again, part of it probably comes from an old space of vague insecurity that like, I’m not a composer. I’m also not a very good scholar. I love reading and writing about things but I’ve never had the kind of brain to do the super academic rigorous thing so I remember feeling really liberated when I think it was Amy Cimini, who was on my doctoral committee when I was studying in San Diego, and she was like, the epistemic stance of the performer is its own space and no one has as much authority to talk about that as the person that’s inside that space. And at the same time, I was doing all this work with Charles and really trying to understand, build kind of like my own theory or concept of these pieces like the Tashi Wada Duets or the work I was doing with Charles and La Monte where the piece lives in the space of performance. There are instructions or directions, but the navigation of that can only occur in this configuration of body and time and that’s where the actual piece reveals itself in a way. At the time I was calling it ‘realization specificity,’ which is just a silly way to think about it and I think it’s actually much more complex than that but it’s also one of those weird things where the more you try to explain it the more you start to paint yourself into a corner [laughs] you’re like, it’s this but it’s not this, but it’s this, but it’s this. But I think more useful to me than trying to figure out how to do an elevator pitch version of it is just to be like, well that’s present across all the work that I make. Everything I’m doing is about coming from that particular space. It’s not about concepts and execution, it’s about something that is deeply engaged with material that is responsive, that is resonant with different things or ideas or that it’s this particular space for making work and revealing work that for me has a totally different relationship to authorship or making. Maybe it’s not so far from locksmithing [laughs] I don’t know because there is something about task and undertaking an action and in the navigation of that action the music is revealed from within that space. So then you know maybe in some cases, the more organized electroacoustic things, then there’s a lot of work that takes place, but a lot of it comes always from this seed of something experiential at the center of everything.
KP: Yeah and I guess, to use the now-outdated term realization-specific [laughs]
JH: I think we should pretend that I never… I don’t think that’s good, yeah. It’s too tied to site-specific and it’s just not the right frame, but it kind of gives you a hint of the idea I guess.
KP: I think it totally does. I’ve heard it reframed as like the absolute kind of view is music in time and the realization-specific view is music as time type of thing, which I guess you can start to think about time and whether that actually exists but [laughs]
JH: But I think the thing is that it’s more bodily than just that. I think that makes it too neat, to think about it in those terms, because then it can be just abstracted to sound that occurs without a body making it, you know. And I guess this is always just a thing, you know, I feel like this has come up a bit. Like if you go looking into all these things like that great Lydia Goehr book, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, you know all these things like, is the work object in the score or is it in the piece. And the performer is just this idea like some transparent vessel for the sound, and there’s nothing about the tactility or the messiness or the fuck-ups or the effort or the discomfort but also the magic of what it is to then be doing the thing. It’s too much of a task-trade thing. It’s about labor and care practices and those sorts of things. It doesn’t sit super well with the idea of “the work” and things like that. Or, like, I don’t know, yeah… I’m doing like a cat gesture [laughs] but I feel like that’s really important to me in all of this, that the physicality, the things that you do and the things that you respond to in order to make the thing happen, for me that’s where the weird crazy magic often happens.
KP: Yeah and not only do you kind of collapse the composer chain like we talked about earlier but with all of these real-time pieces, you’re listening as well, and responding, so you become maybe as much of a listener as the audience is...
JH: Yeah, you’re occupying multiple subject positions simultaneously. I think it’s also important to remember that listening was seen as a participatory practice even in European thinking up until a couple centuries ago. That division is relatively new really.
KP: Would you ever, or have you, composed for situations that you weren’t involved in?
JH: No… I haven’t. But a friend of mine who’s a viola player transcribed one of my humming pieces and performed it in Naarm, where I’m from, and I’ve never felt remotely like a composer up until that point. And it was so strange to hear something I made played by someone else. And on a different instrument as well, on a viola. And I was like, wow that’s kind of cool.
KP: And the viola itself - this might be getting a little technical - but it’s almost like a transitory instrument too, right, like whereas the cello and the violin are very specified lengths aren’t there a range of lengths for the viola?
JH: Yeah it’s much more volatile and crazy. You can have these ginormous ones and then ones that are closer to a violin.
KP: Yeah super interesting instrument…
JH: I love the viola, it’s such a good instrument. I mean, yeah, maybe one day. I did a performance of the A Coffin Spray piece by myself but with delay and a little bit of playback but I was thinking it would be much much nicer just to arrange it, which would be very simple, and just play it with another cello. So maybe it’s just baby steps towards things becoming a little bit more external.
KP: Yeah, yeah. And this is also maybe getting a little technical but I’ve only within the past year become aware of harmonic interactions through playback and not through two or more acoustic bodies, but is there a huge… or do you a perceive a huge difference in interactions with playback versus the interactions with another instrument?
JH: I think you can achieve the same… I mean, it’s always gonna be a little bit different. But you can definitely record all the parts individually and have the ratios line up and have the activity happen. But part of me is like, that’s not the question in this music in a way. It’s like, how do you fuse sound collectively. I think playing this music is a collective practice in a way. And I think that harmonic fusion or interference, like summation tones, difference tones, all those things, part of the incredible thing about that for me is when you’re doing it collectively. It’s like you’re sustaining a collective hallucination. Because the things, these beautiful summation tones and things, can only emerge when the thing is being wielded by more than one person, in a lot of the music I play anyway. Well, maybe hallucination is the wrong word, it’s like a hologram or something or it’s like you’ve all got a laser beam and you’re holding the thing [makes gesture of ghostbusters crossing streams] and then you have to take care of it, you know, you can’t drop it, you can’t drop out, or do one thing, and when someone needs to take a breath or take a bow you compensate for them to support this thing. So for me it’s the fusion, the incredible feeling of it. And I also like the real pressure of how it feels in your ears and your chest and all those things that happen in real space. But I think one of the things I love about - and it’s not like I do that kind of work only, I also do plenty of stuff in like equal temperament you know - but there is something very special about the communal and relational practice that that kind of music demands that I think can only be good for us to do, even if you just do it for fun.
KP: Yeah. And like you mentioned earlier with your solo work I picked up on a little hesitation around being presented as a capital c composer but is there also a little bit of this tension with some of this work being solo and not collective? I know you view your instrument or environment as a kind of collaborator but I guess specifically with other people.
JH: Yeah I don’t think it’s truly solo. I think that’s kind of like a fallacy anyway, that anyone is not dependent on multiple things and systems and people and environments to do anything. But I guess I don’t have to battle with another brain when I’m working alone, only my own. And I guess it turns out I like making things maybe with lots of other bodies and activities and sounds but maybe only having to deal with my own weird brain. I think it’s good for me to do both things, and they’re complimentary practices. For me, making solo records was very scary, vulnerable. I was feeling totally sick right before the Blank Forms records came out, like, oh my god what have I done [laughs] I don’t know, it’s a different thing for that music to live in performance, as an iterative performance, and then to be like, OK I’m going to nail down one version of that and call it the thing and let other people listen to it. I’m feeling more comfortable with this space than I did before. Kind of enjoying it, actually, making my own weird things.
KP: Yeah, it’s good. And with the recordings as well, just since so much of your practice does seem to draw attention towards the performer or the body, do see an issue in recordings as disembodying the performer or making it blind to them? A lot of your stuff, with the shaking and the breath work, there’s artifacts in the sound result, but do you feel too much of something is lost in the recording?
JH: I mean, I think coming to terms with the fact that recordings and performances are different things is really important. And I think part of why it took me forever to make records is that I love records, I love recorded music, I love people who just make a record to be a record, you know. And I felt like there was this chasm between a performance practice and making a great record. It just didn’t really, for me, kind of add up in a way. So it was more helpful for me to think about the recordings as like documents of a practice that has been going for a long time and will continue. So it’s on this temporal spectrum of an evolving, iterative, embodied work and this was like... you know when geologists do the thing, they take a sample...
KP: Yeah, they take a core.
JH: Yeah. It’s kind of like taking a core sample at that particular moment, you know. And I was like, if I think about it that way then I feel OK about it. But I also... like for instance the shaking record, I recorded that live with some people in the room because my friend who recorded it was like, it’s just not going to be the same unless you have people there.
KP: That’s interesting...
JH: He knows me really well and he’s like, if you start thinking that it’s gonna be a record then it’s not gonna be that thing anymore. So there’s footsteps as well as my own breath and creaking and moving - like the cello creaks - there’s hand sounds and the fingers and all those kinds of things, so it was really important for me to have the body present in those things, even if it’s just as a trace. And in the humming for instance I remember when I was working on edits for one of the things and someone was helping me just take out clicks then he started taking out breaths and mouth sounds and I’m like, no no no no no that’s the thing, that all has to stay. I mean, yeah, I think it’s interesting that recording is disembodied and it’s also one of those things where like... ‘cause I definitely think that sound and vibrations are not just aural but they’re haptic, they do have an impact on your body. So sending records out you have no idea how people are going to listen to them or engage with them, you know, headphones is a totally different question. It’s interesting. I’m actually working on a project for a series that a friend of mine who’s an artist here in Berlin has been doing that’s about grief work and sound but it’s like a thing of… it’s proposing these questions of whether you can inhabit a collective listening space through - she started the project in the lockdown - can you create a collective listening space that is also bodily when everyone’s in different spaces listening on headphones. It’s not a question to be answered but it’s just a question. So I’m trying to make something for that and it’s a really interesting conundrum to be posed with. How do you get something on headphones to connect into the body? How do you bring the body into the headphones? Interesting things. But I think letting go of these things and letting them be their own entities in the world has also been kind of hard but good I think. Sorry, I just drifted off from your question...
KP: No that’s perfect. So I feel like you’ve been a performer for some time and you’ve been releasing recordings for some time too but if I do a search for the press about you, it really only starts popping up after all these solo records from a year or two ago. I wonder if that betrays a bias, a societal bias, as a composer over performer type of thing… do you have any thoughts about that?
JH: It’s definitely a thing, that if you don’t make recordings it puts a ceiling on things I think. Which is not necessarily always a bad thing but part of what it does is it makes your practice very localized, as in people who see you know your work and love your work, but it doesn’t travel and it also makes it harder to travel then. A lot of really good friends of mine, musicians from Naarm, where I’m from, I know so many musicians like that, who are just amazing, have never made a solo record or a record even, you know. Maybe there are some live recordings floating around, but it in no way captures the scope of what these people have been doing, playing live like three times a week for thirty years. And yeah, there is something about the kind of machinery around records even in this relatively small niche world of experimental practices and contemporary composition and things like that which I think I resisted for a long time like, no no you don’t have to. But then in the end the work that I was making changed so that I wanted to I guess. But I think, I don’t know, is it a shame, or is it kind of like a beautiful thing, that someone can change the lives of so many people but maybe just in their city, state, region. I don’t know. But it puts certain limits on things, it makes things harder, like if you want to tour and you don’t have any records and you don’t have mates who will just tell someone to book you… I don’t know. It’s been kind of weird ‘cause all these records came out and I was in various kinds of lockdown for nearly the entire time. So it’s only now that I’m sort of emerging a little bit and I’m not sure how it will change my performance life. Maybe it won’t. And maybe that’s fine. It’s this complicated thing.
KP: Yeah, there’s always a tension somewhere right.
JH: I think it’s also OK to make records that you would never do live, that have no live realization. They live in the record, the record is their performance space.
KP: Yeah just since we mentioned Amplify, I feel like that’s Jon Abbey’s mission, to take these live performance practices and make it translate to a great record, but there’s always an interesting tension there.
JH: I mean, I don’t know how many of those people have never released any records, you know. I think you still have to be on the radar somehow to be able to access that space. I think Jon only asked me... when my friend Sean Baxter died, Jon didn’t know him actually but I guess knew a lot of people who knew Sean and were grieving Sean so I think he invited a lot of people who were close to Sean to make things, even though he might not have had us on his radar before, if that makes sense. And that was an interesting example of… like Sean was one of those people who basically didn’t really release records but just played, played, organized shows, put on shows, did so much work for a whole community, really sustained in some ways - him and his partner Annalee - like a whole experimental music community in so many ways. And it doesn’t matter that he didn’t release a whole bunch of records that got reviews in The Wire. He changed so many people’s lives, you know. There are other ways. They‘re just maybe not as visible.
KP: Yeah, and you were talking about success a little earlier and I would view that a better metric of success than a review in The Wire.
JH: Yeah, he was bona fide life changer. Not that I’m saying that music doesn’t change peoples lives all the time, because it does. But it’s more like the press construct around it…
KP: Yeah. And you talked a bit about subverting the big c composition and the hierarchy there, and centering the performer does it and approaching the music as something to be unfolded in time instead of an absolute to be replicated kind of conveys that. Also what I’ve heard about your work with Anthea as well, where it’s conveyed aurally to each other or through memory instead of a disembodied text... but are there other ways in which you’re trying to crumple that capital c.
JH: Mmh, I mean I guess at what point is something a piece. Can it just be a practice, rather than a piece? Can you develop a vocabulary in a space? I guess for me a great deal is about developing a relationship with material, that the material then demarcates this space that the piece or the practice lives in and that doesn’t require a score or instruction or even necessarily memory in terms of: OK and then I do this bit and then I do this bit. I think developing parameters so that something can inhabit a particular kind of space... And I do believe you can do that collaboratively, for sure, if people are up for thinking about things that way but, yeah, maybe practice rather than ‘piece’ is another way to think about that. Again, it’s resisting the closed or finished thing. Even things that have less stable identities than like, you know this piece enacts this particular task and then the piece only lives in the performance but it still has these boundary markers of it’s a piece. I think there are other ways to think around that and maybe think of things in terms of like, yeah, this is a practice. So it’s always unfolding and changing through each iteration. Like the temporal idea doesn’t just hold the sound in time but also the way that iterates itself differently over time as in context and intention, and I change, and the instrument changes, the listeners change. Maybe it’s a larger sense of time and maybe time is not necessarily particularly linear as well, it’s kind of like more cyclical in a way. We’re revisiting territory and then making a new space by revisiting.
KP: Yeah, like seeing the canyon for the cores.
JH: Yeah.
KP: That’s all that I had flowed out. Did you have anything that you wanted to talk about?
JH: Oh, I don’t know. I feel like I’m not very good at these things, honestly. Like when you were asking me and I was like, no but I just feel like I’m more coherent and clear when I write stuff down than when I try to remember things and talk, and then you were like, yeah but sometimes people take forever, and then I was remembering that there was this written Q&A thing that I just haven’t been able to do [laughs] It’s good that we talked but sometimes I feel like I have a terrible memory and I don’t focus my ideas so well when I’m speaking, so I’m not sure how I’ve done [laughs]
KP: No, it was perfect. That does kind of come from a practical thing. There have been some interviews that discontinued I think because of how much time it takes to write. It’s lessening the burden that way, but with the recognition that even if a lot of time people are talking past each other and fumbling with these headier concepts in words - because how well do people really think on their feet - but I think conversation reveals the kernels that people are getting after in interesting ways. But yeah, thank you for having the trust to do a conversation.
annotations
annotations is a recurring feature sampling non-standard notation in the spirit of John Cage & Alison Knowles’ Notations and Theresa Sauer’s Notations 21. Alternative notation can offer intuitive pathways to enriching interpretations of the sound it symbolizes and, even better, sound in general. For many listeners, music is more often approached through performances and recordings, rather than through compositional practices; these scores might offer additional information, hence the name, annotations.
Additional resources around non-standard notation can be found throughout our resource roll.
All scores copied in this newsletter are done so with permission of the composer for the purpose of this newsletter only, and are not to be further copied without their permission. If you are a composer utilizing non-standard notation and are interested in featuring your work in this newsletter, please reach out to harmonicseries21@gmail.com for permissions and purchasing of your scores; if you know a composer that might be interested, please share this call.
Raven Chacon - American Ledger no. 1 (2018)
To be displayed as a flag, a wall, a blanket, a billboard, or a door.
For many players with sustaining and percussive instruments, coins, axe and wood, a police whistle, and a match.
For at least 13 minutes
For any number of musicians with any number of non-musicians
Each line is a minute or longer
Line 1 is for both percussive and bendable tones
Line 2 begins with a warbly long tone crossfading into waves of harmonic or dynamic increases. X = chop wood
Line 3 is for police whistle(s). Other instruments may join
Line 4 is for coins to be thrown. Two instruments may accompany.
Line 5 is a line
Line 6 is a grand decelerando ending with the striking of a match
Line 7 is for acknowledging groupings of 5’s and 4’s. Chop wood. End with everyone and everything.
Raven Chacon is a Diné composer, performer, and artist perhaps most often associated with chamber music, noise, and installation. Chacon is an educator and the composer-in-residence for the Native American Composer Apprentice Project and has contributed as part of the Postcommodity arts collective. In 2021, Chacon released Sweet Land with Du Yun, Aja Couchois Duncan, and Douglas Kearney and White People Killed Them with John Dieterich and Marshall Trammell.
American Ledger no. 1 is a 2018 composition for many players - any number of musicians with any number of non-musicians - with sustaining and percussive instruments, coins, axe and wood, a police whistle, and a match. It prescribes minimum durations for each line and the total performance but no maximum limits. Non-standard notation blends with standard notation, including: a trill chevron, whole note, and ghost notes in line 2; quarter notes and quarter rests in line 3; repeat signs in lines 2 and 3; a natural accidental and a dynamics indicator in line 4; an accent, coda sign, and Da Capo in line 6; and reappearances of some of these symbols in line 7. The instructions might intuitively decode non-standard symbols. Below are three performances of it.
There’s a rich subtext in its materials. The gestalt of an American flag, its thirteen stripes fabricated by the Da Capo, as a ledger or record of accounts of that nation’s oppressive systems, police, money, virulent growth encroaching upon the sky, state & church. From these signposts for the toxicity of colonialism, the relationships with more ambiguously interpreted elements might take shape. It simultaneously offers a guide to a kind of decolonization in dissolving hierarchies associated with chamber music and in this way it assumes the other part of its meaning as not just a record of accounts but a burial slab. In suggesting a collective of non-musicians can perform it just as well and being intuitive enough for non-musicians to do so. In presenting all the information on one page for everyone instead of dividing players among parts that the audience never witnesses. In only specifying instruments outside of the western classical tradition, dismantling ideas of virtuosity and confronting concepts of failure in a chamber performance context (see how frequently the axe does not cut through, imagine how easy it is to not light a match on first try). And in instructing the notation be displayed as another object, diluting the idea of score as work-object.
- Keith Prosk
reviews
Pascal Battus / Michel Doneda - Miracle (Potlatch, 2021)
Pascal Battus and Michel Doneda play five scenarios for rotating surfaces and soprano & sopranino saxophones on the 51’ Miracle.
Instrumental identities blur. Rotating surfaces sound the period of a wave with each revolution and pulse like saxophones’ shrill trills and quavering vibrato. Gyral wobbling like microtonal warbling. Turntablesque skipping like insectoid chirruping more than the bird chirping most often associated with saxophones. Surfaces’ frictional textures mirror saxophones’ piercing whistling, airy roars and rough wheezing, metal-on-metal screech. Together they foray some from the threshold of silence for their sounds, mousy, prodding, sometimes harmonizing in scintillating beatings. Instrumental identities blur but for the limit of breath that the saxophone cannot shake.
- Keith Prosk
http://www.potlatch.fr/
Lauri Hyvärinen - Cut Contexts (Intonema, 2021)
Lauri Hyvärinen arranges five 7’ collages for acoustic and electric guitars, objects, floor, and recording on Cut Contexts.
There’s some cross-pollination of approaches but each track focuses on a set of guitar techniques: the wavering whine of a bowed string or their deep tanpura together effusing beatings; some preparation between spring and roulette pill sounding the resonating body and a harmonic plucking; rubbed resonating body and other anonymous frictional movements and picked strings at the edge of audibility; a low sonorous tone allowed to ring out in long decay amidst amplifier hum; a small squall of droning strings fluttering into an orchestra of arpeggios. The rate of play is slow enough to make time feel slow and this sense is only amplified by the significant silences separating soundings. But as the record progresses environmental sounds desublimate from the silence, birdsong, cock crow, performed floor, water, steps up stairs, traffic, dogs, voices and replace it in the structure. An inviting way to illuminate the depths of silence through the classic combination of soft soundings and contingent sounds. And through this diachronic unfolding of silence and sounding it conveys with clarity the sea change that combination can have on listening. But it seems always aware that these sounds are not necessarily of a related time and reflects that in the structure too. The record ends with the first sound heard, making something recognized as linear circular; further, each track being the same duration might encourage that they’re overlaid and folded again upon each other.
- Keith Prosk
Gerard Lebik / Burkhard Beins - An Alphabet Of Fluctuation (Inexhaustible Editions, 2021)
Burkhard Beins & Gerard Lebik construct four environments for amplified ride cymbal, sine wave, and synth & pd, ppooll, and zopan generator on the 57’ An Alphabet Of Fluctuation.
There is a continuous surface of sound woven from manifold pulses, hum, buzz, whirr, and oscillation in different frequencies sometimes stratified and sometimes interacting for beating patterns and perceptual distortions, sometimes as calm as a breeze and sometimes flexing the volatility of its electric air. Cymbal sounds crosscut, scraped, tapped, raked, pawed, their textures patchworked through the piece though played long enough to resonate with the rest and manifest beatings from the ether that hasten and slow with each activating intervention like drops in a pool refracting among each other. As the title suggests, not much changes and everything is always changing, in flux.
- Keith Prosk
E. Millar - AFR3 (presses précaires, 2021)
Elizabeth Millar presents two sidelong tracks of repetitive acousmatic sounds on the 43’ AFR3.
Traces of environments understood to be natural might appear in this artificial field recording, an afternoon breeze or a teeming night air chatter peaking through the corona discharge hum of recorded and/or amplified spaces, but it could just as easily be anonymous collateral movements from these anonymous objects. Likewise the mechanisms of movement are ambiguous. Fluidly shifting cadences and a variability at the threshold of repetition intimate manual interventions; the fatiguing duration of repetition, periodically inhuman regularity, and occasional coincidence of more sounding lines than hands suggest automation. The materials are unknown but I suspect they are both organic and not. They are alternately percussive and bubbling, shaking and drawing, brushing and whirring, wobbling and popping. Sometimes there is what seems like a little rip or skip as if a glitch places the recording equipment into its own frame. Maybe it intends to blur the boundary between nature and machine. Or confront the relationship between understanding sound and the contextual knowledge of it. Or center the labor of musicmaking in repetitive motion. Like the sounds themselves, their meanings are branching.
- Keith Prosk
Alfredo Costa Monteiro - Nocturnality (Trome Records, 2021)
Alfredo Costa Monteiro plays percussion and electronics on the single-track, 40’ Nocturnality.
Metal percussion sounds like gong rings, singing into silence. No-input feedback ululates fishtails and oscillates. A snarling swell ambiguously metallic and/or electronic interposes. Their sequences and the density of their soundings shift but percussion and feedback each emit resonant pulses that interact. Beatings begin breeching hearing and glimmer in the ether seemingly independently from any other sounding. An angelic choir for cymbals’ bells. I don’t know any specifics but it feels like play, a real-time study of complex harmonic behaviors from among the simplest means.
- Keith Prosk
LOTE - Santiago Astaburuaga: la perpetuidad del esbozo #3 (self-released, 2021, reissue)
The ensemble LOTE performs the titular Santiago Astaburuaga composition on the single-track, 20’ la perpetuidad del esbozo #3.
The materials are overlapping layers of sine tones, soft instrumental soundings, recordings, and silence. Sometimes ‘unintentional’ sitting rustling, throat clearing. The eeks of winded instruments at the threshold of sounding and the whispers of barely-there bowings and percussion and guitar in slow but constant clock-like cadences sit in relation to snippets from radio and television, birdsong, other music, voices, ice cream truck jingle, church bells. The timbres and sources of radio or television or music or other recorded mediums might feel more familiar than those of traditional instruments. In a moment of meta-awareness a voice, there has to be a balance - that’s why we play so softly and we let everything come in. As the variability in duration, number of performers, kinds of instruments, and the way in which similar material is realized uniquely across performances indicates, there is a high degree of indeterminacy in the composition. I suspect it permeates the choices, of materials both subjective and non-subjective, of the performing collective but is perhaps made most obvious to listeners in letting the outside in by way of recordings and accidental sounds and underscoring it with the aside above. Performers surely listen and respond to these and other contingencies and when delicate beating patterns signal a harmony among them it conveys a harmony with that very time and space. I am not sure what questions the composition or performance are asking but the intersecting fields of silence and indeterminacy, here deep and wide, provide a rich terrain for exploration and discovery.
- Keith Prosk
Another performance of la perpetuidad del esbozo #3 from LOTE can be found here, from Alvear, Tim Olive, and Mitsuteru Takeuchi can be found here, and from Alvear, Makoto Oshiro, and Hiroyuki Ura can be found here.
LOTE on this recording is: Cristián Alvear; Santiago Astaburuaga; Felipe Araya; Vicente Araya; Edén Carrasco; Nicolás Carrasco; Gudinni Cortina; Sebastián Jatz; Marcelo Maira; Álvaro Pacheco; and Michael Winter.
Andrew McIntosh - A moonbeam is just a filtered sunbeam (Another Timbre, 2021)
Andrew McIntosh arranges improvisations for violin, viola, piano, wine glasses, slate, field recordings and electronics on the four-part, 58’ A moonbeam is just a filtered sunbeam.
While continuous each part has its focus. The refracting waves of reverberating piano keys muted and strings ringing in “beginning.” The deep tanpura of bowed piano in “middle” and discrete twinkling bowings coalescing into a music box melody tinny, bright, but broken in “other middle.” The scraping of stone in “ending.” Phylloidal layers of pulse and their interactions and the sound of wind through trees permeate the piece. There is a filtering mechanism at work I don’t hear, but I am reminded that like trees are filters for the wind instruments are filters for the natural harmonics of the earth, channeled here into something often sonorous and resonant.
- Keith Prosk
Michael Pisaro-Liu - Revolution Shuffle (Erstwhile Records, 2021)
Michael Pisaro-Liu constructs a political décollage of 106 1’ tracks on Revolution Shuffle.
Tracks bleed into one another, cut hard and cold open. There’s both a sequenced narrative and an invitation to shake it up. The sources of sounds are diverse. Cross-generational, cross-continental, cross-cultural. Scenes of unrest. Songs of protest. Ideological readings and broadcasts and more. I imagine many sources - some minimally changed, some metamorphosed - will be familiar to listeners, and more than that will be unfamiliar. But whether or not the specifics of any single source are known, they all convey a revolutionary spirit. The short tracks - each a revolution of the smallest hand on the clock - and cut-up montages induce a sense of agitation inherent to revolution. Its melange of (undoubtedly uncleared) samples structurally communicates necessary recognitions for revolution, that it is important for people to see it is possible by way of its history, that sometimes systems won’t allow asking for something and you have to take it, that a paradigm shift is never the work of a single person but the accrual and synthesis of small actions from the collective. While not necessarily a strict adherent to its soft aesthetics, this stands in stark contrast to the silent music with which Pisaro-Liu might be most associated, maybe a kind of poetic response to the contemporary rallying phrase ‘silence is violence.’ In content, structure, and context, Revolution Shuffle is a music of change, for change.
- Keith Prosk
Fredrik Rasten - Svevning (INSUB, 2021)
Fredrik Rasten performs their own composition for acoustic guitar and voice on the two-track, 77’ Svevning.
Guitar chords languorously picked expand and contract in both the number and grouping of their tones, alternately repeating and revolving pitch sequences in lullaby cadences - sometimes retuning mid-sounding - to cultivate harmonic interactions and beating patterns in their overlaid decay. Evokes the rich reverberance of a piano’s whole harp ringing or a choir of bells. An angelic voice humming sustained and steady occasionally outcrops for more harmonic interplay. And beyond the voice the performer is heard in breath between voicings, small sharp slaps of string against neck and other string noise. Its slow unfolding feels like the discovering illumination of harmonic spaces by a musical candlelight, especially when tones seem sour as if some edge or corner has been stumbled upon.
- Keith Prosk
Taku Sugimoto - Octet (Meenna, 2021)
Johnny Chang (violin, viola), Sam Dunscombe (bass clarinet), Jon Heilbron (contrabass), Catherine Lamb (viola), Rebecca Lane (flute), Michiko Ogawa (clarinet), Lucy Railton (cello), and Fredrik Rasten (guitar) perform Taku Sugimoto’s modular compositions for solo strings and winds trio and their composite on the 51’ Octet.
The octet is an unbroken plait of meandering soundings mellifluous and briefly beating in their overlappings. The trio for winds and solos for strings unravel the component lines. Multiangular melodies of viola and cello. Linear strokes of contrabass and bowed guitar, the latter particularly resonant and ringing and the former’s decay extending beyond strokes like ghosts. Clarinets a chorus for flute’s piercing song. Each punctuated by silences and with a clarity towards the grit and grain of their individual instrumental identities and something else undefinable all exchanged, their lines stretched and rearranged, for a sense that the octet is something whole and wholly new, for a sense of true harmony.
- Keith Prosk
Mario Verandi - Eight Pieces for the Buchla 100 Series (Play Loud! Productions, 2021)
Mario Verandi arranges eight improvisations for the titular synthesizer on the 36’ Eight Pieces for the Buchla 100 Series.
Layers of discrete or otherwise pulsing sounds materialize rhythms whose components might meander in some haywire eddies but more often appear constant if not for their shifting textures. Chitinous shaking. Life support songs. Bubbling oscillations in surrealistic biomorphisms. Spaceship soundtracks. Clicks. Sirens. Arcade phasers. Sometimes surprising warmth in throbbing organesque sustain or deep bass bombardments. The progressive expansion of its palette conveys the exploration of the composer. Though appearing constant the patterns at the end of any track are not necessarily similar to those at the beginning, giving these electronic tracks organic characters that reveal the strong bonds between texture and form.
- Keith Prosk
Nate Wooley - Michael Pisaro-Liu: stem flower root (Tisser Tissu Editions, 2021)
Nate Wooley performs a Michael Pisaro-Liu composition for trumpet, mutes, and sine tones on the half-hour stem flower root.
As with all Tisser Tissu Editions releases, stem flower root presents the music alongside direct and indirect context, in this case the notation, writings from the composer and the performer and an exchange between them, and two supplements from adjacent arts. It is in no way stifling - quite the opposite - but thorough enough on the nuts and bolts of the music that it confronts any worthwhile words about it to focus on interpretations more than mechanisms. For my part I perceived its structures in the sound. The sturdy underlying sine tone of the stem in its otherwise branching trumpet and sine tones in diurnal tidal cadences of sounding and silence in decreasing durations as it bends toward the bloom. The continuous melodic arcs of the petals that begin where their neighbor ends, sines seemingly detached like shadows flowers cast on themselves. The fuzzy expansion of roots in trumpet and sine tones sounded together but changing the shape of each other in harmonic interactions. And like a plant is not its parts but the whole, each part anticipates the next. The revolving sines and radiating melody at the end of the stem the radial flower and the cross-cutting shadows of increasingly conspicuous oscillations in the flower the “extension and interference” in the buried roots. This particular plant is quite colorful, through mutes and other means, perhaps a gradient moment to moment but spectacularly popping if I skip around the track. Imitating nature faithfully draws upon its infinite well of indeterminacy and I can only imagine the beautiful field of flowering plants this composition might make possible.
- Keith Prosk
lists
There was some discussion about whether it felt right to participate in the volatile ritual of year-end lists in a space otherwise intended to promote a more holistic engagement with music. There are certainly wrong ways to do it but maybe that means there are right ways too. We hope we’ve leaned towards the latter because it comes from a place of wanting to share some of what makes us passionate enough to maintain a project of this kind. I will say that there is something pleasing in how individual our choices are here, only overlapping some in Occam Ocean 3 and ASLEEP/AWAKE/EKAWA/PEELSA, Spring 2021. In the hopes it will grow a little more, we look forward to announcing the recipient of the first small cash prize generated by reader donations next new year. Thank you so much to all the musicmakers and contributors and readers for making the newsletter’s first year grand. We hope you have a happy new year.
Ellie Kerry
Perhaps in light of the relative paucity of opportunities this year for serious sustained engagement with the world outside my home, I found myself increasingly centering the idea of ‘worldbuilding’ in my listening: recorded sound as tangent (in the mathematical sense) to a musicking practice, practice as tangent to a mode of operating in the world and relating to others - cf. the utopian impulse in experimental music, the ideal of, via sound, imagining or willing into being a better or at least different world, whether this frame is explicitly invoked or not.
The auditory experience of filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, centering sound and its relationship to time and memory even more explicitly than the rest of his oeuvre, seemed at certain points forebodingly fragmented, partial, and, at others, fantastically coherent - or, rather, coherently fantastical, not just a science-fiction setting but a science-fiction ontology.
Deborah Walker, Silvia Tarozzi, and Julia Eckhardt’s recording of three more works from Éliane Radigue’s Occam Ocean project felt like a rare and privileged moment of access to, it is hoped, the beginnings of a new and astoundingly lucid world, an ecology of now over fifty pieces, each drifting, slightly, deliberately, with each live performance and each painstaking transmission to a new interpreter.
Henry Birdsey and Zach Rowden’s Fiddle Music series deepened to seven volumes this year, a collaborative practice not ‘expanding’ or exactly ‘evolving’ but simply, indeed, deepening, accumulating, solidifying further into a language and tension all its own.
The idea of ‘worldbuilding’ is of course applicable also in terms of our relationship to history. Björn Schmelzer and his ensemble, Graindelavoix, commemorated the 500th anniversary of the death of Franco-Flemish composer Josquin Desprez with yet another strident affirmation, in sound and in print, of the radical, experimental, explicitly avant-garde potential of ‘Historically-Informed Performance.’ Rebecca Stewart and the ensemble Seconda Pratica, less stridently, and via totally distinct line of flight, did the same with their own Josquin album, echoing Radigue in their explication of the spiritual potential of overtone manipulation.
There are many more recordings and auditory experiences I could list here, but it’s these especially which have returned to me over and over, in my headphones or in my memory, resonating, resounding, as worldbuilding.
Connor Kurtz
In addition to this list, I've also created a one-hour mix which includes most snippets from most of these albums. It can be heard here:
Keith Rowe – Absence (Erstwhile Records). When thinking about what music had the biggest impact on me in 2021, the answer came to me very quickly – it’s Keith Rowe’s Absence. On this live release, the improvising guitar&electronics icon gives a dynamic, subtle and refined performance of textures not necessarily unlike previous masterpieces, but a big difference is that the artist has now doubled down on his use of the radio as an instrument. The music that came from his radios during that performance really interested me. An optimist might see the music coming from the radio as a genuine people’s music, a popular music decided by the populace based on their own interests, while a cynic might see it as the music that the radio wants to be the people’s music, as corporate-approved aesthetics and ideologies readied for mass consumption, meticulously designed to hold the listener’s attention from ad-break to ad-break. What Keith Rowe’s use of the radio offers is something of a detached liberation of the found music, where he acts both as passive observer and active curator, and the songs are able to grow a strange but sincere fascination.
It was exciting and inspiring to hear the songs being pulled from what sounded like another plane of existence, where the fact that the beginning or the ending of the song was missing was inconsequential because the radio signal never ends, where the timbre of the singer’s voice and the haze of the radio’s static take on equal sonic importance, where my country’s own pop-stars (Nelly Furtado and Justin Bieber) can be stripped of their fame and enjoyed as perfect unknowns.
The radios playing against Keith Rowe’s trademark electric eccentricity made for something very special, and my favourite listening experience of the year.
a.hop – FIRST ALBUM (SUPERPANG). This large international ensemble of eccentric musicians came together really well. The three pieces, premiered as still available audiovisual works (links on bandcamp), take on surprisingly different themes and structures but they share a similar mammoth creativity. Despite there being so many sounds and ideas on this album, a strange, multicultural, playful but serious harmony is maintained in the dueling elements of improvisations, compositions, field recordings, voices, electroacoustics, objects, devices and just about anything else one might like to hear on an album like this.
Akaihirume & Yasumune Morishige – ricca (Ftarri). Here’s a very creative and exciting duo acoustic improvisation, for voice, cello and a little keyboard. Vocalist Akaihirume sounds as if she’s releasing an animal from her throat, or even a barely constrained primal zoo – her groans, hums, squeals, squeaks and squawks feel simultaneously alien, organic, curious and erotic. Yasumune Morishige’s cello performance works well as a softened counterpoint, sometimes lurking in the background to provide the vocalist some accessible footing and other times grabbing attention with its careful, offbeat performance and subtle tonal impulses.
Thomas Ankersmit – Perceptual Geography (Shelter Press). Perceptual Geography has remarkable control over not just space in the stereo-field, giving the electronic world it conjures a surreal 3D sensation, but also over space in time – its progression feels like storytelling. The variety of sound is vast and despite being all created with a synthesizer it feels full of life. As the music evolves it takes on a surprisingly epic feel, sounding something like the best moments of a science fiction film’s soundtrack before twisting and perverting itself into its next form.
François J. Bonnet & Stephen F. O’Malley – Cylene Suisse redux (Editions Mego). Bonnet & O’Malley’s original Cylene boasted a strong, dark atmosphere but didn’t really capture my interest – but Cylene Suisse redux is one of those rare remix albums that pulls all the best traits from the original works and presses them up against new ideas, refining them into beautiful new pieces. In the very capable hands of Jim O’Rourke and Ryoji Ikeda, the same material is processed and recomposed in two different ways by two different artists, creating aesthetically similar tracks with compositional differences great enough to make them fascinating to compare, making for one of the most cohesive, creative and captivating drone releases of the year.
John Cage – Number Pieces (Another Timbre). “After all these years, I am finally writing beautiful music,” wrote Cage on this last era of his work. It was a fair description – these compositions were pleasant and engrossing, free from the trappings of harmony and favouring an open structure where notes co-exist. This box set puts together four discs of his final chamber pieces which are performed by varying members of Apartment House. The performers all play with comfortable, modern, Cagean sensibilities that help the patient music’s avant-garde atonalities and spontaneous dissonances float by unobtrusively as a soft wind or brief daydream.
Maria Chavez – ASLEEP/AWAKE/EKAWA/PEELSA (Self-Released). Turntablist Maria Chavez performs with a singing bowl record on four turntables. The result is a constant drone where harmonies shift as similar tones swirl around each other, changing in pitch at the performer’s will. The performance is slow and meditative though, it takes it’s time to flow through pitches but the natural pacing makes the dissonant moments not so ugly and the beautiful moments evoke pure bliss – and it’s all to a soft backdrop of vinyl statics and pops. It’s great how this performance successfully demonstrates what’s so wonderful about both the turntable and the singing bowl at once.
Joe Colley – Trance Tapes (No Rent Records). Joe Colley effectively builds a trance from ticking, bumping, softly screaming electronics and devices on four lengthy tracks all with their own feeling and flavour. The tracks have clear progressions and use their durations well – flowing and fading through electric repetitions and soft-noise textures while others subtly mutate, gradually growing large and violent, but it’s all slow and methodical enough that it achieves an atmosphere somewhere between a genuinely meditative trance and the anxious, concerning trance that might be caused by staring into a blinking light.
Dagar Gyil Ensemble of Lawra – DAGARA – Gyil Music of Ghana's Upper West Region (Sublime Frequencies). This percussion ensemble contains so much energy. The spirited performances are on distinctive enough instruments so that several layered rhythms that may or may not be in cue with the rest can be heard, but an accelerating polyrhythmic groove is always maintained. In two long tracks they assemble off-kilter, progressive, erratic soundworlds rich with fierce style and cautious dissonance. They’re potent enough to induce a trance, or maybe a fever.
Jordan Dykstra & Koen Nutters – In Better Shape Than You Found Me (elsewhere). Somewhere between a classical piece and a work of pure atmosphere, In Better Shape Than You Found Me stirs up an eerie but calm sensation that it modulates with the utmost sensitivity. It’s a really beautiful piece, I can listen to it again and again and again...
Fumi Endo – Live at Ftarri, March 8, April 11 and June 27, 2021 (Ftarri). Since moving to bandcamp, Ftarri has become even more prolific with new digital exclusive releases, which I happily welcome. My favourite of these has been this collection of live performances by pianist / composer Fumi Endo. Touch and Carve are soft, lovely duos with the very talented saxophonist Masahide Tokunaga, but they’re also chances for her to shine as a minimalist composer – the attention to space and growth is impressive. A solo improvisation is also included, where her performance sounds even more structured than the compositions, but intuitive to what must be a natural rhythm.
Heather Frasch – with objects (Glistening Examples). As the lowercase title implies, Heather Frasch plays with objects very softly on this album. On three compositions with different set-ups, constructed from objects, small electronics and “kinetic sound sculptures”, she plays like a barely-present percussionist who occasionally blends right into the quiet winter backdrop that crept through open windows. The vibe is cold and anxious, but there’s also a meditative beauty and comforting resilience.
Full of Hell – Auditory Trauma: Full of Hell Isolation Sessions (Self-Released). Much like many others, the lack of concerts over the past couple years has had me bored. A lot of artists have tried to bring the concert experience to the fans’ homes, and my favourite one to do it was grindcore band Full of Hell. There’s no catch, just pristine recordings of a blood-bumping performance. Try to stay sitting still while listening to this, it can not be done, I guarantee it.
Richard Garet – LEFT and RIGHT (Self-Released). Although nearly two hours long and made over a decade of electroacoustic performance, recording and exploration, of studying and finding what’s fascinating within materials, this went straight to bandcamp and seemed to fall under many people’s radars. It’s a shame, because that time and patience shows. LEFT and RIGHT presents four wonderful, dynamic compositions of soft noises, discrete frequencies, staticy tones, irregular clicking and buzzing electricity, each with a remarkable character that’s expressed through its own marvelous assortment of sounds.
Hecker – Syn As Tex [AC] (ETAT). Fresh after a 2.5 hour masterpiece of stereophonic computer music madness, Hecker follows up with this 51 hour monolith of software synthesized abstraction – the outlandish duration forces the music to become more of a sustained environment than a single experience. The overwhelming complexity is spellbinding – it’s surreal to hear digital ideas, textures and motifs being revisited and reprocessed over and over, taking minutes, hours, days to redefine themselves while rapid-fire change is constantly happening at microscopic levels. The music is rewarding too with no shortage of recurring melodies that embrace, spontaneous rhythms that energize, pleasant stretches of glistening ambience and climactic squelches of digital chaos, but the mind-numbing results make it clear that this music wasn’t designed for human perception – this must be music by computers for computers, what else could sit through a 51 hour album?
https://www.etat.xyz/release/SynAsTexAC
Clara Iannotta – MOULT (KAIROS). Clara Iannotta quickly asserted herself as one to follow on her debut release, and now just five years later she’s come through with a release that’s brilliant track after brilliant track. Large ensembles dynamically come together to make microscopic bug scrapings at times and eruptions of molten horror in others, and things are only more powerful when amplified ensembles and piercing electroacoustics are added to the mix. This is classical music as a visceral experience, as an intimidating creature, and it is absolutely captivating.
https://www.kairos-music.com/cds/0018004kai
Giuseppe Ielasi – its appearance, reflected by three copies (901 Editions). This album feels like ambient music perfectly distilled, or just frozen. Ielasi creates discrete electronic layers and loops which he gradually stacks on top of each other before fading them away, or just lets them sit still. Everything is so soft and unspecific that it feels as if it could be sounds mysteriously left at the end of a tape, the voice of a friendly, musical ghost.
Carlo Inderhees – 8 stimmen¹ (Edition Wandelweiser Records). This 66-minute piano composition is minimal in a very mechanical way. Elements are introduced one at a time after minutes of precise repetitions. Only a handful of different notes flow through the piece in its long runtime, but it’s enough to gradually ascend the composition from sounding like a repetitive machine to a simple melody and back again. The progression is intoxicating to follow.
https://www.wandelweiser.de/_e-w-records/_ewr-catalogue/ewr2112.html
Annette Krebs – Konstruktion#1 & 2 | Sah (Graphit). On these composition-performances, Annette Krebs plays custom equipment made from metal, objects, computer, strings and more to make some seriously otherworldly music. Soft tones hang in the sky, accompanied by sparse metallic clashing, unclear voices and pulsing electronic equipment. Really, if I were abducted by aliens, I wouldn’t be shocked to hear the surgery room sounding something like this.
Francisco López – Hidden Island Music (untitled #398) (Discrepant). This longform composition of field recordings made on the island of Tenerife is an impressive example of most of the things that make Francisco López great. He captures and takes home dynamic sound material and instead of fetishizing their origin location he mystifies it, playing off their perceived aesthetics with new ideas, new dynamics and aesthetics, processing them as much or as little as he needs to arrive at a desired final product. In this piece we get to hear him do it for 41 minutes, elegantly flowing or abruptly cutting through lush soundworlds, making a composition rich with variety and assembled crescendos.
ΜΜΜΔ & Alem – L’âge de l’absolutisme (Antifrost). It almost seems like a novelty release – electroacoustic drone act ΜΜΜΔ introduces a baroque keyboardist to perform music from the 18th century; tattoos and a suit. But this is way too good to feel easy or tacky. As Alem’s hands fly across the harpsichord and an overwhelming low-end cacophony build towards the climax of Händel’s Sarabande it sounds like an overblown fantasy reimagining of what baroque music was. It’s some of the most powerful music released all year.
Leo Okagawa & Philip Sulidae – A Hole Made by Ants (Grisaille). Following these two musicians grow in recent years within the area of processed field recordings and minimal electroacoustics has made them seem like an exciting and maybe even obvious choice for a duo, but this subverted my expectations by having Leo Okagawa play the saxophone for his first time on recording. But he treats the saxophone more like a found object than an instrument, a source of airy timbres and metallic chambers to be investigated, and it ends up sitting beside Sulidae’s digital abstractions comfortably, allowing the whole music to come together as electroacoustic environments that bustle with life.
William Parker – Migration of Silence: Into and Out of the Tone World (Centering Records). More than being ten discs, Migration of Silence is ten original albums of material from different ensembles, ranging from free jazz to piano solos to poetry to traditional music to cosmic funk, varied but similar enough to make a comprehensive look through William Parker’s tone world. There’s so much spirit in these performances, and each disc has its remarkable moments but a big standout is Parker’s text and poetry – it’s pleasant, direct, meaningful, modest, frustrated, inspiring, and the words are sung with enough flavour and sensitivity to make them unforgettable.
Vanessa Rossetto & Lionel Marchetti – The Tower (The City) (Erstwhile Records) / The Tower (l'escalier en spirale) (Self-Released). Two makers and arrangers of strange sounds come together to make and arrange some of their strangest, most exciting, cohesive, mysterious, attractive, alarming, colourful and remarkable sounds yet. Most excitingly is that this is available in two separate versions where the materials are arranged into totally different experiences – they’re a thrill to hear and compare.
Toby Roundell – meditations on the great O antiphons (Edition Wandelweiser Records). A voice singing one syllable at a time, slowly, drawing out each one, turning sentences into abstracted sequences that transcend time. Irene Kulka’s voice is soft and beautiful, but its consistent on-off rhythm makes it feel more robotic than religious. At nearly three hours with little variation between tracks it begins to feel like a natural component of the atmosphere rather than an observed performance at some point, ringing from the speakers like a never-ending monosyllabic mantra.
https://www.wandelweiser.de/_e-w-records/_ewr-catalogue/ewr2107.html
The Scotch of St. James – Live at ErstQuake 2 (Confront Recordings). It’s remarkable how fresh this percussion duo manages to still sound, 16 years after recording. Tim Barnes and Mark Wastell play tam tams, gongs and bells, usually staying on the quiet side with just the occasional massive explosion of sound. The big moments feel like absolute catharsis while the softest feel like zen – both sides feel essential and deserved due to the patient, thoughtful performances that give the illusion of a planned structure. This one is a fundraising release for Tim Barnes’, who has recently been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s Disease, medical expenses. A link to Tim’s gofundme can be found on the bandcamp page.
Alexandra Spence & MP Hopkins – The Divine for Me Is Whatever Is Real (moremars label). This improvised weirdness was captured in a single evening of the duo playing around with miscellaneous objects, tapes and faint instruments, recording each other’s whims from moving perspectives. The music is so odd: playful but distant, relaxing but silly, cute but confounding, mundane but alien. It’s the kind of album to credit ‘tiny bananas’ as an instrument and for it to not be surprising.
Frédéric Tentelier – On Établit un Temps, On Creuse un Épais (Ftarri). Frédéric Tentelier assembles his compositions from layers of soft performances, but they sound more like a chamber ensemble where everyone’s miraculously on the same page. The compositions are slow and dynamic, patiently shifting through instruments, movements and slightly different performative soundworlds. It’s eclectic but comfortable, and as evaporated instruments and ideas reappear the music’s ambiance takes on a dreamy, cozy reminiscence.
Oliver Thurley – Percussion Studies (LINE). This soft, frail droning probably isn’t what one expects from solo percussion music, but I adore this alternative approach that uses the instruments as a nuanced source of continuous sound to more precisely study and exploit. While the first half of the album feels like an exploratory, or even scientific, list of possible sounds, gestures and environments, the 25-minute closer makes for a more impressive composition where these percussive elements get a chance to build into something multi-faceted and affecting.
Mark Vernon – Magneto Mori: Vienna (Canti Magnetici). Mark Vernon collages together magnet-damaged recordings of Vienna, splicing together the tapes in random orders to create fragmented, indeterminate, multi-perspectived but hollow collages of the city’s sounds. It’s more like a tourist’s memory of a city than a valid documentary, but the deteriorated recordings take it further by recalling the effects of dementia or at least a psychedelics-addled brain.
Reissues & compilations:
Denis Dufour – Complete Acousmatic Works, Vol. 1 (KAIROS). This 16-disc set has a lot to dig into. Each composition brings new, exciting pairings of sounds, fusing the acoustic to the electric with contrasting elements of performance, processing and recordings, people, machines and synthesis, pianos, percussion and water. On many compositions Dufour also finds captivating ways to use the human voice, realizing its multiple potentials as abstracted sound material, melodic instrument, emotional character, documentary subject and narrative crutch (most of the text is in French though, making the two-hour translated travelogue The Cries of Tatibagan a major highlight). The soundscapes are all so engaging and thoughtful – it’s amazing how Dufour manages to make such dynamic compositions where all the strange layered elements seem to fit right in place, even elevating each other into glorious moments of acousmatic ecstasy.
https://www.kairos-music.com/cds/0015076kai
Felix Hess – Frog Night (Basic Function). This album consists of 52 uninterrupted minutes of many, many frogs calling at night in a rice field in Japan, recorded near Akio Suzuki’s house in 1998. The unique voices of the three species layer into a soft chorus – it’s so pretty that it almost feels comical that many would consider the frog an ugly animal. As calming as this recording is, it’s also chaotic and uncertain in the way that nature always is. But still, I have first-hand experience proving that this works terrifically as a sleep aid.
IST – A More Attractive Way (Confront Recordings). Out of all the great performances included on this 5-disc set of improvised string music, the one that really stood out to me was Aesthetic Triage, which featured violinist Phil Durrant to make a four-piece. On the other performances it’s clear how good IST were at playing into each other and sharing ideas, but Durrant acts as a somewhat disruptive force that forces the band to uncomfortably adapt. It gives the performance an off-kilter, almost violent atmosphere without sacrificing too much of the band’s shared sensibilities, subtle stoicism or controlled loud/soft dynamics – but there’s plenty of that on the four surrounding hours of excellent music anyway.
Roland Kayn – Electronic Symphony IV (Reiger-records-reeks). For over a year now the remastered work of synth, tape and electroacoustic sound design maestro Roland Kayn have been being added to bandcamp in monthly increments and it’s been a thrill to follow, with each release offering another ticket to dive into his constantly-shifting and always endearing pool of sounds. My favourite release was this 91 minute composition – it’s great to hear Kayn take the time to slowly mutate and grow his sounds. This release also features a masterful, mysterious but relatively limited palette focusing on low-end reverberations and careful variations. This makes for one of his most consistent works, but it also allows the patient climaxes to come off as shocking and awe-inspiring.
Merzbow – Flare Blues (Room40). 1994’s Flare Gun and White Blues are two of my favourite noise releases, so I was excited to hear them digitized and remastered. This did not disappoint – they feel incredibly crisp, sharp and savage. Flare Gun is brutally intense, feeling like a full-on stereophonic assault. White Blues slightly takes the edge off with an ironic twist on rock music, it’s as fun as it is bombastic. The bonus tracks are like sweet, poisonous cherries on top.
Pedestrian Deposit – Nostalgia: 2000-06 (Monorail Trespassing). This box set collects most of the harsh noise artist’s material from splits, EPs, compilations, etc from these years. There’s been a lot of strong box sets of remastered noise material this year, but this is the stand-out to me for two reasons. First, this solo era of Pedestrian Deposit feels like American noise at its best – it’s pure catharsis, one man playing his heart out through distorted, feedbacking electronics, but he takes it a step further by primitively cutting up his material and fusing them with controlled ambient sections, turning his noise performances into compositions that play out like short, melodramatic stories. The second reason is sound quality – back in the early 00s one didn’t expect much quality-wise from noise tapes, but every single track on this compilation sounds fantastic.
Keith Prosk
There are so many more wonderful listening or otherwise musical experiences that I will carry forward but these are the recordings released in 2021 to which I compulsively returned most in 2021.
Nick Ashwood - For Catherine Lamb (self-released)
mattie barbier - Wolfgang von Schweinitz: Juz (A Yodel Cry) (self-released)
Maria Chavez - ASLEEP/AWAKE/EKAWA/PEELSA, Spring 2021 (self-released)
Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage - Blues Alif Lam Mim (Blank Forms, reissue)
Zachary Good & Ben Roidl-Ward - arb (Carrier Records)
Judith Hamann - A Coffin Spray (SUPERPANG)
Sarah Hennies - Psalms (self-released, reissue)
Elena Kakaliagou - Hydratmos (Dasa Tapes)
Masamichi Kinoshita, Airi Kasahara, Seira Murakami - Study in Fifths I (Ftarri)
Rebecca Lane, Jon Heilbron - Catherine Lamb: Muto Infinitas (Another Timbre)
Klaus Lang & Konus Quartett - Drei Allmenden (Cubus)
Liminar - Michael Winter: single track (Another Timbre)
Hans Eberhard Maldfeld - André O. Möller: Out of a Matrix (Partially) (Edition Wandelweiser)
John McCowen - Robeson Formants (SUPERPANG)
Sergio Merce - Dragón neón (SELLO POSTAL)
Microtub - Sonic Drift (Sofa)
Phill Niblock, Dafne Vicente-Sandoval - NuDaf (XI Records)
Onceim / CoÔ - Patricia Bosshard: Sillons / Reflets (Potlatch)
Jessica Pavone String Ensemble with Brian Chase & Nate Wooley - Lull (Chaikin Records)
Deborah Walker, Silvia Tarozzi, Julia Eckhardt - Éliane Radigue: Occam Ocean 3 (Shiiin)
Nate Wooley - Michael Pisaro-Liu: stem flower root (Tisser Tissu Editions, 2021)
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