1/19
conversation with Laura Cocks, Madison Greenstone, and Charlotte Mundy of TAK Ensemble; notation from Katie Eikam; reviews
harmonic series welcomes a new regular contributor in Gil Sansón, who appears in the reviews this month.
Michiko Ogawa recently published The Cosmic Music of Teiji Ito in the form of an essay and a short film, the latter in collaboration with Manuel Pessoa de Lima.
Rishin Singh recently talked with Brad Rose over at Foxy Digitalis.
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conversations
The New York City-based TAK Ensemble is Laura Cocks (flutes), Madison Greenstone (clarinets), Charlotte Mundy (voice), Marina Kifferstein (violin), and Ellery Trafford (percussion). Over video chat, I talk with Laura, Madison, and Charlotte about utopic intentions, mutual care, ensemble mechanics, embodied sound, and the personality of TAK.
The ensemble recently released Love, Crystal and Stone with composer Ashkan Behzadi and the ensemble label, TAK Editions, recently presented Studio Session from Ensemble Interactivo de La Habana. The TAK Editions Podcast also features conversations with friends of the ensemble.
Keith Prosk: Hey, how’s it going?
Madison Greenstone: It’s going well. Looks like I’m the first one on the call.
KP: Ah, yeah. Are y’all joining from separate rooms?
MG: Separate locations, yeah.
KP: Hey, Laura, how are you?
Laura Cocks: I’m great. How are you doing, Keith?
KP: Doing well. Thank you both for taking some time to chat for a bit about what y’all do.
LC: Absolutely, yeah. And I think Charlotte’s due to join us as well. Thanks for chatting with us. I’m excited to have this conversation.
KP: Of course. Is Charlotte, is she currently in New York with y’all too, or is she back in Canada?
LC: She’s just thirty minutes up the road walking… yeah. We all have really good light in our homes today, look at that.
KP: Well I’ve got a couple of threads that I’m thinking about but at any time please feel free to take it in any direction that y’all want to and anything is honestly free game, whether y’all want to talk about things within the scope of the ensemble or what y’all do with your solo stuff or on the side, privately. So I guess whenever I emailed you I kind of talked about responsibility or ethics or political perspectives in what TAK does. In the notes for the most recently released stuff, for Love, Crystal and Stone, the book talked about the political potentiality of Lorca and Shamlou. Some of the excerpts from Star Maker Fragments that y’all did with Taylor Brook a bit ago struck me as describing some of the more hellish aspects of capitalism. Even something like what you did with Brandon [Lopez], just the collectivity of that approach, and even requesting a collective call for this kind of indicates a certain compass. So is there a conscious curation towards the political or moral stories with what TAK does?
LC: I think that, as an ensemble, the interpersonal relationships that we have with each other are incredibly important. And, of course, these interpersonal relationships are not just political, but opportunities to actualize the politic of worlds that you want to see. And, certainly within the microcosm of the chamber ensemble, you have a lot of power with that. You can make things very collective. You can really sit down with the group and talk about what everybody wants to see inf how people interact in the world, and the kinds of community responsibilities that are exciting and important to us and that we think are ethical, and then do our best to model those within our small-scale social community of the chamber group. And then, of course, that extends to folks that we bring in as a collaborator in any sense. So, I think that the folks that we end up working with, we’re bringing them into this little world that’s really like inviting them into our family. And, so, anyone that we work with, I think, Mad and Char y’all should weigh in on this too, I hope, feels the space to collaborate really intentionally with us, as part of this little family unit. And I think that that, it’s apparent in the work with Brandon that you mention. Taylor [Brook] we’ve been working with since our very first concert and we’ve done several collaborations together, from large-scale multi-week theater productions to ten-minute chamber pieces. So, certainly, there’s a lot of those threads in Taylor’s work and our combined work that kind of bring our shared political and ethical feelings to the fore, because that space for conversation and mutual trust has been really thoughtfully established.
MG: Yeah, something I was thinking about, Laura, while you were talking and, Keith, while you were formulating your question was kind of the importance of process and the real care paid to… not the integrity of the process but… well, yeah, the integrity of the process. And that all these collaborations and things you’ve listed off, CDs, tapes, performances, I think they all are kind of this massive accretion of sometimes years-long processes of dialog and making sure that in the moment every aspect of the dialog is right and representing people’s perspectives along the way. And I think this also trickles down into rehearsal strategy and the process of rehearsing, making sure that there are always times to tap in and see how other people are feeling, check in about who’s feeling what, who has a thought that they might not be expressing. And I think that this structure of care within the process creates this upsurgence where what’s produced by TAK or the kind of objects that are made for the public consumption kind of concretize this sometimes years-long process of mutual care for collaborators, for the ensemble. So, it’s interesting to think about what’s in progress and in process right now and the kind of timescales that those are allowed to expand into.
Charlotte Mundy: For me, part of what comes up in reaction to your question is that I think that the fact that a lot of our work does feel political, I think it, actually, comes from us being really honest and reflective about what is most interesting to us personally and as artists. And I think when we ask, “what ideas do we have that are actually kind of scary,” or, “what do we want to see that we don’t see in the musical field,” when we try to answer those kinds of questions, it just ends up being kind of a collective creation. Trying to create worlds that we want to exist but don’t quite exist yet. And, of course, we do think deeply about it and we do also, I think, feel ethical responsibility or whatever but for me it feels like the core of what we do is actually just kind of honestly what we want to see, what we’re most excited about as artists
KP: Yeah and I think I understand that TAK started just ‘cause you had a performance and y’all hit it off as friends, right? So it’s not necessarily that you’re here for some ethical goal or something but you work with each other because you like each other, which I guess is common sense. So if there is an ethics or any consideration of it in what y’all do, that kind of equitable representation of perspectives or collectivity, I mean, that’s it, that’s at the forefront?
LC: I think it’s beyond being at the forefront, I think it’s like the ground. It’s not as though we’re looking at it but we’re walking on it. And I think what Charlotte’s saying about honesty, it’s like we’re all really good pals too so we talk about things that are interesting to us when we’re hanging out, which is basically all the time. We’re talking about these threads of aesthetic and artistic and ethical. We’ve had reading groups where people are bringing in readings to do and stuff like that. It’s just how we interact with each other I think, it’s just the mycelium.
KP: Nice. Love that concept of the mycelium. So you also have TAK Editions where you’re letting other people do their thing, with Ensemble Interactivo [de La Habana] or Lizard Tongue, so is there… what’s kind of the mission behind that? Or is that also just a, hey we’re friends with these people, they’re good people, we wanna give them a platform type of thing?
CM: I would say certainly the people that, the projects that are on TAK Editions are personal connections with us as well as being artists that we really respect. But I think the mission behind TAK Editions is just wanting to support our broader community and create connections across our community. Yeah, said very broadly, kind of the mission.
LC: And I think also we’re really lucky to be an ensemble that’s been around for as long as we have. We just celebrated our ninth birthday. And with that kind of longevity there’s a slightly different degree of institutional support, whether that comes in the form of funding - and we continue to be pretty underfunded - or comes in the form of long-built relationships with folks that might be helpful in supporting the sharing of music. So,I think we really owe it to our community to contribute what we can in terms of platforms for sharing their work.
KP: Yeah, how did y’all find Ensemble Interactivo?
LC: Well we found them by playing with them. They’re fuckin’ amazing players and just brilliant musical thinkers. I think in 2017 I went to Cuba with Hajnal Pivnick, Dorian Wallace, and Eric Umble under the auspices of Hajnal and Dorian’s project called Tenth Intervention. And we performed a concert at a Festival that Ensemble Interactivo performed at and then ended up playing together and all just becoming really close. Then, the following year, year and a half later or something, Charlotte also came with us, and it was a similar model, we played a concert, they played a concert, we played two concerts together, one at this great bar called La Casa de la bombadilla verde and one at the Fabrica De Arte in Habana and we just kind of stayed in touch over the years. And when we were thinking about what we wanted to release that year on TAK Editions we reached out to the group and they had actually just recorded something, and it was like the first thing that they had been able to record since the pandemic started, in November 2020 when they were finally able to come together and record. So, it felt like a really magical thing to be able to be trusted with something that these colleagues that we’ve really cherished for so long made, in that context especially.
CM: I’m really grateful to the groundwork that Tenth Intervention did to make that connection because it’s difficult for American artists to make connections with Cuban artists for logistical and political reasons. And so it felt really cool to get to know these musicians a little bit and get to play with them and get to present their work to more people in America who might not be able to access it in other ways.
KP: That’s awesome. Definitely whenever I saw that y’all were presenting artists from Cuba, that was my first thought too is that, you know, from the first statement, lumping everything together under a political umbrella, that definitely seemed like a fuck the embargo type of move.
LC: Fuck the embargo!
KP: [laughs] yeah, exactly. So some of what I like to ask too are just nuts and bolts questions, because sometimes it feels like there’s a bit of mystery behind the way that things work for people that are on the outside. I know for some of the big New York City ensembles, they have boards and there’s this whole insane corporate architecture. But when I look at y’all, I know that you have David [Bird] and Taylor [Brook] working with some of the more logistical or technical aspects, but at least in the information about you I don’t see this huge corporate thing going on. So, yeah, I guess what’s going on there? Is there a greater responsibility for what you choose, not having that outside party there? And I guess are there some difficulties in that? As you can see I don’t know how ensembles work [laughs]
LC: [laughs] no that’s a great question and as you can see we’re all cracking up because it’s something we’ve been talking about in the last few weeks in a really concerted way and so it’s funny that you ask this. Does anybody else want to answer this otherwise I’ll just, you know…
CM: I think go for it, Laura, and maybe we’ll add stuff.
LC: Cool. So, yeah, we have never had a board and we have been, in the eyes of the New York state government, a for-profit institution which basically just means it was gonna be logistically and financially challenging for us to figure out how to become a nonprofit for the last many years, so we didn’t [laughs], but we’ve over the last few years realized the necessity of changing that financial model within the group, so that we have essentially just access to more grants so that we can get more money and spread it around more. What that does mean though is for the first time in our existence we are required to assemble a board. And, as of last week, we have a board! So our board is, I won’t name names ‘cause it’s not public yet, we haven’t even had our first meeting, but it’s basically just three friends. And what was important to us with the establishment of this board was basically that it was just people whose artistic vision we really value and who we have a really, really long working relationship with. We wanted to make sure that in getting folks together we wouldn’t put ourselves or our board members or our artistic community in a position where folks are having to get on their hands and knees and ask for the space to be creative and ethical. What’s important to us with this is that things, for all intents and purposes, as a baseline, continue functioning in a weird, fucked-up, creative, exciting way and that with the development of the board and change-over into actually being a nonprofit, we can actually figure out some more sustainable and equitable financial systems and see where there are holes in the way that we operate and what we can do to patch those up. But in terms of decision-making and stuff like that, the way that we work inside the group - and I imagine that this will continue to be the case even when the financial system shifts into being a nonprofit with an actually active board - is basically we talk about everything all the time and everyone has equal weight and if one person doesn’t want to do something we don’t do it. That said people are friends and are excited by what other people are excited by. Like, if Charlotte was like, “I really wanna do this project,” and I’m like, “well that sounds like something I’m not really sure I’m into but Charlotte’s so into it that I’m into it now,” [laughs] there’s a lot of discussion and there’s a lot of care and everything’s made with collective unanimous decisions.
MG: Yeah. What I was gonna say kind of in that realm and also relating to your question is that that sounds like a question about self-determinism and decision-making, like if the board has any sort of artistic influence over what we would do as players or human musicians or as like a kind of collective of creative individuals and I just kind of wanted to relate that to the political thing you were talking about earlier. That there is an enormous amount of self-determinism, as a chamber music ensemble, as individuals, and as platforms to present other peoples’ music. And what Laura was saying, what I find really, really beautiful about TAK, is that if folks have an idea it’s on their onus to bring it to fruition. And there is a real flexibility from the members and from the group to try to perceive and inhabit these multiple perspectives that make all these kinds of things possible. Something that comes to mind immediately is the podcast and maybe Charlotte you can say some things about that and kind of like how the TAK Editions podcast came to be?
CM: Yeah and I think the fact that we have a relatively light administrative structure does make our operations kind of, I forget what Laura said, fucked-up and chaotic or something, but it also means that we don’t just go on and keep doing the same thing but we do keep thinking about what would be a cool new thing to do and we do have to make it happen ourselves if we want it to happen. So Marina [Kifferstein] and I started TAK Editions Podcast and everyone in the ensemble has contributed by cohosting and giving ideas for guests. That is a good example really of something that she and I wanted to do and not everyone in the group loves podcasts as much as the two of us do, but they were like, yeah do it, and I think it has really allowed us to have a lot of really cool conversations that we wouldn’t have otherwise had and we’re gonna keep doing it. But it is also a lot of work.
Listen to the TAK Editions Podcast on soundcloud here, or find it wherever you listen to your podcasts
KP: I believe it. Y’all do a lot of - I just checked into it - and y’all do a lot of audio editing on the podcast, it’s not just the straight file.
CM: Yeah that’s important to us because I try to think of it like an audio magazine, like you wouldn’t just put a raw first draft of something into a magazine, you would edit it, right, depending on the magazine maybe. I want it to be presentable enough that maybe people that don’t already deeply love and care about TAK might still listen to it and get something out of it.
KP: I did want to ask, what are some of the choices behind using audio, other than transcribing sucks? Like is there a conscious decision to make it a podcast instead of relaying it some other way?
CM: One, nice thing about a podcast is it’s an excuse to get together and have a conversation. And I think even when it’s edited after the fact you get different kinds of information from hearing people speak than you do from reading a transcript or reading what they chose to put on a page. So that medium, I just find it really… in my life, listening to radio and podcasts has been a big part of my personal development. A big part of me feeling like I found my community and whatever so, yeah, I love the medium of podcasting for those reasons.
MG: Yeah there’s also a beautiful hybrid media thing you can do. With sound - we’re all kind of sound workers - you can play the person’s music concurrently with when they’re speaking so it’s really easy to just have audio examples or things that they might be referencing there immediately for the person to listen to. And, I don’t know, when I was listening to the TAK Editions Podcast I think there’s something so amazing about just hearing your friends’ voices and just hearing the voices of people they’re talking to. You know, hearing the style of banter or where someone takes a pause or whatever, just all these little details that, like in chamber music, carry an enormous amount of meaning also carry so much meaning in these human to human conversations. I think it’s lovely.
LC: Podcasts are just chamber music, baby [laughs]
KP: [laughs] Yeah, definitely. You definitely get a lot more information with intonation. And even so… I feel like so much of the information about this music is on the page that I was listening to your podcast with Weston [Olencki] the other day and I didn’t know know their name was pronounced Olen[skEE] for instance, I kept on saying Olen[KEE] when talking about them. So it’s always interesting to actually hear how people say what they do and how their names are pronounced.
LC: It’s also just an artifact of time, like everybody’s voice sounds different on different days or different conditions. Then you have these little postcards
KP: mmhmm. One of the contributors to the newsletter, he does a longform audio thing and is trying to get the newsletter to do an audio version of the transcripts as well. But usually the things that people want to edit, they’re substitutive or additive instead of just subtractive, so still thinking about that.
LC: Can I ask you a question, is that appropriate?
KP: One hundred percent.
LC: How do you deal with the transcripts? What is the process of turning a conversation like this into what folks end up getting in their inbox?
KP: Yeah, well, y’all will experience this first hand. I’m aware that there are things like otter.ai or whatever that auto-transcribe it and then you can go through and check but I haven’t used those yet because every single time someone says, hey this is pretty good, in the same breath they also say, hey it’s pretty shit. So I just listen back and hand-transcribe it. So that takes some time but I try to turn back transcripts usually in a week or two. And I include some links, whether there’s a dissertation floating around or some videos, audio links, pepper those in, hotlinks, write a little intro, hand it over to the people and then from there it’s their choice. I accept everything, you know. If they don’t want something that they said in there ‘cause they were accidentally shit-talking something or if they decide that they wanna shout someone out and add that little bit of information at that point I feel like the edits are out of my hands and it’s up to them.
LC: That’s really cool so you really spend an intimate amount of time with each conversation that comes to our inboxes. You’ve spent hours and hours just to do the hand transcription, I imagine. That’s really neat.
KP: mmhmm. Definitely get used to a lot of people’s voices. And, you know, I don’t know, it is a lot of fun. The interview that I did with John McCowen this past month, I was just upstairs laughing to myself the entire time between his bigfoot comments and stuff. He’s hilarious.
MG: Shout out to John!
KP: Yeah. Particularly when there’s... It’s fun for me to listen back to them, it’s not necessarily fun transcribing, but the people make it fun. So a little earlier it was mentioned like, hey if Charlotte’s into this but I’m not really into it but because she’s so into it I want to be into it. I guess, are there… y’all all have individual practices, y’all are all composers on top of performers, I guess, what are some ways that the ensemble and your individual practices talk to each other and are there things… I get the sense that everything is on the table or good to go… but are there some things you do individually that might not necessarily feel appropriate for presenting through TAK?
LC: I just wanna clarify one thing, is that usually if Charlotte’s into something I’m probably into it. Charlotte’s deeply curious and creative and everything that Charlotte gets stoked on excited about the prospect of getting stoked on. But yeah, sometimes it takes, you know, we all have different things that bubble up in different ways.
CM: Yeah. I think we all have slightly different frames of reference so sometimes someone will bring an idea and someone… you’ll just be like, I never considered that so I don’t know how I feel about that. It’s usually more that than like, ugh that’s a bad idea.
LC: But as far as stuff that’s really individual to folks’ practices outside of TAK that doesn’t happen in TAK, what would y’all say?
CM: Sometimes I still work on more standard voice repertoire. Sometimes I take on projects or pursue projects that are a little bit prettier, a little closer to like a sort of New Amsterdam aesthetic. Occasionally I do stuff like that, that I probably would not bring to TAK. And that’s not because I think TAK wouldn’t do a good job but I do have an idea of a sort of… like the personality of TAK…and I am sometimes interested in doing stuff outside of that personality because I like doing a lot of different stuff. But I’m curious what Laura and Madison have to say about it, for them.
MG: I don’t know [laughs] I genuinely don’t know. I think it’s hard to answer that question because I’m kind of the newest member of TAK. Everyone has been in this group nine, going on ten years and I just wrapped up my third season. So there was a long period of, you know, a lot of time where I was in grad school, I was writing, I was doing other music, working on other stuff, but joining TAK and trying to find ways to bring my own frame of references, my own perspectives, my own practices just felt very natural and I felt very welcomed within that. I guess on a nuts and bolts level I do a bit of writing as well. I don’t think I bring that to TAK because it’s just a separate medium or a separate structure of working. I’ve been doing a little bit of breadboarding stuff like DIY electronics and I haven’t brought that to TAK because, I don’t know, there just hasn’t been the right time or opportunity but it doesn’t feel like it wouldn’t be welcomed. I feel like… like we all have such varied and heterogenous practices but it doesn’t feel like there’s aggressive border policing of what is TAK and what isn’t TAK. And because we all have these hybrid and multifarious practices that also on a kind of subconscious level imbues what we bring to TAK, because it’s just part of us, we can’t help it. I don’t know Laura, you go.
LC: I was gonna say the same thing. I mean, y’all know what I was gonna say, I was gonna say it’s all goo. It’s all goo and I have no idea where the lines are.
MG: Mycelium.
KP: Yeah it is pretty nebulous but I feel like I do hear a common thread between y’alls solo practices. This might’ve been Weston’s piece but just LARUS LARUS, the multimedia inclusion of it, or like with [Morton] Feldman’s Three Voices, singing with yourself, or I know Aurora had a fixed media aspect, right, which goes back to the interest in multimedia that you were talking about with the podcast and it’s capabilities. It definitely seems like there’s an interest in collage and bringing things together. Yeah, Madison I feel like your interest in mechanical instruments would go really well with like the prosthetic stuff of Laura or even like your writing with text for Charlotte. And I guess… yeah, are there some - we touched on some political stuff a little bit - but are there some decisions behind like whether or not you choose to use text or more abstract vocals - which I guess text is its own kind of multimedia inclusion…
CM: I mean often we’re performing pieces that have been pretty fully notated and so the composer has kind of made that choice, often we’ve let the composer make that choice, if we’re doing that kind of project where it’s composers and performers. Yeah I think I don’t often consciously make that choice. I like in TAK how the voice often can just be another instrument and there doesn’t have to be text. So I think usually I tend away from text for that reason unless the composer, there’s some really strong reason for using a particular text. But yeah it’s an intuitive choice, I guess. When I have the freedom to use text I just kind of choose intuitively.
KP: Yeah, I know a lot of your, just going back to the composers’ decision part, I know some of your stuff is pretty collaborative, I guess whenever you do have a more collaborative thing what are some of the things that y’all are workshopping together? Say on one side of the spectrum is something like Brandon’s, that looked more like a collective improvisation thing, and then maybe something that is more through-composed but you’re still talking about like, what are the boundaries of the ensemble, what are the boundaries of the composer, type of thing?
LC: Well, one example of that, that kind of presents another way of what that deep collaboration and conversation looks like, is a piece that we just gave kind of a premiere of two weeks ago, three weeks ago, is a piece by Eric Wubbels called interbeing. It’s kind of this folio that is comprised of multiple chamber music movements that are discrete quintets, gestures that we make with our bodies, audience participation, video elements, et cetera, there’s a lot of different things. Basically you open up this dream-folio and you pull things out and you can construct a piece from it. We gave the premiere of one iteration of it which probably comprised about between a quarter and a third of the actual material that Eric’s written or is writing. And that’s a project that we actually began with Eric in 2017, so, there’s been five years of communication, conversation, and collaboration around that prior to even just giving this first iteration of a premiere. And when we first started that project it wasn’t just like Eric’s giving us material and we’re reading through it but we actually took two full days and carved them all out and camped out at Marina’s parents’ house. We were all there and Eric had one-on-one conversations with us just about music and politics and creative envisioning, et cetera and then we tried out some things and then it has kind of moved from there.
One thing that I always think with these projects that take a long time is how beautiful it is to move at the speed of collaborative care, to move at that speed of creative trust, of really working together. It’s really gratifying when that happens. Then to kind of prepare for this year, in which we knew that we were going to give one of the premieres of this first iteration of interbeing here, we spent about four or five days at Eric and his partner’s place up in Greenfield, Mass., living on their floor and in their rooms and workshopping everyday and taking swims together and just kind of really fusing our brains and talking about crap all the time. And, on the other, other side of that spectrum we’re making our first piece, our first significant piece, significant in terms of scope, as a collective, that we’re collaboratively composing, and stuff like that. We’re in the process of working on that, so that is another mode of collaboration from within the group at play there.
KP: Oh, awesome. Very cool. So I guess we’ve stepped around maybe what you sound like or what you’re drawn towards but is there a sound character that the ensemble is drawn towards or do y’all consider yourselves pretty open?
MG: The sound of a vortex [laughs]
LC: Hell yeah, Madison, sound of a vortex.
KP: Charlotte, do you concur with the vortex?
CM: Yeah, for sure. I’m trying to think about what other words we can add to that.
LC: I gotta be honest I don’t really know what a vortex is.
KP: It’s like… think of like a drain maybe, or a hurricane.
LC: Yeah I just googled it, that’s pretty cool. It is what I thought it was, I just wasn’t sure. I think the sound of chaos is really important to me. Breaking shit.
CM: Yeah I think we’re drawn to sounds where the boundaries are not clear but it’s also not so completely chaotic that the listener… like the listener still has expectations and those expectations are sometimes subverted.
MG: Yeah I think definitely velocity plays into it. Like I remember first learning how to play with TAK and just having this sense of overwhelming velocity. Things move in really, really amazing ways that I haven’t felt with other chamber music groups. I don’t know, I also know there have been some conversations floating around like, what is the color of TAK’s timbre, or the ideal color of TAK’s timbre. We all have really different answers.
CM: Also, we try to make music in a very embodied way. It’s gotta be music that comes from bodies.
LC: Absolutely. I think in terms of sound as aesthetic it gets confused because I think, at the core of TAK, what we are trying to do is to problematize things that become convention. And even an aesthetic that poses a newness then becomes convention. And, so, when I say chaos, too much chaos or chaos as aesthetic just becomes another series of boundaries and that’s bullshit. And I think that that’s how we approach this stuff, which is like, what are we problematizing, what are these systems that are in place, and what does it look like to engage with them in a way that changes them. Or looks at them as like, what do we do with it, how do we deal with it, what do we actually want. And so in some ways I feel like at its core, what I think, or what I dream of TAK’s aesthetic is that it’s utopic. And that it brings folks together and we have fucking discussions about what we want and what we need, and we listen. We listen to each other and we listen to the music that we’re making. And I think the other thing is, as Charlotte said, it’s very embodied, and if you’re in the practice of trying to problematize a type of boundary or trying to create a different type of working relationship or social system you have to throw down. You can’t do that with a little bit. You can’t just like, oh that’s a thing, what a nice thing that is. You have to fucking show up for it. And I feel like to me that’s the thing that unifies TAK’s sound certainly more than aesthetic, than anything else, which is that I love playing with my friends in TAK because everyone fucking throws down, physically, sonically, these are the same. But, yeah, that’s TAK’s sound to me.
KP: Yeah, so tying this all together I would say that I definitely feel that velocity. Considering a lot of the stuff that I listen to is usually super silent or drone based, I feel that chaos. And if I had to pick like a timbral color for TAK it wouldn’t necessarily even be like a colorfield or one color it’s more a firework of like fruity pebbles explosion…
LC: Fruity pebbles explosion, wow!
KP: [laughs] And part of that has to do with the ensemble, right, like your different instruments and there might be different colors associated with those timbres but a lot of it because y’all are stretching the boundaries of those textures sometimes. So I do… there definitely is an intensity. And a lot of that comes back to the body aspect that you were talking about. Like I know with your solo stuff, it was in the notes for field anatomies, but I don’t think I saw a review where someone didn’t talk about the physicality of it, and I know you go over some of that in your dissertation, and stripping the mucus membrane as part of Atolls, how intense and demanding that is physically. Madison, when I was talking to John, he mentioned you recently did Ferneyhough’s clarinet concerto which I’m not super familiar with but I do know that part of Ferneyhough’s reputation is one of introducing performative impossibilities. And then Charlotte, I’m a little less familiar with your individual work but every time I hear your voice I get almost like an unembarrassed engagement kind of like… the person that I’d compare it to is almost like Jaap Blonk, it can be almost uncomfortable and comedic at the same time because it’s so absurd.
CM: Thank you.
KP: So I definitely get that intensity and I think that all comes from that body aspect. And I guess it’s like virtuosity… not in the sense - like I get the hunch that none of you are interested in acrobatics alone, right, or anything like that - but is there something that draws you… I guess kind of you answered it but are there some roots that draws you towards a music that engages the body in a very demanding way?
CM: That’s a really good question. My first thought that’s coming up is like, isn’t that why anyone makes music. Don’t we all want it to be in our bodies and move in our bodies. But maybe that’s an assumption. I’m gonna think more about that, where did I come up with that assumption.
KP: No I super agree that it always leverages the body or perception or the mind in some way but I feel like with say, some of the silent stuff or durational stuff, sometimes I feel like the intensity is in the material, whereas with y’all I feel like the intensity is in y’all.
LC: One way I was thinking about recently was the other day, is that I went for a run as part of my practice for a duo set Madison and I were playing later that night—I was like, OK so I know that I’m going to be running for X miles, so in my head I have to play a X mile duo set with Madison on this run. When you’re practicing while running, you’re breathing hard, because running is physically intensive. So, what happens is, when you’re audiating in this physically demanding situation, you’re so tied in with your breath because your breath is literally sustaining your body through this kind of challenging thing that it’s doing, that the music really… it just clarifies. The breath and the line are so clearly and intensely linked. Line, and scope of line, and duration of line, and how the line really comes from your body. And it’s vital to me to witness that, and feel that when a body is being pushed in that kind of way. I think the concept of phrasing and line which to me is what so much music is about - even if it’s durational, it’s just a different mode of phrasing, it’s a different type of line - but yeah when you’re putting your body through something that’s challenging like that, you have to become really in touch with its various systems of sustenance and then the line itself comes from that system of sustenance so you actually are creating a type of music that at its very foundational aspects both becomes and comes from systems of bodily sustenance. I don’t know, that’s underfleshed, but there we are.
MG: Yeah, I mean, kind of this is also a little… I’m gonna use TAK’s favorite word right now, scoobied. But I think there’s something really contingent and inexorable about us all performing acoustically and us all engaging in musical or instrumental practices that come from gesture and come from the body’s engagement, whether it’s singing or playing clarinet or breathing or it’s like through the arms and the back but it’s all sound that is occasioned by knowledge of the body and by acting with real creative intention. And not creative as in the way we’ve been using it but creative as in, this will create something with intention and you’re making a future possible with your intention. And I think we all have a really heightened perceptual awareness of that contingency, linking the sound that we create with the dynamism and the metabolism or, Laura, you said sustenance with the body, so it feels like with how, I don’t know, maybe I’m just speaking for myself, but it feels like with sound there actually really is something at stake rather than like, and this isn’t a dig, but a kind of observational practice of like make a sound, observe it, set a synthesizer, observe it, you know. Yeah this is also kind of underfleshed but... the person embodying the sound, the person behind the sound, or who is the sound is just as present as the motility of what sound we do make. I don’t want to say also “the sound itself” because it’s not separate. It’s the room, it’s us, it’s everything situated and embedded in that way.
CM: Yeah I’m enjoying thinking about this question and one part of the answer for me is like our interest in embodiment is related to our interest in utopia. Because if you’re trying to create something new and you stay in your head, I think you’re more likely to replicate the problems of your current situation. Like I get confused all the time, constantly by ideas in my head and I find getting into my body… not just me, everybody, it’s therapeutic to get in your body and just be there and go there for your answers and I think that’s part of why I like embodied music so much is because it feels like it sort of helps me access a sort of truth [Laura types ‘the body knows’ in the chat] yes, the body knows… access a kind of truth that you can’t quite access just from your head on its own.
KP: Yeah one hundred percent it feels like a… just the mind-body different feel you’re talking about it almost feels like an upper management versus ground floor relationship type of thing where the people on the floor actually doing the thing know a lot more about like the details of the work or whatever, they know a lot more about what’s possible than someone just thinking about it.
[Madison types ‘yay Cartesian divides’ in the chat]
KP: I don’t know what those are. What are Cartesian divides?
MG: I’m just bullshitting like, you know, the separation between mind and body.
KP: Oh, OK. And yeah, I guess, just towards the intensity part, while y’all where talking I was just thinking about where I enjoy hiking and I really enjoy the desert, for a variety of reasons but also because it doesn’t matter how many calories or how much water you take or if you know the trail or if you’re wearing the right hat and clothes, climbing out of a valley in desert weather is gonna kick your ass and could kill you even if you think you’re prepared. And because of that, I feel like, compared to other places that I’ve hiked, that might have a bigger slope or maybe they have a better view, they just don’t compare to the high stakes, kind of like what y’all were talking about, just putting the body through the paces. So we’ve talked a bit about some ethics behind TAK and maybe what you’re drawn to in sound, drawn towards in thinking about sound whether its coming from the body or how it relates to the body, but are there some things missing that puts together the nebulous idea of TAK that you want to get out there?
MG: I was just thinking about the riff, the special sauce. I don’t know, that’s what immediately comes to mind. It will probably lead somewhere much more insightful.
LC: It’s funny you say that, Mad, because, yeah, what I was gonna say is, I just love these people and I respect them so much and that is so much of TAK to me—coming together with these people that are family and hearing their thoughts and hearing their craft and getting to make things with them. Like that’s a fucked up privilege and that to me is the most thing of TAK. Yeah, basically we get to hang out together and make music, it’s so dope.
CM: Yeah I agree I was just thinking along the lines of like fun and play. I think that’s an important part of what we do and it’s related to stuff we’ve already talked about but we do it because it’s fun. We’re trying to have fun. It’s also a lot of work and sometimes it’s hard but fun is important.
LC: Sometimes that work is really fun, like being in the desert and having to climb out of a valley like that’s some type two fun, but it’s fun.
CM: Yeah exactly yes, like you’re fearing for your life and having fun at the same time.
LC: The best combination! [laughs] TAK’s all about that, we do like to have fear while having fun in various outstretches of our relationships as well.
MG: And also what’s missing is Ellery [Trafford] and Marina aren’t here.
CM: Yeah, they are missing.
LC: We miss you!
KP: Yeah. This goes back to, you know, it’s all kind of based on your personal connections, which is how got started, sounds like its the foundation of the group and what y’all do, but there’s a concept that I think about a lot, escalation with dinosaurs. It’s like more food was available so the plant eaters got bigger so the carnivores had more food so they got bigger and then the plant eaters continued to get bigger… but not in a competition sense, more in like a rising tide raises all ships type of sense.
LC: What happened to the plants, Keith?
KP: Uh, this is from a long time ago so probably more rain from climate change, or more CO2 in the atmosphere too, right. Plants love that, it’s not great for us but…
LC: More dinosaurs breathing out more CO2 means more plants breathing in maybe?
KP: I think whenever the dinosaurs are on the earth we didn’t have icecaps so there was more CO2 just floating around, it wasn’t locked away, so that would’ve provided more food for the plants. So this is not the point but I guess just by being around someone else that wants to grow you’re able to escalate each other and reach new heights together, that’s the point, not so much the accuracy about the dinosaurs [laughs]
LC: Oh no, I was just super excited, I just wanted to know.
KP: That’s kind of what I had lined up but did y’all have anywhere else that you wanted to go, talk about, shout out? I don’t know if this was a deep conversation, if you had prepared some stuff if you wanted to get it out there…
MG: What is deep?
KP: Uh, I guess it depends on the person and how tall they are and how far they can reach…
CM: How long they can hold their breath.
KP: I guess, would y’all rather white water raft together or start a book club together?
MG: This is something we play at the end of the podcast together, right?
KP: Exactly.
LC: I feel like you could have a book club while you white water raft. Very gemini answer, I don’t know if it counts.
CM: I think if we had to choose one and we could not do the other one, I might choose book club because I would like to do things with lots of adrenaline and fun with TAK but book club seems more important some how, I don’t know.
LC: We went rafting last summer, Char, it wasn’t very fun.
CM: Well we didn’t go white water rafting but true, it was not great, it was overrated.
KP: What about, would you rather run a facepainting booth or caricature booth at the carnival?
CM: I mean, definitely facepainting, oh Mad…
MG: No, we just said the same thing.
LC: One hundred percent... painting on someone’s body!
CM: Yeah one is all about like intimacy and elevating someone’s self-image and the other one is just about being kind of mean usually. I guess you could probably make really kind, glorifying caricatures but, yeah, facepainting.
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.
Katie Eikam - Desert Flower Diaries (2020)
Katie Eikam is a composer, performer, percussionist. Collaborations include DesoDuo with Kevin Good (to which Desert Flower Diaries is dedicated) and Quartet Friends with Richard An, Good, and Wells Leng. Recent releases include realizations of Eva-Maria Houben’s john muir trails and Kevin Good’s Songs for Two, both as part of DesoDuo, at whose merch page entries of Desert Flower Diaries may be viewed and their prints purchased.
Desert Flower Diaries is a collection of ten 2020 compositions for an open number of performers with open instrumentation and a duration of less than five minutes each. Each piece may be performed in any page direction. Its numbered entries feature color photographs of unpressed, freshly-picked flowers on paper with hand-drawn lines and forms in black ink.
With duration as the only limit, each pieces’ short time recalling flowers’ brief life when picked, interpretive possibilities appear daunting. But page orientation and the contrasts of color and black & white, three-dimensional and two-dimensional, and natural and more narrowly anthropogenic each feel important to focus on. Drawn lines and forms themselves often seem like interpretations of the flowers they accompany in translation or reflection; a realization might express the spirit of their relation in response to the environment performers find themselves, sounding lines lightly mimicking and parallel and perpendicular to natural forms in the space surrounding them. Page direction can color perception, like whether a flower appears to be growing or dying or the movement of line, but perhaps also dynamics, not just from the forms on the page but the page itself, turned to its corner its angular swell signifying lower-volume soundings or more contingent sounds towards its peak. Color, shadow, natural textures, and irregular lines would seem to encourage non-standard timbres. Whatever interpretation I gravitate towards, I find the relation between a human construction and natural structure at the center of it.
reviews
Dante Boon, Seamus Cater, Heather Frasch, Gabi Losoncy, Koen Nutters, the same ensemble, Germaine Sijstermans, Rishin Singh - amsterdam . berlin . moscow losoncy (Edition Wandelweiser Records, 2021)
The term artistic movement doesn’t fit Wandelweiser. There’s no agenda, no manifesto. Rather, a clear intention to avoid convenient classification, this being one among many strategies employed to operate in ways that hopefully prevent the music to become easily codified and pre packaged for consumption. It would be more appropriate to talk about a network of artists with an interest in non demonstrative sounds, avoidance of conventional narrative, questioning basic assumptions regarding time, musical time and music in situ. As with any rhizome, this larger network is made of many smaller networks, each of them a miniature version of the larger one, sharing most of its traits but adapted to specifics depending on the case. amsterdam . berlin . moscow losoncy is, in part, a map of Dante Boon’s network: he’s the common denominator and producer, gathering artists in the Wandelweiser orbit in a display of ideas that illustrates this ferment of activity that refuses to waste energy in classification or codification, working to proliferate ideas and unexpected connections between seemingly disparate paths. Reviewing this album I get the feeling that maybe the basic notion of a concept album is being questioned here: no liner notes, no heads up, no justification for any of the sounds in it. To the question “why Losoncy?” the answer appears to be “why not?”
In this collection we find pieces that will conform to most people’s expectations of how a Wandelweiser piece of music should sound, like Germaine Sijstermans’ “M,” carefully blended harmonies presented in long tones and shorter values on the piano. Antoine Beuger has said that one aspect that differentiates Wandelweiser from most contemporary music circles is that they play the number pieces by Cage as if each note was deliberately chosen, that is, the fact that they were randomly chosen by a computer program doesn’t mean they are to be played without intention or love. “M” shows this perfectly, each sound feels essential, the tones breathed rather than executed, with understated tenderness and charm.
The voice plays a large role in the program, being the medium to explore non musical ideas. “tree space: the trees they do grow high,” by Seamus Cater, shows how Wandelweiser approaches song forms; voice and accompaniment at their bare minimum, so that a single chord on the piano after a handful of single notes feels like a standpoint, musically and structurally speaking. One could say that the key to a successful Wandelweiser piece of music is the trust placed on the relatively limited amount of materials, which carry the weight of the composition when conventional drama, pathos, tension and release are eliminated from the equation.
Dante Boon’s “depression (herbeck)” hints at a larger context. Depression, lack of motivation. Our post pandemic times charge a large toll on our psyche, and artists are forced to confront this sooner or later. In this relatively brief song the listener finds a female voice singing a tender melody, seemingly independent from the piano, who seems to encounter a surprising difficulty in playing a simple major scale, perhaps being forced to examine its validity in this context. In this type of music, something as simple and basic as a major scale can be a disruptive element, adding tension to the whole. “trauermusik” by Rishin Singh does sound like the title implies, with a ceremonial quality that revels in its lack of harmonic resolution, placing the tension on this static quality that despite being insisted upon never becomes too comfortable or familiar. It might be something as old as Bach’s dissonances, used to enhance the pathos of the text, and here the music blends the somber mood with a harmony that savors small intervals and the poignancy they can elicit. “for what,” by Boon, is a piano piece made out of simple chords giving way to dyads and single notes. As often with this music, the simplicity hides all the work that has to be made to reach this level of economy of means. In very subtle ways the music evidences that it was written by a pianist composer. Gabi Losoncy is the wild card in this collection. Her work quite deliberately avoids music, or even the more aesthetically minded noise art of most. She presents us with a sound as it is, with a title (“tighter”), and it’s up to the listener to connect the sound to the rest of the program. To these ears, Losoncy’s track both evidences the strong artistic personality that merits her inclusion in the title (as if it was a capital city) and serves as a palate cleanser for the rest of the program. Simply put, after Losoncy’s track everything has changed, hers is the elephant in the room and again, this seems to be a welcomed disruption, an object that shares the space with you, forcing the listener to make some sense out of it, with no easy answers in evidence. Kirill Shirokov takes a piece by Josef Matthias Hauer and interprets it by taking some great liberties with the text, all while managing to stay true to the music in a rather oblique and charming way. Wandelweiser comes from the experimental music tradition of the XX century and one of its characteristics is the way in which it deals with music history. Shirokov’s next piece, “2019IX26 (quintet),” takes Walt Whitman’s “The Song of Myself” as subject matter. Deliberately or not, this subtle way in which an author is perceived by another from a different time and different culture becomes a field of possibility well worth exploring. The restricted pitch content is lovingly displayed and the music doesn’t feel contrived, on the contrary, the sensation that the music requires this concentrated exploration of a relatively short space is very much present. The instrumentation hints at jazz (plucked double bass), with the inclusion of that most humble of instruments, the melodica, in equal standing as the piano or any other instrument. William Blake is the writer on the next piece by Shirokov. There’s a quirky quality to Shirokov’s music, at times giving hints of some sort of modernist cabaret of the earliest period of the Soviet revolution, with a sort of inquiry into basic assumptions of the bourgeoisie, without the pointing finger or the lecturing. One can feel the philosophical underpinnings behind the music without necessarily being dragged into it, just enough to know that there’s more than meets the eye. Samuel Vriezen’s linking closes the program fittingly. Again, the deceivingly simple surface hides a carefully chosen system (implied by the title). Vriezen’s music often pushes the envelope regarding what’s expected of Wandelweiser music, but here the music fits the criteria perfectly, and it has to be said that Boon’s distinctive playing highlights the more poetic aspects of the compositions.
The album has the merit of offering a map of Boon’s network (at least a possible one among many), a collection of quite different views and ideas by composers that may not be the first ones to come to mind when thinking about this thing called Wandelweiser (the principal names, those belonging to the first few composers associated with the Wandelweiser tag, Beuger, Frey, Pisaro, Werder, Houben, have all evolved in sometimes wildly unpredictable ways, but are experiencing the validation from the larger contemporary classical establishment with high profile commissions in at least a few cases), but that only shows that in this rhizome the vitality of the less explored areas is just as rich as in the more celebrated works of the core of artists of what could be labelled as the first wave of Wandelweiser composers.
- Gil Sansón
Lydia Winsor Brindamour - empty spaces (Sawyer Editions, 2022)
The 51’ composer portrait empty spaces features four Lydia Winsor Brindamour pieces for small groups and solo.
Single soundings surrounded by silence characterize two short duos from the composer’s empty room series for clarinet & violin and bass flute & violin. Their staccato relations suspend movement yet imply it in phasing overlappings, vibrato, and the reverberatory presence of space for a series of sound images like stills from film. But even with these sort of photographs the memory of soundings’ personalities changes unreliably the longer silence separates them just as absence would that of a person. Two longer pieces play at the complex textures of tam tam and piano, the latter accompanied by violin and cello that interblend and extend the interactions of a chord across the whole harp from each strokes’ tolls, the former malleted, brushed, and struck to brighten the corners of its timbral spaces. Piano and tam tam decay as intricately as they sound, layers of their spectra fading staggered into inaudibility. Such that an afterimage of what is gone might remain to frame absence as an unsound perception of silence. A ghost.
- Keith Prosk
The performers on this recording include: Kyle Adam Blair (piano); James Beauton (tam tam); Erik Carlson (violin); Madison Greenstone (clarinet); Myra Hinrichs (violin); Peter Ko (cello); and Michael Matsuno (bass flute).
Lucio Capece, Katie Porter - Phase to Phase (Ftarri, 2022)
Lucio Capece and Katie Porter perform two compositions for bass clarinets and contrabass clarinet on the 46’ Phase to Phase.
Subtone soundings swell from silence, fetch breath along the bore like seafoam up the shore, split tone spectra to best express their combinations in a rich depth of harmonic interactions. They phase in alternating shifting attacks and on a smaller scale in beating patterns. Fishtailing waves with each sounding as if they were the wake with each breaching. The second composition is supposed to be stricter in timing than the first but nearly seems a continuation of similar patterns whose most noticeable difference is the new register of contrabass clarinet. But maybe that its half-length feels as expansive as the first means its dilation of the experience of time is not lost.
- Keith Prosk
Sam Dunscombe, Rebecca Lane, Horațiu Rădulescu - Horațiu Rădulescu: Plasmatic Music, Vol. 1 (Mode, 2022)
Sam Dunscombe realizes three or four Horațiu Rădulescu compositions with clarinets, synthesis, tape, Romanian flutes, and sound icon, with contributions from Rebecca Lane on flutes and recorded contributions from the composer on pipe organ and synthesis on the 64’ Plasmatic Music, Vol. 1.
Dunscombe’s notes describe what’s happening in each track - pulses of pulses, the breadth and depth of one tone, deconstruction and reconstruction of harmonics and its overlaid inversion - in just enough detail to maintain some mystery yet focus listening attention towards the experience of it. The persistent repetition of relatively simple structures, the extended duration of ecstatically dense textures, and the ascetic constraint of parameters like pulse and pitch to paradoxically explode their expressivity guides towards a sense of psychedelia. As does a similar liminality in contemporaneous poles like the mimickry of nature in crickets with the synthetic textures of clarinets’ odd harmonics or the simultaneously sinister and comic warped carnival organ of overlaid winds. And from the ether between all these strange partners emerges imagined sounds, not just singing beatings but other phenomena like the guttural chant towards the end of Opus 42. Conjuring an awesome spiritual experience from the revelation of music’s animism.
- Keith Prosk
Cenk Ergün - Inseln (Sacred Realism, 2022)
Cenk Ergün arranges layers of voicings from Rupert Enticknap, presented twice in different locations, on the 87’ Inseln.
Sounded islands sit in a sea of silence. The voice is the bar that breaks the air. Laminar spillings from longer singings lapped over by layered others amass, interfere, wash, and beat. Undulating, pulsing, throbbing, singing. Uniform, syncopated. Melodic fragments and multi-track layers lend more shore for wave action. Compared to the stillness of the recording at Andreaskirche, the recording of the original installation at Zionskirche features a richer silence of cracking pews, infant coos, chattering birds and persons, and rail whistles. A big church door slams shut like a tome during an angelic chorus for a serendipitous complement. But beyond these happy accidents the presentation of a relatively exact copy allows the listener to hear the space. Not just a greater reverberation but other intangibles that manifest in different beating behaviors at comparable moments across the two recordings. And without access to the two spaces to tether these sounds to shapes it alights the imagination to wonder what part of a sound is ethereally stable and what part delights in interaction with the room.
- Keith Prosk
Bryan Eubanks - for four double basses (INSUB., 2022)
Jonathan Heilbron, Andrew Lafkas, Mike Majkowski, and Koen Nutters perform two sidelong iterations of the titular Bryan Eubanks composition.
Arco ebbs and flows in molasses turbulence, phasing for accidental harmonies, spilling beatings. Players hasten or slow sequences but the crystallized meter within sequences seems to ensure a gentle arrhythmia expressing the fickle unique clock of each. Comparative listening between the two iterations doesn’t produce acute contrasts, the body still moves similarly despite individual variation in the way the four could be said to move as one instrument. What does change is time, the material the players manipulate is time, the music is time. And the reduction of variables towards time illustrates its potentiality as a material by itself. A synchronic approach maybe difficult to track but for the number and location of singing harmonic interactions.
- Keith Prosk
Terry Jennings - Piece for Cello and Saxophone (Saltern, 2022)
Charles Curtis performs an 85’ realization for solo cello of a La Monte Young arrangement of the Terry Jennings composition, Piece for Cello and Saxophone.
Matrices of melodic patternings on droning prismatic surfaces. For the duration a purring tanpura fades to begin and end like the tinnitus about us out of a heightened consciousness. In the arc of a spiral of expanding segments that could perhaps continue forever, a rhythm of transitions at intervals around 17’-6’-6’-10’-10’-25’-6’-6’ that each mark a change in chord and surface by slowing and folding the melody into the droning harmony. Surfaces sound sonorous to tinny, frictional like tectonics or as expansive as breath, as strata or a shaggy unit, and each maintains its character in dynamic equilibrium for the duration of the segment. Upon them dance melodies of melancholy serenity that appear to be similar material or permutations of a set. The extended total duration and shear of droning monotony with endlessly shifting melody (which sometimes makes what’s happening seem like a performative impossibility for a soloist) disintegrates memory. So the melody seems difficult to track, and comparing the interaction of tone across surfaces doesn’t readily happen directly but in its manifestation as beatings. Which breach and dive into audibility or sustain a presence, maintain constant speed or flit in giddy arrhythmias, sing and hum, alone or in throngs, all depending on the pairings of chord and melody. It sounds the scaffolding of rational lattices to visualize the dimensionality of harmonic space to a substantial degree.
- Keith Prosk
Sylvia Lim - sounds which grow richer as they decay (Sawyer Editions, 2022)
The 43’ composer portrait sounds which grow richer as they decay features four Sylvia Lim compositions for small groups and solo.
Some of Lim’s music draws from decay, the biological process, which can present in unstable techniques, slowing speeds, fuzzying pitch clarity, expanding material, decreasing density, softening volume, and decay, the acoustic process. That which might not, like the progressive elongation of tone from malleting to rolling to bowing in the multi-movement “Piece for three tuned cowbells” or the monochrome series of clarinet multiphonics in “Colour Catalogue: Whites,” still feels similar though maybe more topological transformation in their shifting parameters. Instruments often come in pairs as if to provide markers of change and illuminate the complex processes between two states, like the two trombones of the title track moving out of unison for beating harmonic interaction. And as something moldy is immediately identified by its texture and color, those aspects are accentuated through preparations, mutes, extended techniques, tactile timbres, and rougher textural surfaces. Decay betrays some truths of a material and a sound is laid bare as its pieces dim to silence one after another.
- Keith Prosk
The performers on this recording include: Christopher Brown (cello); Ian Calhoun (trombone); Ben Clark (percussion); Evie Coplan (cello); Antonin Granier (percussion); Zachary Johnson (trombone); Alvin Leung (piano); Katie Macdonald (flute); Kaitlin Miller (harp); Heather Ryall (bass clarinet); Fiona Sweeney (flute); and Natasha Zielazinski (cello).
Maxi Mas - Lo que se esconde entre las notas II (Rumiarec, 2022)
Jorge Consigo, Laura Fainstein, Daniel Gómez, Julián LaRosa, Andrés Ortiz Mendez, and Lucía Raimundi perform a Maximiliano Mas composition for acoustic guitar on the 14’ Lo que se esconde entre las notas II.
The guitarists sit in a circle strumming chords and picking melodies and bowing drones in and out of unison through movements. Sometimes a guitarist alone as a kind of control for the harmony of the group. Which sounds their halo in deep breathing and chair creaking to place their beatings between resonant bodies and visualize their circular auroras. And in this way what is between the notes clearly becomes what is between the people, which is harmonic interaction and space, unveiling the intimate connections between them.
- Keith Prosk
Sean Meehan - Magazine (Sacred Realism, 2022)
Sean Meehan sounds a cowbell in the powder magazine of Fort Jay on the two-track, 62’ Magazine.
The notes relay the chamber occupies non-parallel stone walls and arched ceilings. It manifests in sharp strikes and quick decay. Echo flashes from percussive clusters but there’s as many solitary soundings as not and as many minutes of silence as those. A still silence. Void of anything but hushed rustling from movement about the room. For an hour. Tapping. Empathy for muting, force, and location along the bell though the lapse of memory in long pauses together with blind listening obscures any systematic approach. Staccato soundings so surrounded by silence repetitions within them even seem non-repetitive. Each an assault, a jolt of volume. After so little in so long, the 4’ salvo of dinner bell tolls induces a perception of chittering rhythms from which an aura of harmonics arises. After the location a demonstration of power, of silence, of sound, of time, of space.
- Keith Prosk
Vanessa Rossetto - The Actress (Erstwhile Records, 2022)
Writing about the music of Vanessa Rossetto can be quite difficult. A descriptive approach doesn’t work. She’s doing what practitioners of concrete music have been doing from day one, selecting sounds from everyday life and recombining them in pieces that seem to be about something. If anything, her approach seems closer to Ferrari than to Henry: she doesn’t push sounds around, to quote Feldman’s famous retort to Stockhausen. Rather, she allows for grey type sounds to linger for as long as deemed necessary, often in ways that seem more structural and related to pace and agogic than to any sort of sound portrait of an environment. Over time her work is shown to require large canvases of sound, and here the double CD format feels like a personal conquest, and the music validates it. Splitting the whole into chapters, so to speak, the listener is able to listen in smaller chunks, and all the tracks have a definitive character while being perceived as parts of a whole. Can we speak of a single to extract? Probably not, though pieces like “Early Girl” or “Instagram Famous Cat” do give the impression of a self contained piece, with different parts on a given structure. Rosetto’s work revels in the everyday sounds you get by simply placing a microphone outside your door, in references of forgotten cultural items, in the sound and patterns of speech, prosody of language and the sounds that can be encountered in common households. Again, methodologically speaking nothing new under the Sun, but done in a way that keeps the listener constantly engaged, avoiding tricks or jump scares and focusing primarily on flow. Is there a story being told here? Perhaps, but not in any traditional, narrative sense. The actress seems to be witnessing events, not commenting on them or driving any action, but we hear people talking, knocking on doors, movie dialogue. She seems to enjoy her invisibility, as the cover art implies. At some points, electronic sound is employed to act as bookmarks of sorts, and this is especially noticeable in the way disc one ends and disc two begins. Each disc has a particular quality that in retrospect makes the two volume format not only necessary but essential, as the emotional gravitas seems to gather momentum as the album progresses to its ultimate conclusion. Over time, the listener’s mind can’t help but detect patterns, the way certain sounds seem associated with certain emotions and how these experience subtle alterations and shifts in color or mood. It is here, perhaps, where we can make our own associations and attempt to guess the narrative with the sonic clues given as a guide. Or not.
- Gil Sansón
Grisha Shakhnes - Brass (presses précaires, 2022)
Two pieces, totaling 28’, “recorded at home, Tel Aviv,” by Grisha Shakhnes.
Between the recording’s title and art, my own memories of Tel Aviv’s heat and humidity, and maybe something in the audio itself, a yellowish haze seems to me to hang audibly over these two pieces, contextualized as foreboding rather than simply present, especially on the first track, by irregular taps or clicks alongside unclear ‘rough-textured heavy object dragging on rough-textured surface.’ When these more concrète elements are interrupted by seemingly unprocessed sounds of children playing or cars going by in the distance, the effect is quietly surreal, suggesting something hidden underneath or within the cityscape’s normalcy. Also cutting through this thick atmosphere are the late intrusions of a muffled gamelan ensemble followed by agitated flute (though I think it’s not, as might be suspected, a suling), which ironically dispel the tension by communicating a similarly ‘mysterious’ mood but in much more conventionally ‘musical’ terms, to gently humorous effect. Altogether a beguiling soundscape.
- Ellie Kerry
Germaine Sijstermans - Betula (elsewhere, 2022)
Antoine Beuger, Johnny Chang, Fredrik Rasten, Germaine Sijstermans, Rishin Singh, and Leo Svirsky play seven Sijstermans compositions for concert flute, viola, guitar & ebow, clarinet, trombone, and accordion on the 102’ Betula.
Soft soundings slowly unfurl for sustained durations, individually and aggregately. Limited sound shapes and textures lend a sense of similitude across compositions but for their shifting structures. As if each is just a different perspective of the same environment. Half of the recorded time inhabits two pieces as sensual as their aromatic titles. “Jasminum” sounding curved lines like vines in varied densities impressing the depths of its bushy mass whose outward bound apogees bloom beatings. And the staggered spirited soundings of “Lavendula” like its longer stalks in strands swaying in winds. Cultivating a botanical or environmental feel, the longer silences of “untitled” become a clear mind against efficient soundings’ moments of clarity like the smooth monochrome of a clear sky behind the texture of the treeline. The undulating harmonics of others extending that of the trombone in “call, there” seem to model a voice floating in the wind. And “M” carries forward the chord of guitar and accordion through a collectivity of monophony from the rest. So though the sound shapes and textures might appear limited they flower through a moving togetherness and harmony. And the two songs show how players might choose to buoy each other up, the simple melody of each soloist complemented in turns by others. More than sound the interaction of people is the material.
- Keith Prosk
Sophie Stone - amalgamations (Sawyer Editions, 2022)
Peter Falconer, Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, Peter Nagle, and Lauren Redhead each perform an iteration from a series of Sophie Stone compositions for solo piano, viola, cello, and organ on the 75’ amalgamations.
The ear attunes to the moment. Careful soundings ask to be received with care. Cellular structures wander with abandon of what came and what is to come. Longer durations lapse memory to the current experience. Repetition focuses every variation, and instruments of analogous texture or mechanism might do so on a larger scale. Long silence makes the ear hang on every sound. Contingent events captured through open windows and doors - rail squeals, seagulls, ringtones, dog barks - mark the time in unique collections of occurrences. The listener attunes to the tactility and sensuality of every sound.
- Keith Prosk
Mark Vernon - A World Behind This World (Persistence of Sound, 2022)
Right after high school I spent a summer working in an automotive factory. I was working in one of the loudest sections of the factory allegedly, where massive machines pressed sheets of metal into the shapes of doors and hoods. My first few days were spent away from the machines though, in the close but muted breakroom while I read a lengthy book full of security protocols. I was fascinated by the sounds of the machines though – a large, but limited, variety of thuds, crashes and hisses, an organized cacophony performed by unknown processes. I even tried recording those sounds one time, just by leaving my phone near one of the machines. I never did anything with those recordings though. The problem was that within a few weeks of working with those machines and hearing and, even worse, understanding those processes, I had lost interest in their sounds entirely. It had turned from a gorgeous, inexplicable, industrial orchestra to a repetitive, mechanical, corporate beating that required uncomfortable earplugs to endure without developing a headache or hearing loss.
To be clear, the problem with these sounds wasn’t just that they had become linked to my employment and my daily labour, it’s that they no longer surprised me – they were demystified by my understanding of their processes, and that spoiled my fetishization of those sounds. The harsh metallic clang that sounded like the smack of a gong, the stomp of a giant and a car crash all at once had become the generic sounds of ‘Press 2’ in operation. Now that I had an explanation in my head, my mind was no longer free to perceive these sounds however it liked, my fascinated curiosity was gone. But luckily for me, what Mark Vernon’s latest album offers is a whole factory (well, a workshop, but I’ll get back to that) full of unexplained sounds – sonic evidence of various machines, tools and processes that I’ll never understand – and again, I’ve been captivated by the mysterious incidental industrial orchestra.
Much of this mystifying effect comes from intrinsic qualities of the recording process. When an event is recorded, the sound is extracted but the context is left behind. To return to my auto factory example, I think it’s fair to say that if I quit that job the day I made those recordings I wouldn’t have become bored of them. They would have been able to exist in my mind as decontextualized sound matter, as abstract, meaningless, metallic thuds, but they lost that ability once my mind began to focus on the cause-and-effect operations that were responsible for their soundings. Meanwhile the workshop that’s been captured on A World Behind This World has been recorded as audio rather than as impressions in my memory, and any understanding of these sounds has been left behind at the factory. As there’s no way of knowing what is being produced by these processes or how, the listener is forced to address these sounds as-is and to permit them to act as their own context.
What this results in is a massive shift in perspective between what was recorded and what is heard. What Mark Vernon recorded was various operations being executed, all with a specific meaning and goal: the production of something. The sounds that came from these machines and devices were like the heat that comes from incandescent light bulbs – accidental, likely even unwanted, but essential to the process. But Mark hasn’t shared with us the items that these processes were made to produce, there’s no included photos of the final products for example. All he’s shared is the sounds – items made from the production process which are not what the machine was made to create. That’s where the twist in perspective takes place – Mark Vernon may have made recordings of a factory that produces physical items, but he left with recordings of a factory which merely produces sound.
At this point I’d like to note that the ‘factory’ that’s been recorded here was quite different from the auto factory that I once worked at – A World Behind This World was recorded at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop in Lumsden. By recording both in and around the workshop and mixing these indoor and outdoor perspectives together, the pieces takes on an imaginary, impossible perspective which leads to moments as surreal as grinders and saws seemingly being ran by birds and sheep. It also interests me that he chose a sculpture workshop, rather than an auto factory for example, because it means that what’s being produced isn’t just a commercial product but a work of art, the same thing this album is, and the recorded processes are creative ones, not unlike Mark Vernon’s own creative processes used to make this music. One could even take it as far as to say that these are recordings of performances by an artist, and in the album’s credits, workshop technician Eden Jolly has in fact been credited as a ‘performer’. From the opening moments as Eden tightens a bolt or rotates a hinge or kicks a stuttering engine into action to the closing moments of roaring machinery being deactivated by trained hands, practical moments of the technician’s performance have been deeply baked into this soundworld, but the specifics and the extent of it is another question with an answer that’s been left behind in the workshop.
The other part of the mystification process that makes this album so enjoyable to me comes from performance and processing. There’s no implication that what’s heard on this album is what was heard in the workshop, and there’s no saying how far from the truth each sound is or isn’t. Elements are sped or slowed, sequences are dissembled and constructed into imaginary processes, and the steady rhythm of tape loops allows for the creation of new sonic machines. Clearly structured melodies and patterns bring a momentary sense of artifice, but there’s a remarkable trait to the assembly of these compositions that makes it all flow and feel so right – it’s as if they’re following the natural logic of another world, of a world behind this world, perhaps.
I’m sure it could be read in a bunch of ways, but to me the title of this album refers to a world within the artist, the world they create in their mind which exists in the space behind the world in which we all take part in. And I think it follows that that’s the world where this natural logic exists, that this album is how the Scottish Sculpture Workshop sounds in the imaginary world behind this one, the one that exists in Mark Vernon’s mind and is released through his music. That idea is a big part of why I love music like this – it’s a glimpse at my own world through someone else’s ears, mutated by someone else’s creative perception, understood by somebody who isn’t me and an unanswerable mystery to me. This isn’t something specific to artists or field recordists though – I think everyone with a brain has access to a world behind this world, specifically catered to their own unique mind, imagination, memories, fantasies and perception. The most significant thing that Mark’s done here, really, is share his.
As I’m writing this I can hear the sounds of power tools from the floor above my head. It could be a recently emptied apartment being renovated or a tenant constructing a table or maintenance of heating or plumbing processes. It interests me how the electric tools have their own specific frequency that they operate at, which makes different sounds as it resonates against different materials, as its applied with different pressures for different durations. I also like the uncertain gaps in time between these sounds, the sporadic bumping and chatter while they presumably do work that’s less loud. I’ve started recording these sounds again too. I could probably go up there right now and ask what they’re doing and find an answer, maybe they’d even show me around what’s being worked on, but I’d rather not know. I’d rather let them to continue to exist in my mind as unknowable sounds captured in a world behind this one.
- Connor Kurtz
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