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notation from Lance Austin Olsen; reviews

Sep 01, 2022

harmonic series is now located at harmonicseries.org. Everything should redirect seamlessly from what you were navigating through before. We’re still hosted by Substack. We’re still not a non-profit, but .com was taken and peers like freejazzblog, pointofdeparture, and recordedness use .org so it seems fine. Search results for things only we have reviewed or featured were not readily returning; the newsletter format isn't necessarily great for seo anyway but it needed to be addressed and this is a step in that direction.

No Idea Festival will make six audio/video commissions available online between September and November 2022, featuring Christine Abdelnour, Tim Barnes, Patrick Danse, Jim Denley, Aquiles Hadjis, Jeph Jerman, Bani Khoshnoudi, Ernesto Montiel, Gustavo Nandayapa, Iván Naranjo, Rhizomes Films, and Gil Sansón. Program to be announced September 5.

IM-OS #9 is available, featuring a call for interpretations of a graphic score from Nolan Hildebrand, scores from Fernando Palacios and Maria Sappho, improvisation exercises for large groups from Matthias Schwabe, writings from Carl Bergstroem-Nielsen, and Bergstroem-Nielsen in conversation with Anton Lukoszevieze.

August 29, 2022 marked the 70th anniversary of the premiere of John Cage’s 4’33” by David Tudor. Some briefer readings to celebrate the occasion might include Daniel Barbiero’s From Silence to Time, Antoine Beuger’s Grundsätzliche Entscheidungen, and Taku Sugimoto’s A Philosophical Approach to Silence. Unrelatedly, The Atlantic published Why Do Rich People Love Quiet? this month too.

I recently stumbled upon The Experimental Music Yearbook, a currently dormant but awesome resource for composition and performance approaches edited by Casey Anderson and friends that includes notations. It’s now on our resource roll.

Similarly, I recently found out about Lateral Addition, where Eric Laska presents sound-based intermedia, often with commentary from the contributing performers. It’s now on our resource roll.

If you’re interested in sharing a thread of thought prompted by something in our conversations, annotations, or reviews, we encourage you to leave a comment. We’re always glad to receive messages at harmonicseries21@gmail.com but if you leave a comment other readers can chime in too.

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.

Lance Austin Olsen - A Night On The Veldt (2019-2020)

Lance Austin Olsen is a painter and composer whose work explores the interactions between its visual and sonic components with many objects but especially amplification, recordings, guitar, and voice for sound. Some frequent collaborators include Bruno Duplant, Lee Noyes, Gil Sansón, and Jamie Drouin, with whom he organizes the Infrequency Arts label. Recent sound releases include the solos fukushima rising, Sure Is A Good Hamburger, and polishing the mirrors of psychosis, A field of wildflowers for our lost souls with Barry Chabala, and nattinsektor with Terje Paulsen, a realization of A Night On The Veldt, the full score of which can be viewed alongside other select Olsen sound compositions here.

A Night On The Veldt is a 2019-2020 score for open instrumentation, an open number of performers, and open duration. The score features fourteen sets of journal pages depicting staves or something similar, arrows, text, and other markings in blue and black inks, with textual performance direction that might appear both poetic and more traditionally descriptive. However, the poetry appears to contain significant sound information and the more traditional description summons sounds from moods and images as much as standard musical language. There is no total duration but a note that each image should last one to three minutes with as much silence between them, though each image can be the contents of a whole page or set of pages, a gestalt within a page, or a single marking or text direction, and the perception of that relationship likely changes across sets of pages. While not forwardly modular, there is an invitation to tiptoe around sounds a performer would rather not meet on foot in the night. Forms like staves might contain more or less than five lines, which break into points, become broken by other forms, bleed across a set of pages, or flow like a stream. Points, lines, and other markings that might assume characters of rainclouds, spotted or striped skins, ears, radiating stars or the radially growing nodules, and jars or beehives or morels surround the staff forms, as well as text that conveys durations, directions, dynamics, tempo, and the title with other unknown numerical inclusions. Ink progresses from fine black to fine blue to bold black and forms appear increasingly natural. Though a relict image of another composition on the first page might suggest the effect is not totally intentional, what came before and what is to come remains visible on each page and sometimes makes for interesting interactions. It is a visibility beyond expectations for the page and so might invite play with listening memory, but its fadedness might also mimic the decreased visible distance of the night.

With limits only around sounding as often as sound is received and sounding soft, clean, simple tones, interpretations are nearly as many as the imagination can muster. I am drawn to the strong sound associations of its images and the environments conveyed in the text. Pointillistic sounds for these percussive marks, whose spattering across staves seem to imply a natural sound mass over what would be impossible pitch lines. The rattle of dry grass, the crunch of gravel under foot, chittering night bugs, raindrop impacts, the whipping gusts of the coming storm, swarms of flying critters, the roil of water over imbricated river stones all enter my mind. My focus cycles through groupings on the page and their interactions on the page, across pages, and with the pages behind and before like paring back layers to focus on a sound amongst the symphony of the night to zoom out again in awe of its whole stratum. The progression of inks might provoke a change in color, texture, biome, or something else. The increasing prevalence of what I perceive as ear forms and the progressive abstraction of staff forms seems to signal a shift from searching for musical framing towards just listening, and while instrumental tones are possible perhaps the presence of footsteps or broken twigs in moving between sound spaces is enough for the performer.

In the realization below from the composer and Terje Paulsen, the performers use some instruments and amplified objects to complement the sounds of night bugs.

reviews

Cristián Alvear & Diego Castro - Alvin Lucier: Criss-Cross for Two Electric Guitars (self-released, 2022)

Cristián Alvear and Diego Castro perform the titular Alvin Lucier composition on the 14’ Criss-Cross for Two Electric Guitars.

Passersby on a semitone. A demonstration of beating pattern behavior as two approach and leave unison, hastening with distance. But though the structure would suggest a symmetry, a point equidistant from unison after is not quite like the one before, conveying the construction of harmonic interaction, or that such things do not just occur but are cultivated. The realization from Oren Ambarchi and Stephen O’Malley, for whom the piece was originally composed, featured a comparatively uniform tone that accentuated a spinning stereo sensation, or the feeling that the depth of the wave had become recognized and was closer to a spiral, springing with distance to unison. The realization from Alvear and Castro is more texturally heterogenous and I hear at least three dominant bands of ringing, humming, and jangling. Aesthetically this addresses a common criticism of sterility in some Lucier compositions by offering some diversity in tactility. But it also illuminates other harmonic behaviors by allowing changes to ripple through its different textural surfaces, sparking imaginations of where and how wave action happens when a low band barely responds to what excites a high band, and by sounding with clarity the progression towards unison as the character and number of bands combine and collapse towards the center in the manner of a gravitational singularity.

- Keith Prosk

Clara de Asís/Ryoko Akama - sisbiosis (Erstwhile Records, 2022)

Ryoko Akama and Clara de Asís each arrange half of six tracks for electronics, percussion, field recordings, and amplified objects on the 49’ sisbiosis.

I first played sisbiosis back while cooking. For a moment I forgot I put anything on and looked outside the window to see if I heard rain before recognizing “Destiny.” My rhythmic chopping, popping oil, and other percussion from the kitchen blended well with what I heard. Shortly after I was asked if I had thoughts on the record and reported that I was struck by its distinct yet similarly textured surfaces. I usually rely on this setting as a subconscious primer for closer listens later that often drastically change what I might recognize but something from this one stuck.

“Destiny” begins as a crackling, spitting static with interludes of effervescent clicks like details of the whole squall, foregrounded against an out-of-focus noise wall. Bells and chimes, fluid sounds, and oscillations that were maybe always there slowly substitute the static by the end of the track as if an adjustment in resolution revealed smooth lines from the snow of discrete points. What happens here appears to occur within tracks and their sets of materials as well as across the total record. Analogous textures from disparate sources surreptitiously smooth from discrete points towards line like seeing shifting pinscreens for their gestalts.

Within tracks night bugs blend with electric stridulations, stick clicks glitched pops, scraped stone recorded silence. Across tracks pointillistic noise carries through stone friction, the flame-like flickering of a windy recording, the machachara between radio broadcasts, fricative hisses. High tension wire wobbles and other waves seem to emerge from bells and percussive electronics, melodic lines from staccato toms, synth stabs, morse-like talk. Textures appear rhythmically stable, though the ear no doubt glosses over the finer divisions of denser noises. Though the sources change there is a sense many sounds are analogous to each other.

These mottled field of monochromes draw the ear to the material, draw the ear to how sound could communicate whether it comes from air or something more viscous, wood or metal or skin or stone, something natural or something engineered, something specific as sounds can often seem. In parallel I hear language bubbling up from the babbling noise, an evolution of clicks, fricative phonemes, something similar to morse, and spoken word. I imagine how the ear gleans meaning from sound is different than how we do from language but both seem to create something from nearly nothing like the lines conjured from noise. While sound seems more individually experiential or primal, culling language from a palette of noise requires interdependent exchange, a symbiosis not unlike this collaboration.

- Keith Prosk

Webb Crawford - Joiners (Tripticks Tapes, 2022)

13 solo electric guitar improvisations from Webb Crawford, totalling 40’.

Alternating, for the most part, between short-ish explorations of more- and less-distorted timbres, Crawford presents here what strikes me as a sort of sketchbook or toolbox of approaches, ideas, insights, techniques, and ‘vibes’ of particular (i.e. repeated) focus - harmonically- and rhythmically-sophisticated fingerpicking patterns moving unexpectedly in different directions; distorted tones at the highest or lowest ends of the instrument's range bent to beat against near-neighbors, where ‘consonance’ and ‘dissonance’ dissolve into ‘texture;’ and, through it all, a sense of grounding in the materiality of the instrument which refuses rigorous or artificial separation of those two ‘styles’ from each other. Crucially, though (for me), Crawford’s relationship to their guitar seems based not in ‘forgetting’ contingent histories to arrive at it ‘naively’ as a ‘found object,’ but rather in freely and non-discretely superimposing the many ultimately- always-contingent material and historical specificities which can ‘become audible’ between performer and instrument - histories, for example, of the North American lumber industry, as referenced in track titles, or of Piedmont-style fingerpicking, per Crawford’s bio. In other words what can be listened for here is a critique of a still-hegemonic modernity valorizing ‘autonomy’ for art and artist, and a turn, instead, towards a more ecological or sustainability-minded aesthetics, an embedded and embodied ‘language’ already in a process of ‘organic’ growth. This perhaps returns me to why, without any concrete indication, I persist in hearing these recordings as non-exhaustive guidelines for future delving, as introducing something to be developed further later - without, at the same time, feeling like there is anything ‘incomplete’ about what’s already here. Regardless of possibilities for eventual contextualizations - reductively, perhaps, as ‘experiment’ or as ‘language,’ though of course inevitably always as both and more - this remains an aesthetically engaging and nuanced document in itself.

- Ellie Kerry

Giacomo Fiore - turntable drawing no. 16 (self-released, 2022)

Giacomo Fiore presents two realizations of Danny Clay’s composition for electric guitar and three turntables, a studio version arranged by Clay and a live version performed by Fiore with a synthesizer patch as a proxy for record playback, on the 41’ turntable drawing no. 16. It is part of a series in collaboration with Jon Fischer, who handmakes the records.

Record loops whirr, buzz, and sigh. Their playback populated by a polyrhythm of pops and crackle and static evoking comforts similar to TV snow, white noise machines, and their electric waves. Chordal fragments from guitar swell as easy as breathing deeply. And together they make for a pleasant ambiance and feel-good vibes, calm undulations in parallel through sustained durations. But after some time the guitar awakens, turns up the gain, and plays an unabashed retro solo that might seem silly if not so sincere and so seems uplifting. Between the two, the studio version opts for softer guitar attacks and gentler record sounds, a hastier arrival to the guitar melody, and an addition of Ovalesque skipping melodies to its mille feuille. The live version opts for a crunchier, dynamic sound bed and plays with the shape of chords, changing how each fades into the electric environment, shifting between crisp attack and subtler materializations, and accentuating the palette of fragmentation in a way as broad as the records’ glitched material.

- Keith Prosk

Part of an ongoing series, the collaboration between Clay and printmaker Jon Fischer, this project takes the mediums of turntablism and printmaking and fuses them into art objects that are playable as records. Fittingly, the work is presented in LP format in limited edition. Turntable Drawing No. 16 takes three of these prints/records in locked grooves along with a score for electric guitar, likely with Fiore in mind. The sounds of the records, deliberately lo-fi in their character, aren’t just surface noise, though, and include fairly melodic bits imbued in the ghostly quality of well worn vinyl sound. The LP presents a studio version, created by Clay, and a live version featuring Fiore’s live performance, who takes fragments of the studio version as well as the original records and manipulates them in real time along with his guitar playing, in essence turning the original, that remains fixed as an object, into a living entity, tied to space and time, fleeting but embodying and enhancing the essence of the original. The guitar chords, appearing softly for the most part, appear to have a function akin to color and mood, and their relative softness may bring associations to ambient music, though the grit in the sound stays far away from the shiny colors and textures of most ambient music. This is most evident in the live recording, when Fiore sometimes lets his guitar roar on top of the sound, reminding this listener of guitarists that are both rough in sound as they are elegant in the placement of said sound, like the late Robert Quine. The spirit of the music is closer to, say, Loren Connors, than to Fripp & Eno: rustic, rough, but also warm and inviting.

- Gil Sansón

Julián Galay - ɣ (SELLO POSTAL, 2022)

Julián Galay and Ángeles Rojas perform a Galay composition for twenty-seven tuning forks in a room on the 99’ ɣ.

Other than what is by that time a startling disturbance from a tapped tuning fork closer to the end, the duration is one of constant vibration without discrete activation of its instruments. Hear three bands. One of static noise whose gradations are as tactile as Juan S. Pinkus’ designs for the label, which could be the typical hiss of recorded silence but in this context assumes a character of information too complex to hear, intricate wave action baffled, made turbulent, and mistranslated across the equipment or the ear. One of low end hum that remains continuous and continuously changes shape in the combinatory synthesis of other unheard vibrations. And one of singing resonances, refractory, ephemeral, whose parabolic forms flit out of audibility and fade totally as the environment moves towards quiescency. As in similarly minimal and constant environments, the perception of waveforms’ shape and color changes with changes in skull or sinus shape and location in the playback space. Which in turn interacts with the perception of shifting dynamics among bands and their own movement across stereo space in the recording. So concurring with the notes, it draws attention towards the convergence of the listening space and the recorded space and their times, to the interactivity of everything even through what might seem like a simple sound.

- Keith Prosk

Violaine Gestalder / Louis-Michel Marion - MARGES (Creative Sources, 2021)

Violaine Gestalder and Louis-Michel Marion freely play five communications for saxophones and contrabass on the 79’ MARGES.

Textures accentuate mechanisms. Key clicks and metallic taps sound the sax body. Saxophone sprouts overtones from a bed of breath. Saliva gurgling and air notes recall the body behind them that might be missed in clean tones. Contrabass’ earthquaking strings buzz and thwack against the neck in corporeal wobble. Arco emits overtones like guttural chants. Circular massage, plucked harmonics, and big body bass resonance sound their vessel. And the physicality of its attacks remind of the body behind it too. The two expand and contract together through dynamics, speed, pitch clarity, texture. Bass climbing towards shrill sax yells, the shear of breath of the latter meeting the string friction of the former, arco and subtones beating together. It conveys the kind of conversation that improvisation can, through bodies, complementary action, and a stream-of-consciousness flow of textural themes.

- Keith Prosk

Andrew Greenwald - A Thing Made Whole (KAIROS, 2022)

Violinist Austin Wulliman, the ensembles Wild Up and Pamplemouse, and various configurations of the ensemble Contemporary Insights perform seven iterations from the eponymous series of Andrew Greenwald compositions on the 72’ A Thing Made Whole.

General material recurs across iterations. Mellifluous protean melodies, percussive and frictional scratches, and more continuous textural surfaces like noise. Each translates across instruments, the breath of a performer in one becomes winds’ air notes in another, sawing strings become a scratchy guitar attack in another, a purer silence in one becomes chair squeaks, page turns, and traffic in another. And out of this noise appears hymnic and elegiac melodies in a string and brass fanfare, piano chords, or reverberant vibraphone. Cells separated by significant silences seem to rearrange similar material within compositions. Through this the sound conveys the community it takes to make a music, that the composer approaches each iteration for a different ensemble with a different perspective, the ensemble necessarily approaches their iteration with a different perspective than the composer, and within each iteration the ensemble rearranges material suprematically to provide different perspectives of similar material too. A ceaseless shifting of irregular tessellatory patterns to find something that sings.

- Keith Prosk

Preview A Thing Made Whole here.

e millar and christof kurzmann - rare entertainment (Mystery & Wonder, 2022)

e millar and christof kurzmann craft two multi-movement suites for amplified clarinet, fans, motors, objects, lloopp, and voice on the seven-track, 49’ rare entertainment.

The first suite is speckled by glitched chitter and bleep bloop tunes, string twangs and sonic drawing, but nearly everything else is airy. A muted yet oppressive presence like a whipping wind rumbles. A motor purrs and chokes. Clarinet’s air notes and quavering voice undulate and fade as if caught and carried away by the wind. The lisp and wisp of fricatives in the voice accentuates the breath. Fan hum changes color with the interference of objects around its blades. Dynamics and speed become audibly tied to pressure. And in this context the beating of lloopp sines and fan resonance visualize the air waves they are. The second suite is all alarm clock from fan blade, looped scream, knocks and clacks and bell tolls like some dystopian worksong which fades to a faint ticking alongside a somber melody and song as if to underline the labor of the motor and the body behind the lighter material of air.

- Keith Prosk

Grisha Shakhnes - Brass (presses précaires, 2022)

Grisha Shakhnes works a type of concrete music informed by noise aesthetics, attuned to the sounds of tape machine mechanisms, often rough and with seemingly unpolished surfaces. This somewhat crude aesthetic exists in the same plane with a very subtle and considered approach, non demonstrative and leisurely paced, befitting of an artist who trusts his materials. To be more precise, there's a warmth to his music that contrasts with the rusty exterior for an often moving listening experience, a paradox that resolves in the music with no explanation, as if it was the most normal thing in the world, and that's where most of the magic seems to reside here. The listener can even forget for a second that the sound is not a badly recorded machinery equipment but a very sensitive musical statement, in a way similar to the uncertainty principle of Werner Heisenberg: you have to apply your listening intention for the music to reveal its beauty and sense. Listen to it passively and it will blend with the sounds of your environment; listen closely in good faith and the rustic appeal of the music becomes evident. It’s somewhat understandable that some pundits view this body of work as related to drone aesthetics, but in my opinion they're missing the point: there are many extraneous noises that just happen to be there as result of a mic placed near a window, like voices from the street, for example, and these bring with them an openness that is not frequent in drone music, which on the contrary is very focused in creating an object that's independent from broader contexts. Also, in Shakhnes’ work one can detect an underlying narrative element, understated but clearly felt: these are sounds made by people, not just the embodiment of an idea, and Shakhnes seems to want to honor the humble origins of the sound by turning them into music without embellishment or streamlining. It’s a wise choice and the source of the appeal of his music. What makes this release different from the rest of his catalog? It’s hard to say. He tends to exploit the tape medium and many of his works are released as cassette tapes, and he sticks to his guns in terms of sound, so there’s no break here, only the same careful and deliberate focus to his craft that has endeared his work to those with ears attuned to it.

- Gil Sansón

Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir - strengur (Carrier Records, 2022)

Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir presents collaborative compositions and performances with Halla Lovísa Loftsdóttir, Davíð Brynjar Franzson, Lương Huệ Trinh, Kent Olofsson, and Mirjam Tally for mostly violin, electronics, and voice across five three-track EPs on the 141’ strengur.

All the composers perform and performers compose, and three of five EPs include collaborators outside of their showcased duo. The sound reflects this ecological reciprocity in the distinctiveness of each EP and the accord of the whole. In interaction with field recordings and ethereal AI atmospheres that respond to what’s sounded. In the series of titular scores crafted by the wind’s hand and the ground beneath the page. It evokes simple materials in woody sawing and hairy friction and especially air in breath, wind, and the lift beneath bird’s wings in divebombing gliss. It expresses the everpresent tension in living and the calmness of a landscape’s long timescales.

- Keith Prosk

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harmonic series

1/20

notation from Lance Austin Olsen; reviews

annotations

Lance Austin Olsen - A Night On The Veldt (2019-2020)

reviews

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