In just over a week’s time Iceland’s premier new music festival, the Dark Music Days, will be up and running again, and once again i’ll be heading off to Reykjavík to immerse myself in some of the goings-on. Details about the festival can be found here, and for any UK dwellers who fancy a spontaneous jaunt over to Iceland, there are some fantastically cheap deals to be had from Gatwick and Bristol (especially, with Bristol, if you travel on a Wednesday or Sunday), and some equally great deals to be found on AirBnB. As an upbeat to the festival, it’s a good time to touch on a number of releases that came out last year on the Sono Luminus label, showcasing some of the more exciting examples of Icelandic contemporary music-making. Read more
Mixtape #57 : Best Albums of 2019
Happy New Year!
i want to start this year by expressing my heartfelt thanks to all of you who have followed and supported 5:4 in the last year, particularly my delectable band of Patrons. Hot on the heels of my Best Albums of 2019 list, i’m beginning 2020 with the usual mixtape comprising selections from each of those 40 albums. It rather nicely encapsulates another year of breathtaking musical imagination and ingenuity, exploring a typically eclectic range of styles, attitudes and aesthetics.
Here’s the tracklisting in full, together with the start time for each track in the mix; links to obtain the music can be found in the previous two days’ articles. As usual, the mixtape can be downloaded or streamed. Read more
Tags: Aurora, Benge, Bobby Krlic, C Duncan, Catherine Lamb, Chelsea Wolfe, Clemens von Reusner, Davíð Brynjar Franzson, Dis Fig, Enno Poppe, Erkki-Sven Tüür, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Federico Placidi, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Holly Herndon, ionnalee, Jakob Ullmann, Jenny Hval, John Williams, Joseph Branciforte, Juhani Silvola, Lance Austin Olsen, Martin Smolka, Natasha Barrett, Phill Niblock, relief, Roland Kayn, Rose Elinor Dougall, Sigur Rós, Sir Babygirl, Ståle Storløkken, Stefan Fraunberger, Tanya Barany, The Ballet, The Caretaker, The Faint, Theo Bleckmann, Tim Clément, Tom Holkenborg, Vyacheslav Artyomov, Zbigniew Karkowski, Øyvind Torvund, Þóranna Björnsdóttir
Best Albums of 2019 (Part 1)
With only a couple of days left until 2019 comes to an end, it’s that time once again to take stock and celebrate the great and the good albums that have been tickling my eardrums in the most beguiling way this year. Just before that, though, it’s perhaps worth stating the rules that determine whether or not something is eligible to appear in this list:
- No reissues, re-recordings (including live concert recordings) or releases that are not widely available can be featured on the list – though limited editions are generally allowed.
- A composer, artist, performer, ensemble or group may only appear once on the list in the same capacity (i.e. a soloist can appear more than once if also performing as part of a group or ensemble; a composer can appear more than once if featured on, for example, a portrait disc and a compilation).
- The definition of an ‘album’ is determined not primarily by its duration but the nature of its content. However, in general, to qualify for the list a release should be of at least 20 minutes’ duration.
- No recordings or arrangements of music composed prior to the 20th Century can be featured on the list – unless there’s a very good reason for doing so.
Right, now that that’s out of the way, here’s the first part of my round-up of the 40 Best Albums of 2019; each and every one of them in their own unique way will make your life a bit better – and give your ears one hell of a thrill.
Read more
Tags: Benge, C Duncan, Catherine Lamb, Chelsea Wolfe, Clemens von Reusner, Dis Fig, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Erkki-Sven Tüür, ionnalee, Jakob Ullmann, John Williams, Joseph Branciforte, Karin Hellqvist, Quatuor Bozzini, Roland Kayn, Rose Elinor Dougall, Sir Babygirl, The Faint, Theo Bleckmann, Vyacheslav Artyomov, Øyvind Torvund
Lauri Jõeleht – Cantus angelorum
Happy Christmas to you all!
To conclude my week-long sojourn into the start of winter, i’m returning to the Estonian trio Una Corda – comprising harp, harpsichord and kannel – for a performance of a piece that i think is perfect for the festive season and especially Christmas Day itself: Cantus angelorum by Lauri Jõeleht. The title, which translates as ‘song of the angels’, directly relates to the choice of these instruments, as Jõeleht explains in his brief programme note:
A group of theologians and philosophers have contemplated the nature of sound produced by various musical instruments and have concluded that the sound of plucked string instruments might be the closest to those that one hears in the heavenly spheres.
The music primarily consists of an interplay between melodic and chordal ideas – the former highly conversational, driving the piece on; the latter acting as gathering points when the dialogue pauses and the trio is more rhythmically united. However, a sense of unity actually persists throughout everything that happens; the nature of the contrapuntal sections is such that it’s as if the three players were finishing each other’s sentences, or passing a train of thought between themselves, conveying the impression that they’re all essentially communicating the same thing. Read more
Éliane Radigue – Occam XVII
For the penultimate work in my week-long journey into winter, i’m again turning away from festive music to a piece that continues my preoccupation with the season’s prevailing darkness. Not that the work in question, Éliane Radigue‘s Occam XVII for double bass, has darkness as its theme; her Occam series is primarily associated with water-related imagery (in part literally, the performers being asked to keep images of specific watercourses in mind while playing). But every time i listen to this piece i’m drawn into a soundworld that i think of as a myriad shades of black, having the same kind of inscrutability and, despite first appearances, endlessly shifting surface details (both real and imaginary) of the marvellous black paintings by Ad Reinhardt.
With all of Radigue’s Occam works it’s arguably best just to listen to them rather than read a lot about them – trying to capture something of their inner magic is nigh impossible anyway – so i’ll keep this brief. Occam XVII essentially charts a slow transition from low A to bottom C# on the double bass, but that’s not remotely what the piece is ‘about’ or what’s most interesting about it. The work begins, and is continuously filled, with a plethora of overtones and harmonics ever in flux. Sometimes they suggest the harmonic series, projecting prominent fifths or thirds, but more often they act not as a reinforcement of the fundamental but a kind of challenging colouration of it. Sometimes they shimmer, sometimes they judder, but always they’re in motion, each up- or down-bow seeming either to change entirely or at least subtly alter the agglomeration of pitches magically emerging from the strings. It gives the impression that the instrument is breathing, each inhalation and exhalation a continuation of the same impulse toward deep, dark meditation. Read more
Karen Tanaka – Sleep Deeply
While i can take or leave most Christmas music, i have a real soft spot for lullaby works setting texts that either allude to or directly address the sleeping infant Jesus. It’s a nice counterpoint to the shouty-shouty zeal that permeates a great deal of festive musical fare, but more importantly it invites composers to explore the most intimate, dare i say ‘snuggly’ side of their musical language. So the next piece in my week-long journey into winter is a lullaby composed last year by Japanese composer Karen Tanaka. Though not actually a Christmas carol at all, to my mind it fits perfectly in this context.
Setting words by Irish musician Michael McGlynn, Tanaka approaches the text in two ways. The verses take the form of personal reflections about the nature of Christ and the broader spiritual relationship the writer has – from birth to death – with what the figure of Christ represents. Consequently, these verses convey a nice mixture of introspection, contemplation and wonder, Tanaka’s melody having a simple, folk-like quality, surrounded by warm, balmy harmonies. The refrain is treated much more intimately, the words here becoming a lullaby sung to oneself, liltingly and soothingly inviting an immersive sleep in an atmosphere of safety and security. Throughout Sleep Deeply, a female soloist takes precedence in the verses with the accompaniment kept light, occasionally doubling or reiterating key phrases. But the ending is really special, Tanaka allowing the choir to elaborate just a little bit, finally repeating the word “softly” again and again as if savouring it on the lips and tongue, lingering over its sound and its meaning. And the unresolved final chord – which nonetheless feels final – couldn’t be more right. Read more
Maria Kõrvits – Darkness and Deeper Dark (World Première)
This morning (at 4:19am to be precise) saw the winter solstice, making this the northern hemisphere’s shortest day and the start of not only the season of winter but also a host of traditional festive periods. Being the day when we’re dominated most by night, it’s an ideal moment to spend time with the latest work by Maria Kõrvits, Darkness and Deeper Dark. To an extent, it continues a preoccupation from Kõrvits’ previous work Öö [Night], premièred earlier this year at the World Music Days, though where that piece was concerned with obscuring the distinction between melody and embellishment, her new work inhabits a place where any notion of such things is more or less lost entirely.
Composed for strings, a great deal of the piece behaves in essence like a noise study. Indeed, for the first couple of minutes pretty much all we hear is pure friction, creating a thick band of noise within which faint traces of individual pitches can just about be discerned. A few pitches protrude a little more after this, but they become lost in what by now is becoming a densely cluttered ball of seething movement: activity absolutely everywhere, details nowhere to be heard. Only when it dies back to a whisper does something a little more tangible begin to emerge, though in the form of tremulous surges like gangs of angry hornets, creating buzz-clusters around various possible pitch centres that, as a result, are all massively smudged. Read more
Howard Skempton – The Wells Service
The pair of canticles used in a traditional Anglican choral evensong service effectively straddle the Christmas story, the Magnificat pointing towards it, the Nunc dimittis referring back to it. Their use in this service means that there must be literally thousands of settings of them, though, no doubt fuelled by the overtly conservative tone endemic to both that service in particular, and to contemporary religious music in general, the number of these setttings that are interesting, imaginative and individual is significantly smaller, the exception rather than the rule. One such exception is Howard Skempton‘s The Wells Service, composed in 2011.
i think it’s fair to say that Skempton’s approach to the texts is, in the best sense, something of an acquired taste. Not because it’s radical or wilful or arch or just weird, but because – as with so much of his output – it manages to combine great simplicity with a subtle kind of aloof calculation that makes it sound disarmingly strange. The Mag and Nunc are essentially two parts of a single, singular expressive act, grounded in a basic rhythmic language of crotchets and minims that Skempton uses to give the phrases a gentle elasticity. It’s in the way these phrases progress that the strangeness is most apparent. Skempton doesn’t particularly treat each canticle as a broad sweeping narrative but rather as a sequence of individual sentences that become connected through the unity of their language. It’s almost entirely syllabic, no repetitions or melismas, giving the canticles something of the air of chant; they don’t so much sound sung as recited. Read more
Age Veeroos – Külmking (World Première)
It’s nice, sometimes, when a composition isn’t concerned with layers of complexity and subtext, but instead focuses on a single idea. So as the days grow increasingly cold (here in the UK, at least), it seems an ideal time to explore one of Age Veeroos‘ latest works, the title of which, Külmking, translates as “chills”. It was written for one of my favourite ensembles, Una Corda, an Estonian trio comprising harp (Liis Viira), harpsichord (Ene Nael) and kannel (Kristi Mühling). Playing together, these instruments make for a heady, even an opulent combination, but in Külmking they create an altogether different musical environment.
In essence, it’s an onomatopoeic music, manifesting both the source and the effect of the chills. This is primarily articulated in two highly contrasting kinds of material: clear, repeating notes and vague chords that more often than not are packed into tight, reverberant clusters. Veeroos uses these materials to generate considerable tension and drama. The former often bring about a kind of pressurised poise, the repeating notes not so much progressing the narrative as doing the opposite, staying put, actively fearful of pushing ahead. The latter provide release but not relief, increasingly wild bursts of discharged noise, the chords – regardless which instrument they’re on – detonating like small cluster bombs. Read more
Tõnis Kaumann – Ave maris stella (World Première)
During my week-long journey into winter, i’ll be veering back and forth between sacred and secular music. When i first heard Tõnis Kaumann‘s setting of the Marian hymn Ave maris stella at the World Music Days earlier this year, i have to admit it didn’t make a huge impression on me. Then, i regarded it as over-simplistic, a bit like an exercise, but i’ve since spent quite a bit more time with the piece and have come to appreciate it a great deal more. Kaumann uses two melodies, the hymn’s original plainsong and, more often, another melismatic melody that may or may not be based on a different bit of plainsong (if it is, i’ve not yet been able to find it in my Liber Usualis), mirroring its scalic contour.
The structure of the work uses the stanzas of the text as the basis for a sequence of shifting permutations of a small number of parameters:
- tonic: G or D;
- melody: plainsong or melisma;
- voices: solo voice, women/men, tutti;
- accompaniment: single-note drone, perfect fifth drone (both primarily sung by the men), or unaccompanied.
London Choral Sinfonia – O Holy Night
December 18, 2019 • 05:00
in Advent & Christmas, CD/Digital releases, Thematic series
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The solstice and the season of winter are fast approaching, so over the next week as we transition through i’m going to explore music that taps into some of the aspects of this remarkable time of year. By that i don’t just mean ‘Christmas music’ – which, let’s face it, is rarely something to get excited about these days – but also works that speak of cold, darkness and the ever more encroaching presence of the night.
To start, though, i am turning to music celebrating Christmas, in order to flag up a new disc called O Holy Night performed by London Choral Sinfonia. From the perspective of contemporary music, Christmas is seriously troublesome in the way it so often leads composers down over-trodden paths towards tradition, banality and cliché. It’s refreshing, then, to find a sprinkling of contemporary pieces on this disc that offer a little more than that. To be clear, O Holy Night doesn’t just feature contemporary music – the album is clearly designed to emulate a conventional Anglican carol service, including a number of exceedingly well-worn hymns and carols that act as structural points of familiarity and repose in between some of the more adventurous music. There’s not a great deal to say about these except that the choir, conducted by Michael Waldron, gives them all the most lusty treatment, at times singing with such overblown heartiness you can’t help wondering if copious quaffings of mulled wine took place before rather than after the performance. Read more
CBSO Centre, Birmingham: BCMG – Migrating Sounds
i’m going to start with an observation, a complaint and a plea. Yesterday evening’s concert given by Birmingham Contemporary Music Group featured four pieces of music that together lasted one hour and two minutes. The actual concert lasted more than double that length. It continues a trend that appears to be plaguing BCMG concerts more and more in which the duration of events has become in some cases massively extended due to the length of time being taken to set things up between pieces – exacerbated last night by having two intervals. Perhaps those organising BCMG concerts are trying to turn them into a whole evening experience, but for me it’s become an absurd example of (deliberately or otherwise) stretching out not very much music into very much concert. Not only does this break up the engagement factor – one’s focus being regularly interrupted – but it also makes for a huge contrast with pretty much all other contemporary music concerts i’ve attended lately (in the UK and abroad), most of which don’t even bother with an interval at all, even if the music lasts up to two hours. So my plea is that those who decide these things at BCMG acknowledge the fact that this approach needs to be, at least, massively reigned in, and that changeovers between pieces need to be quick and efficient – definitely without the need for an interval (or, indeed, two of them) to attempt to hide how long it’s taking. Read more
Roland Kayn – Scanning
There aren’t many new releases that require you to free up huge chunks of time in your schedule, but then Roland Kayn isn’t like many composers. Two years ago, 14 hours were required to explore the vast expanse of his A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound, which i ended up doing in a couple of 8-hour shifts across two days. The latest release of Kayn’s music, Scanning, lasts a mere 10 hours that, in contrast, seemed to pass with surprising briskness.
This wasn’t due simply to it being significantly shorter than its predecessor; i think it’s primarily to do with the nature of the music – particularly the kinds of materials Kayn uses and, most importantly, the way that they’re shaped, articulated and structured. It’s feasible to think of many of the 24 movements of Scanning as examples of what i’ve previously called ‘meta-ambient’, where a generalised steady state reigns over the long-term behaviour of the music, leading to in essence an equilibrium, within which a constant evolution takes place, sometimes involving abrupt shifts or alterations in its details. Long-form structural designs are of course nothing new in Kayn’s music, yet the specific way Scanning behaves sets it apart, i think, not only from A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound, but from a great deal of his previously-released output. When writing about A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound a couple of years ago, i commented on its generative, hands-off aspect, and on that occasion cited Autechre as a point of reference. Scanning also possesses this hands-off aspect, but a more fitting aesthetic reference this time might be the music of Andrew McKenzie’s The Hafler Trio project, particularly (but not exclusively) his last major releases from around 2003–2005. This is down to the way that pretty much every part of Scanning plays with and explores the relationship between pitch and noise. In some respects – and this is perhaps the only strong connection to A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound – its 24 movements are almost variations on this theme. Read more
Fovea Hex – The Salt Garden III
It all began with a trilogy. This was back in 2005 when, over the course of three successive years, Irish musical entity Fovea Hex (singer Clodagh Simonds, together with a changing roster of collaborators) put out the trio of EPs – Bloom, Huge and Allure – that would become collectively known as Neither Speak Nor Remain Silent. An album in all but name, each part of the trilogy was accompanied by an additional disc where the music had been extensively remixed by The Hafler Trio. Following this there was a four-year wait until their only actual album, Here Is Where We Used To Sing, was released in 2011, again with an accompanying disc of remixes (titled Three Beams) by Michael Begg, Colin Potter and William Basinski. After which a further five years would pass before their most recent, even more slow-to-emerge trilogy The Salt Garden, the third and final part of which has recently – finally! – been released.
It’s worth taking a moment just to reflect on two significant aspects of all this. First is the group’s disinterest (for the most part) in more conventional contemporary release practices. i described Neither Speak Nor Remain Silent as an album in all but name, yet at a risk of contradicting myself the fact is that it wasn’t, and isn’t, an album, but – to borrow a phrase from The Hafler Trio – a ‘trilogy in three parts’. There’s something rather old-school about it, not unlike like the practice during the 1990s in which, due to the popularity of the relatively new CD medium, instead of releasing bog standard singles, artists would instead put out dual maxi-singles, one disc of which typically featured three or four songs, the other disc a collection of remixes. Taken together, the two discs would often last as long (if not longer) than an album, and being able to spend time with a cluster of songs that were then reworked was always an enormously enjoyable listening experience. Read more
Charles Uzor – mimicri/ pieces with tape
Another interesting release from the NEOS label is mimicri/ pieces with tape, a double album featuring nine works by Nigerian-born composer Charles Uzor. As the name suggests, most of the music is electroacoustic, together with a chamber piece and two works for choir, and the majority of them are relatively recent, dating from within the last five years. Uzor was an entirely new name to me, and while this album is helpful as a portrait of the composer’s outlook and aesthetic, if anything that portrait is an intriguingly multifaceted one, in which connections between the different works are far from obvious. Perhaps it would be fair to characterise Uzor’s music as ‘consistently inconsistent’.
The opening work on the album is 2016’s Nri/ mimicri, in which an ondes martenot and percussion quartet coexist – or, rather, co-behave – in a way that could be described as ‘meta-ambient‘. It’s an unhurried atmosphere combining small individual attacks from the percussion with more extended sounds from the ondes (both sustained pitches and glissandi), within a kind of ‘open’ ambiance articulated by gentle granular noise on the tape. The piece coalesces into more focused episodes where there’s an overt sense of dialogue, yet as the work’s half-hour duration progresses the broader context suggests that these kinds of action – and others, such as prominent passages from vibraphone and marimba – are all elements that can be essentially switched on and off. It leads to a beautiful form of steady state where small-scale interest is always balanced against large-scale equilibrium, though it’s important to stress the small-scale interest is not merely striking but at times surprising, such as the introduction of previously unheard birdsong into the texture just a few minutes before the end. Read more
Gunnar Geisse – The Wannsee Recordings
The Wannsee Recordings is a double album by German composer and improviser Gunnar Geisse, released on the NEOS label earlier this year. In some ways, that sentence is about as certain as i can be about the album because, to be honest, i was as impressed by it as i was flummoxed by it. Usually, when an album ramps up its flummox factor it doesn’t take too long for it to become unengaging and ultimately boring, but in the case of The Wannsee Recordings, despite the fact that i regularly found myself staring at the speakers in a certain amount of disbelief, something about it kept me hooked for its complete 150-minute duration.
Let’s back up a bit: the album is essentially an anthology of 34 individual improvisations, ranging in length from 58 seconds to well over 13 minutes, performed by Geisse using a special laptop guitar rigged up to a MIDI controller and a laptop enabling the instrument to transform into a host of other instruments and sounds. Sometimes the guitar stays fairly close to its own identity, but in most cases it would be impossible to tell that what you’re hearing is emanating from a guitar. Opening track ‘VII.4 [10100111_A7_⋆167]’, for example, is described as being for “electric guitar, brass, percussion, timpani and celesta’, whereas one of the most ambitious, ‘II.4+V.4 [100100+1100111_24+67_⋆36+⋆103]’ comprises “electric guitar, saxophone, drum set, woodwinds, strings, piano, choir, noises and trombone”. It’s not stretching a point to describe these improvisations as encompassing orchestral forces and scope. Read more
HCMF 2019 (Part 2)
It’s many, many years since i spent meaningful time in the company of music by Can, so i went to founder member Irmin Schmidt‘s HCMF piano recital last Thursday with precisely no expectations. What transpired was one of the most mesmerising, understated performances that i’ve ever witnessed in St Paul’s Hall. Though Schmidt was performing three works – derived in part from his album 5 Klavierstücke, released last year – they essentially coalesced such that they became three facets of a single train of thought. The innards of the instrument had been intricately prepared with an assortment of screws, rawlplugs and other gizmos, but this was a whole lot more than just a standard prepared piano. In the way Schmidt played, there was no qualitative difference between the prepared and natural notes – they all sounded as though they were an essential, intrinsic part of the piano’s tone of voice, so to speak, articulated with different kinds of timbre and pitch focus. Read more
HCMF 2019 (Part 1)
Last week i was able to catch a couple of days of the shenanigans going on at this year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. It was strange not to be doing my usual thing of setting up camp for the whole shebang, but quite apart from it being better than nothing, experiencing a festival in microcosm like this is somewhat revealing. More than perhaps most music festivals, going to HCMF involves becoming a prospector, panning for gold in its welter of content. Personally, i’ve tended to find the nuggets of gold to be relatively few and far between, but when you find them it’s usually a pretty overwhelming experience, easily among the most memorable i’ve ever had. This proved to be the case again this year: some was worthless, some looked like gold but on closer inspection was just superficially shiny – and every now and then the festival really hit the jackpot.
Apropos: Termite Territory, by composer-in-residence Hanna Hartman, receiving its first UK performance on Thursday afternoon by Swiss ensemble We Spoke. It looked at first glance to be a not particularly promising mucking around with close-miced bits of corrugated cardboard. However, its highly episodic structure – each episode involving a different approach to the way the cardboard was wielded by the five players – turned out to be deeply engrossing. Read more
Tags: Barblina Meierhans, Christine Sun Kim, electronic, experimental, France, Hanna Hartman, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2019, improvisation, Lauren Sarah Hayes, Leafcutter John, Mayke Nas, Netherlands, Olivier Pasquet, Owen Green, Rodrigo Constanzo, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, USA
Nordic Music Days 2019 (Part 2)
Being the host nation, music from Norway was especially well-represented at this year’s Nordic Music Days in Bodø. Harnessing the large and impressive organ of Bodø Cathedral, Trond Kverno‘s Triptychon 2 was one of the fieriest things i heard at the festival. We tend to think of toccatas as fast-flowing, though the ones that appeared here were often crushingly strong, to the point that it sounded as if their notes were audibly fusing into dense clusters. Its more ruminative middle movement only made the powerful outer sections sound more assertive, the final movement managing to turn a pedal point into an aggressive surge before letting high notes hang while the pedals became pushy in the depths. And just when it seemed the work couldn’t get any more forceful, organist Gro Bergrabb’s rendition of the final climax was so crashing it practically threatened the integrity of the building. Read more
Tags: acousmatic, Anna Þorvaldsdóttir, bells, Bergrún Snæbjørnsdóttir, choral, electronic, Ellen Lindquist, ensemble, Faroe Islands, Federico Placidi, Hildigunnur Rúnarsdóttir, Natasha Barrett, Nils Henrik Asheim, Nordic Music Days, Nordic Music Days 2019, Norway, organ, Sunleif Rasmussen, Trond Kverno, USA, Þóranna Björnsdóttir
