As i’ve indicated previously, the non-partisan diversity of HCMF is impressively broad these days, and one of the concerts that best exemplified this took place in Bates Mill Photographic Studio on Saturday morning, in the company of Laura Cannell. To describe her as a composer and performer of folk music would be to over-simplify greatly what Cannell did in the six short movements of FEATHERS UNFURLED, receiving its world première. Switching between a fiddle and a pair of recorders (the latter being played simultaneously), each piece took tropes from both folk music as well as earlier musical idioms as the starting point for broader and more personal explorations. All of the works employed drones to underpin them, and in the various fiddle pieces this accentuated the primacy of open strings, which were continually heard as reference points, grounding the music, from which more (care)free ideas could spring and rise. In one of these pieces, Outstretched, this primacy was particularly striking as, due to detuning the instrument, the quality of the drone at first came to resemble an intoning male voice, later lending an unsettling air to the music due to its unexpected gravitas. The final fiddle piece, In The Room Not Passing Through – one of two using a bow with hair going both over and under the strings – moved farthest from its allusive conventions, combining obsessive bowing with extremes of bow pressure (both too much and too little). The sound emanating from the instrument, in conjunction with Cannell’s stylised mode of delivery – involving small, careful movements within a confined performance space – hinted at something magical being invoked beneath the music. In the recorder pieces Untethered and Hollowed, Cannell took on an even more shamanic demeanour, her movements now the ritualised actions of spell-casting, resulting in heavily motivic material in the latter piece, and a strange tonality betwixt minor and major in the former. This concert was a genuinely unexpected treat, proving how alive and adventurous new manifestations of ancient traditions of music-making continue to be. Read more
HCMF 2017: Laura Cannell, ICE + Distractfold + Fritz Hauser + Anne Bourne, Mix Tape
HCMF 2017: We Spoke, London Sinfonietta + Irvine Arditti, GGR Betong
Yesterday at HCMF was decidedly mixed. Contemporary music-making aiming to be radical, at the cutting edge, obviously involves risk. That risk in turn requires a considerable amount of trust: from commissioners and investors, stumping up the cash; from performers, committing to learn and perfect the material; from concert organisers, providing a platform and technical support; and from audiences, sacrificing money and time to engage with it. That trust was sorely tested in the afternoon concert in Phipps Hall given by Swiss ensemble We Spoke. Not too terribly in H and B by Simon Løffler, works that put so much emphasis on their visual and physical aspects – the former involving tuning forks and a machine with four rotating blades, the latter a system of pedals illuminating three lights in different combinations – that their aural content felt impoverished and vapid by comparison; all very unfortunate, but not particularly uncommon in new music concerts. Fritz Hauser‘s Schraffur was less convincing and musically rich than in its recorded version, which i reviewed early last year; i wonder whether it was seeing the gong-based rhythmic scrapings going on that rendered the effect less impressive and diminished its uncanny long-term potential (the recording, let me stress, is very striking indeed). Yet while these works merely taxed our trust – and this was absolutely no fault of We Spoke, who executed each piece superbly – it was well and truly squandered by Hanna Hartman‘s Shadow Box. Its twelve minutes of cracking open eggs and nuts and punching bags filled with air (i came to empathise with how each bag felt) was less a performance – still less music – than a crime scene in which the Emperor had his entire wardrobe nicked. i don’t think i’ve ever witnessed that trust i spoke of being not merely wasted, but egregiously exploited; if Hartman has any talent at all, precisely none of it was demonstrated in this shamefully vacuous crap. Miraculously, despite all this it was worth attending the concert to experience Cathy van Eck‘s Wings, receiving its UK première. Her work involving performers interacting with loudspeakers is always fascinating, and Wings didn’t disappoint. A ballet involving three large panels slowly being re-positioned around the space, altering the nature, effect and accumulation of feedback generated from microphones around the stage facing a single loudspeaker at the back, was wonderful, effortlessly achieving what every other work in this concert singularly failed to do, creating a perfect, seamless, mesmeric marriage of sight and sound. Read more
Mixtape #37 : Best Albums of 2016
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
i’m starting 2017 in the usual way, with a mixtape bringing together one track from each of the forty albums on my best of 2016 list. i’m sure posterity will come to regard last year as something of a trough in human history, but this mixtape does at least testify to the fact that it also contained some truly marvellous wonders. i hope you find these three hours of music a nice distillation of the aural magic that was made in 2016; links to buy each of the albums can be found in the last two days’ articles.
The mixtape can be downloaded or streamed via MixCloud; here’s the tracklistening in full: Read more
Tags: Autechre, Bear McCreary, Bent Sørensen, C Duncan, Chaya Czernowin, Christian Fennesz, Clara Iannotta, Claude Vivier, Cliff Martinez, Daniel Wohl, Francis Dhomont, Fritz Hauser, James O'Callaghan, Jenny Hval, Jim O'Rourke, John Wall, Jonty Harrison, Katie Gately, Kayo Dot, Kroy, Ladyhawke, Maïa Vidal, Mark Korven, Matmos, Me and My Drummer, Michael Moser, Mitski, Necro Deathmort, Olga Neuwirth, OY, Richard Barrett, Robin Foster, Seth Parker Woods, Sleigh Bells, SPC ECO, Stefan Fraunberger, Supersilent, The Natural History Museum, Three Trapped Tigers, Wendy Bevan, Zahn | Hatami | McClure
Best Albums of 2016 (Part 2)
* Please note this list has how been superseded by the one on the Best Albums of the Years page *
Here they are, then: the best of the best of 2016, each and every one of them packed full of the rarest imagination, invention and ingenuity. i can’t recommend them highly enough.
Read more
Tags: Autechre, C Duncan, Chaya Czernowin, Christian Fennesz, Claude Vivier, Cliff Martinez, Daniel Kohl, Francis Dhomont, Fritz Hauser, Jim O'Rourke, John Wall, Jonty Harrison, Katie Gately, Kayo Dot, Ladyhawke, Matmos, Natural History Museum, Sleigh Bells, Stefan Fraunberger, Supersilent, The, Three Trapped Tigers
New releases: Bernat Vivancos, Fritz Hauser
The most recent pair of new releases from the always excellent Spanish label Neu Records are particularly interesting, both on their own terms as well as in the marked way they contrast with each other in compositional outlook and intent. Neu has particularly championed the music of Bernat Vivancos; 2011 brought Blanc, a double album of vivid, gently experimental choral works, and this has now been followed with another 2-disc set, featuring Vivancos’ large-scale Requiem. It’s a work that will, on the one hand, appeal to those who like their choral music with the kind of harmonic simplicity and clarity associated with composers like Arvo Pärt and Morten Lauridsen. On the other hand, in his Requiem—a 98-minute work for choir, soloists, solo cello and cello quartet, accordion and percussion—Vivancos has to some extent sought to distance himself from conventional models, rejecting entirely the traditional text in favour of proverbs and poetry, together with Biblical excerpts and theological/philosophical musings. As such, and in the context of a requiem this is rather fascinating, the work becomes an infusion of both emotion and intellect, spirituality and science comingling in an act of expression that goes beyond mere grief into something altogether more complex, and which is all the more moving as a result. Read more
