To conclude this month’s focus on post-festive free(down)loading, i’m turning to one of the Currents albums released by two-piano, two-percussion ensemble Yarn/Wire. Over the last decade, the quartet has released 10 albums in the Currents series, showcasing an array of works composed for them. Not surprisingly, with such a diversity of music the mileage varies a lot, but Vol. 8, released just over a year ago, is especially strong.
In some respects the simplest of the three works is Sarah Davachi‘s Feedback Studies For Percussion. The title perhaps suggests we’re in for 20 minutes of wild squalling but the piece is nothing of the kind. It’s a slow, subtle examination of, in Davachi’s words, “the kind of timbral and harmonic spaces that may be achieved through overlapping systems of overtone reinforcement and acoustic feedback”. In practice, the piece establishes a meditative soundworld that, while not a classic steady state, nonetheless could be said to be somewhat static despite the fact that it passes through a greatly ramped-up central episode. That’s because this section, sonically speaking, is only different from the gentler outer episodes due to its intensity; in terms of behavioural and harmonic language, while the details are different the essence is the same, part of a single, large-scale flexing continuity. i suspect it wouldn’t help much to say a great deal more about the piece, except that the way the fundamental pitch C and its harmonics are worried by microtonal fluctuations is nicely effective, as is its ambient-like demeanour that’s clearly not concerned with holding our attention all the time, moving according to a less demonstrative mode of contemplation. Unlike the other two works on this album, it seems rather different each time i’ve listened to it, making repeat listening a satisfyingly rewarding, unexpected (and desirable) experience.
acoustic sourings by Kelley Sheehan is the most tactile of these three pieces. That’s perhaps not surprising considering Sheehan employs what she calls “speaker drums: a construction of speaker cones and their battery circuits attached to clips and/or metal sticks so that when these objects touch … they momentarily activate the speaker cones resulting in the pops, cracks, and static heard”. What’s particularly striking about the piece is the elusive nature of its irregular network of impacts and friction sounds. Everything is clearly percussive – the timbres aren’t elusive – but their nature, in terms of precisely how the sounds are being made, how things are being triggered, struck, scraped and manipulated, is complicated. i also really like how edgy this piece is, that tactility regularly coloured by crunches and distortion. Deep piano notes bring about a dronal foundation that’s nicely opposite to the erratic, non-pitched percussive sounds. Whereupon, a little after halfway(~5:52) it hits a critical point, first emerging resonant and scratchy before powerful clusters obliterate everything. Yet Sheehan tempers this, without in any way diminishing it, with cascading gestures and glissandi, simultaneously aggressive and playful, before a fainter conclusion.
Perhaps most effective of all is Victoria Cheah‘s Ocean Into Wire; at over 23 minutes it’s the longest piece on the album, but it also has the greatest dramatic range. In a way there’s something primordial about it, inasmuch as its palette can be thought of as somewhat archetypal: pitch, noise, wood, metal, dry, wet, etc. Her poetically descriptive notes speak of a wide range of associated concepts: weight, unknown depths, silence, noise and debris, events and impulses, and an “inability to communicate directly”. Those are enticing ideas to hold in mind when engaging with the work, particularly because of the extent to which Ocean Into Wire unfolds with the real sense of an evolutionary sound journey. Big piano chords sit adjacent to two types of friction, a soft wall of noise stays distant, and the chords seem to trigger a very deep bass response (it’s interesting the conflicting way the pianos are perceived, by turns indifferent and catalytic). By around five minutes in we’ve reached a place of gentle sustain, softly throbbing and rumbling, and now the pianos seem like guides, providing a locus of certainty both metrically (in an otherwise pulseless landscape) and narratively, pointing the way forward. There’s a particularly intriguing episode that starts around the 10-minute mark, cycling round like a mobile, though underpinned by a palpable fundamental. It’s a hypnotic sequence that. even when we emerge beyond it, remains heightened, partly due to that same fundamental now rippling beneath. Towards the end is the most heightened passage of all, a hovering pitch texture that sounds tense, not passively but almost muscularly maintained. The final role of the pianos in the work’s closing minutes is to gradually ease things back to a state of calm.
Released in January 2024, Currents Vol. 8 is available on CD and free download from the Yarn/Wire Bandcamp site.
