If you’re in the mood for something a bit left-field to liven up your summer, you could do worse than check out Aggregate, a double album featuring “new works for automated pipe organs”. i know, right? i’ve experienced my fair share of automated organ music, and it invariably tends toward both the weird and the wonderful, often at the same time. That being said, as i vividly recall from what i heard during this year’s Musica Nova festival in Helsinki, it can also tend toward the mediocre. But, being someone to no small extent steeped in organ music throughout my life, i still maintain the optimistic view that it’s possible to write automated organ music (and non-automated, for that matter) without the results sounding like the instrument is being wielded either by someone’s 6-month-old toddler or a badly malfunctioning robot. Aggregate goes some way to validating that optimism.
Some way. i could do without being subjected to the works by Mark Fell, which in their blank repetitions and blurting actions sound like the actions of someone fresh from their lobotomy. And while the two parts of Aggregat 11 by gamut inc (comprising Marion Wörle and Maciej Śledziecki) are nowhere near as egregious, they only maintain meaningful interest at the points where the music is in a clear state of evolution. Once settled, it quickly becomes tiresome (at times, downright relentless), which is a shame as there are some nice episodes along the way.
The remainder, however, is far more successful and testifies strongly to the creative potential of automated organ music. Hampus Lindwall‘s AFK is another two-parter (though perversely presented in reverse order, and separated across the album), Part 1 of which manages to sidestep pitch by using large clusters as the basis for rapid, intense rhythms. Their intricacy alters, and later a sense of pitch pushes through, via a pedal note and one or two notes in the chords, though it retains rhythmic focus in what is essentially an exciting workout for the instrument. (It’s a shame the performance is marred by two audible edits, ~3:20 and ~4:20, that are very clunky indeed.) Part 2, after some strident opening gestures, gets stuck into quieter, angular material that seems to be in a continual state of development. When it finally arrives at large, sustained chords, it makes one reappraise everything that went before, and the extent to which it was always aiming toward this point.
Seth Horvitz is featured no fewer than three times (one of the questions Aggregate raises is why the number of composers included is limited, due to most appearing multiple times; is there a dearth of automated pipe organ composers?). i can take or leave the rather aloof glaciality of Horvitz’s appropriately-named Study No. 0: Untitled, as it’s so benign. Study No. 99: Strumming Machine, Gedächtniskirche Version, however, is much more engaging. A rip-off of Charlemagne Palestine it may be, but it’s not bad: a cheerful, bright landscape of arpeggios that’s actually rather lovely to get lost within. Note: be sure to listen through speakers, not headphones, as any movement of the head during this piece results in quite significant shifts in pitch focus, which only magnifies its 3D enveloping effect. Study No. 1: Octaves, Systematically Filled & Folded opens as the most fantastical flourish of notes, held up by sharp cluster impacts. It’s a hugely impressive introduction, and while the piece that follows doesn’t quite live up to it, it’s nonetheless a fascinating process to behold playing out.
Perhaps it’s unavoidable that an album focusing on automated music should feature the wonder that is Conlon Nancarrow. He’s represented by organ versions of Nos. 11 and 21 from his Studies for Player Piano. And very good they are too, aided by elements of timbral separation impossible in the originals. In the case of No. 21 this clarifies the low-slow-acceleration / high-fast-deceleration process very nicely, pulling the ear constantly back and forth between the two, while in No. 11 that prevalent sense of fun in Nancarrow’s work comes to the fore. The momentum (if that’s the right word for it) is wonderfully weird, kind of shuffling, animated but hesitant, full of nervous energy. It reveals afresh just how perfectly timed Nancarrow’s musical structures are: any longer and they’d become novelties, or even downright silly.
Lost and found loops #1 by Norwegian organmeister (or should that be orgelmestr?) Nils Henrik Asheim is one of two, possibly three works on the album heard as excerpts. Rapid, swirling arpeggios with emergent sustained notes (something of a recurring feature on the album overall) arrive at a more dense sequence, where everything we’ve heard recedes into the background, now becoming chord-focused. In turn it reaches something like a stasis point, with small occasional staccatos firing out within. It’s a frustratingly tantalising morsel of a piece that, considering disc 2 lasts a mere 53 minutes, could and surely should have been included in its entirety.
By contrast, the excerpt of Jessica Ekomane‘s Tipping Point feels sufficiently self-contained to be satisfying. It’s interesting trying to parse its angular, jaunty material: separate layers or all one homogeneous texture? When Ekomane ramps up the density, that question is answered – or at least rendered moot – becoming a single texture that (with echoes of Lindwall’s AFK part 2) attains a point of real grandiosity. The interplay that follows, between convolution and simplicity is intriguing and, again, only makes one wish we could hear the piece complete.
Whether or not the title of Phillip Sollmann & Konrad Sprenger‘s Excerpt is to be taken literally is unclear, but it hardly matters as it’s superb as it stands, one of the highlights on the album. Long, slow-moving sustained notes have filigree applied to them. Soon the texture is dense, even stodgy, and eventually becomes rather static (while still seemingly moving), with high notes protruding through. From around its halfway point, the timbres change – using, i assume, zimbelstern stops – so that the music becomes more and more clangorous. The bass moves up a tone, a powerful moment, and it becomes impossible not to be pulled into the core of this vast, immersive soundworld. At the last everything drops out except for the highest register, leaving us with the complex cacophony of a chorus of pealing bells.
The other highlight on Aggregate is Gwizdały by Lithuanian composer Arturas Bumšteinas, which began life as a work using sounds from a whistle museum (i would love to hear that), being adapted later into this automated pipe organ version. Its cycling and shifting mechanical patterns sound distinctly like a fairground organ gone seriously askew, which is entertaining enough, but it’s the work’s subsequent progression into swarm-like behaviour that’s most engrossing. The music fittingly takes on both a buzzing and hissing quality, starting to sound like isolated points of pitch flying around. A low note appears for a time, and a strange high oscillating minor third is a mesmerising presence above. The swarming buzz continues until, finally, it unexpectedly takes on the quality of, far from something insect-like, a chorus of morse code operators transmitting their panoply of messages via flutes.
Released by Wergo, Aggregate is available on CD and download.
