i didn’t realise how much i’d missed listening to Chiyoko Szlavnics‘ music until i pressed play on Memory Spaces, the latest album of her music. It’s been far too long, and while my interest in music exploring alternative tunings has waned considerably as it’s become slowly and stupidly reconfigured into something ever more cult-like, Szlavnics remains entirely separate from that. Her music has always explored unconventional tunings, but it’s not defined by them, and it’s certainly not about them.
This new album brings together two large-scale ensemble works, performed by Ensemble Contrechamps, with a lengthy electronic interlude in between. Memory Spaces (appearances) for 14 string instruments dates from 2017 (revised 2023), and is a mesmerising study in harmonic fluidity. There’s a paradox in the way the work sounds: from one perspective, so glacial, and from another, so full of inner motion. Likewise, one minute it sounds like 14 individuals following their own noses, and the next it’s a unified ensemble with a group mentality. There’s no need to seek to resolve those paradoxes, just as there’s no need – indeed, no ability – to resolve the music’s perpetual harmonic flux into something conventional. As the instruments move, they freely allude to familiar harmonic states, chords, progressions, ever with the sense that they’re unplanned moments, chanced upon along the way, accidents of verticality from a mindset concerned more with the horizontal.
In tandem with this is an ambient-like quality, in the way the music moves between pulling at our attention and releasing it, caused not only by the flexing harmonic (un)clarity but also the density. 7½ minutes in, for example, everything is suddenly rich and full (flexing in), subsequently hinting via the bass at a seemingly familiar kind of chord sequence (flexing out); yet while the expected cadence comes, it also seems like a fluke, and soon enough we’re beyond it, somewhere different (flexing in). This keeps happening, constant freedom of movement through a redefined, slippery pitchspace, accumulating notes along the way that our ears and brains align (or try to align) into imaginary overtones, triads and progressions. Overall, notwithstanding that push-pull of attention i mentioned, the liminal path the piece walks is utterly engrossing, and while Szlavnics brings it to an end after 20 minutes, there’s no reason why it couldn’t continue ad infinitum.
Composed a little over a decade earlier in 2006, For Eva Hesse is an immersive electronic work that operates in a strikingly similar way to Memory Spaces. Now it’s sine tones that move freely, ever in flux, though here there’s often a curious impression that the tones are attempting themselves to move from misalignment to unison. Yet it’s just as likely that this the same kind of interpretive ‘resolution’ as before, in which proximity, alignment and consonance are products of the same free movement, resulting in shimmering clashes littered with speeding and slowing beats.
There’s something distinctly balletic and also – bearing in mind the dedicatee – sculptural about the way the tones move. One imagines curves and smooth surfaces, joined by or perhaps defined by series of overlapping lines (as in other Szlavnics’ compositions). It also, later, functions in a similar way to Memory Spaces insofar as extra pitches, particularly in the bass, lend the music a stronger harmonic connotation, one that’s even more elusive, and which before long, has completely vanished.
The album concludes with Oracles I-V (listening spaces) for 20 instruments, composed in 2020 (again revised in 2023). At nearly 40 minutes’ duration it’s by far the longest piece, as well as being much more obviously instrumental than Memory Spaces, due to its timbral variety and deployment. It’s also the only work of the three to be overtly sectional, structured in five movements.
The first is initiated by deep tuba pedal tones, resounding like a foghorn. As it repeats, more and more notes materialise, and here too the music takes on a harmonic quality. A drone gives the impression it’s founded upon that, but it’s debatable, the brain potentially treating chromatic pitches as temporary aberrations when the reality could be just as slippery as in the other two works. Whatever it is, it’s gorgeous, like a slow, somewhat solemn breathing in and out, yet at the same time i can’t help hearing a low-key playfulness in the way upper notes make shapes in the air, like slo-mo cavorting.
In Part II a strong single note acts as a focal point; other pitches join it, displacing it for a time, sliding across its surface, but it persists and ultimately prevails. As in For Eva Hesse the music is more behaviourally limited yet never quite becomes austere; there’s an inscrutable warmth despite appearances, and not only during the time bass makes its presence felt. As if to clarify something of that warmth, Part III replaces the opening foghorn with bass drum rumble, coming in slow, steady repetitions like soft aftershocks of an unsensed detonation. Remembering that foghorn, it’s also as if those deep notes had become blurred, losing their central focus. A focal point is instead to be found at altitude, in the form of high trumpet notes, a stark, radical polarisation – low–high, struck–blown, blurred–clear, tremolo–sustained – that’s even less behaviourally demonstrative yet all the more arresting.
Part IV continues seamlessly, introducing additional pitches, in the process only slightly elaborating the polarity into what are now three distant strata: low, medium, high. The uncertainty about individuals or a group returns here, horizontal certainty versus vertical suggestion. Further discrete strata are added, and while one wonders whether the simplicity of the overall language is a consequence of their remoteness to each other, the close of the movement – when everything becomes a lot less certain – is actually the point when everything sounds most convincingly unified.
The short final part acts as an epilogue, almost a continuation but transferred or transfigured to a higher plane, playing out in the stratosphere. A fuzzy fifth shines out, the pitches undulating as if wafted by some supernal zephyr. Everything moves yet seemingly all is still, and at the last, in the midst of the texture, we hear chimes.
Memory Spaces is an album that reminds me what it was that i fell in love with, so many years ago, when i first discovered Chiyoko Szlavnics’ music. It’s that sense that nothing is as it seems, everything familiar has been reconfigured, reimagined, reconceived. Where so much music using non-standard tunings is just fussy, neurotic and joyless, Szlavnics’ work demonstrates a contrastingly genuine emancipation, one that feels effortless, and sounds timeless.
Released by Neu Records, Memory Spaces is available on CD and Neu’s usual panoply of digital formats, including high resolution, 5.1 and stereo.
