Boring Like A Drill.

The Many Hands of John White

2026-04-19T17:20:40Z

John White would be ninety this year, had he not died in 2024. There was a large concert that year to celebrate his life and work, but there is still much to celebrate and more yet that has been so far overlooked. Music We’d Like To Hear began its extended twenty-first season with a concert dedicated to White yesterday which demonstrated both of these aspects. As a pre-concert event, Tim Parkinson gave the premiere of White’s Piano Sonata No. 47 from 1969. Relatively longer than most of his 179 other sonatas, it’s a spacious work that “quietens the mind” in the Cagean sense, although the lean but unyielding structure bears a closer relationship to Christian Wolff. Mixing single notes and chords harmonising the upper leading voice, the piece moved slowly in a largely stepwise way with occasional displacements, the extended duration creating a sort of slow-motion long line of melody. Strange how you could tell it was over.

The concert itself featured performances by frequent White collaborator Christopher Hobbs with Dave Smith on piano. Most of the works were duets for piano four hands, with Smith pairing with Mary Dullea, Rob Grassie, Mark Viner and Hobbs. The piano duets were mostly written in the mid-1970s and tended to be all of a similar style, reflecting White’s interest in the Romantics and in theatre music. The programme notes describe these as non-system works, as opposed to the pieces for which he remains best known, but traces of machinery could still be heard here, both in his fondness for sequences, applied meticulously or haphazardly, and the salon-cum-player piano approach that Smith et al. took to interpreting this self-consciously anachronistic music. There’s a bone-dry humour at work in these pieces if you’re looking for it, mostly in their form, either cutting off the romanticist rhetoric in mid-flow or extending it until it verges on bluster. The English reticence at play here also ensures the seductive effects are blunted. This would all appear to be a way for White to have his cake and eat it, and an evening’s worth of the stuff did start to play on the nerves.

To break things up, Hobbs and Ian Gardiner played a couple of White’s machine pieces for untuned percussion. Yet Another Exercise and Photo-Finish Machine both date from 1972 and use irregular patterns of sounded and unsounded events to produce fleeting, elusive textures out of a game-like situation. Tammas Slater gave the early Toccata for Organ (from 1961) a rendition on the St Mary At Hill instrument, the first airing of this piece in about, oh, sixty-five years or so. It’s a lively, exuberant work, composed to show off the pipes of the newly-commisioned organ at Guildford Cathedral. There were also surprise items not announced in the programme: Smith and Hobbs performing a piano arrangement of Nordic Reverie, and a newly-discovered work from 2019 dedicated to John Tilbury, adapting material from Rossini’s Sins of Old Age into a sly, quasi-obsessive indulgence.

Getting in the groove: Houben & Roeles, Ahti

2026-04-16T22:21:16Z

Eva-Maria Houben & Harmjan Roeles: given [Sawyer Editions]. The last time I reviewed something by Houben I called her composition style as “on the cusp between just-enough and not-enough”, but her collaborations can often go in unexpected directions. In given, she plays a neat little portable pipe organ as part of a trio with Harmjan Roeles on double bass and the producer Roeland van Niele – yes, they describe their practice as involving all three. I don’t see any recording venue or dates on this album so the circumstances of the perfmormance(s) heard here are for conjecture, but the sleeve notes refer to it as an “exercise in breathing”, presumably with the producer providing outsourced mindfulness. In the first part they are susceptible to mood swings, with Roeles’ bass growling in the lowest registers while Houben’s organ is unsettled and flighty, with occasional florid outbursts. They gradually centre themselves, until by the end of the first part and throughout the remaining two they achieve near-immobility. The two musicians occupy a strange space in which timbre and pitch start to blur into a single quality, making as little overt action as necessary to produce sounds in which bow on string matches air through pipes, clear tone meshes with overtones. While working their way down to almost nothing, they never lapse into stasis; rather they feel their way through the piece moment by moment. Lasting over an hour, they seem to achieve a reductive endpoint by about a third of the way through, yet by extending far beyond this apparent limit they keep finding new places to explore with increasing attention and refinement.

Marja Ahti: Visiting Cloud (Two Translations) [Another Timbre]. This is the first solo work by Ahti that I’ve reviewed, and it consists of two electroacoustic compositions from around 2019-20 that were repurposed for the all-acoustic Blutwurst ensemble, featuring Cristina Abati, Marco Baldini, Luisa Santacesaria et al. Laurence Binyon’s aphorism “slowness is beauty” is the watchword here: these new arrangements are about twenty minutes each, somewhere between two to three times longer than the originals. Which I haven’t heard, so I can’t make comments on the tempo. What I do hear is that Chora is stately and sumptuous, rendered as a slow series of chords that gradually fill out an existing harmonic idea rather than follow any form of development or process. The ensemble plays viola, trumpet, cello and double bass, bass clarinet, accordion and harmonium, offering a rich palette of sounds from relatively small forces. In Fluctuating Streams the progression is more linear, starting with unvoiced sounds that slowly morph into monotones, then begin to take on simple harmonisations. Once again, Ahti and Blutwurst prefer not to build up but to detail a single musical image, reaching a certain stage of completeness and then examining its effects at length, creating a piece with a strangely sinuous aspect to its languor.

Lance Austin Olsen: new compositions

2026-04-16T22:27:03Z

Lance Austin Olsen: Death In The Urban Jungle [Confront]. Before I get to the new stuff, let’s backtrack to last year to see where Olsen is coming from now. For many years, the painter/composer has been producing haunted sound collages, combining instruments, amplified objects and old recordings in a symbiotic relationship with his paintings, either complementing or taking direct compositional knowledge from them. The mood is often dark, and these new pieces have stripped back the former complexity of the collage texture to produce music of greater starkness. Death In The Urban Jungle begins with an emphasis on timbre over any particular mood, with strange, synthesised-sounding textures dominating in an unusual way, quite unlike his previous work. (The principal instruments listed here are amplified copper plate, shruti box, guitar, bamboo flute, found tapes.) The work falls into a series of scenes, separated by silences. As it progresses, each scene settles into slow ostinati of unidentifiable sounds which establish their presence and then recede. The introduction of identifiably musical source material in the later stages of the piece seems all the more alienating and ominous when heard in this context.

Lance Austin Olsen: Fascist Cockroaches Over Canada Meet The Resistance [Somnimage]. This is a shorter work made for Somnimage’s unknown territory series, coupled with a digital print of one of Olsen’s visual works. Olsen plays solo on amplified acoustic guitar, raw and uncultured, surrounded by extraneous sounds of scraped and rubbed objects, with an added sample as a sting in the tail to add a pointed reference to place and time. The tone is unmistakeable (see title) but doesn’t stoop to propaganda, locating its grievances in its attitude instead of elevating and restricting to a particular set of circumstances. In some ways this is the theme of the piece, as the ills of the world are ever-present, changing only in appearance and in place.

Jamie Drouin & Lance Austin Olsen: a field far beyond form and emptiness [Infrequency Editions]. Time flies, and this is apparently the first album put out by Olsen and likeminded long-time collaborator Drouin in six years. Again, there’s a newfound starkness in their approach here, even as their work together is more ambivalent and neutral in tone than the portents of Olsen’s solo work. Besides the old radios and found tapes, there’s a particular focus on capital-I Instruments here, even if amplified: cello, guitars, dulcimer and piano predominate. It’s a strikingly pointillistic work, with acoustic phenomenon placed front and centre in clear relief. Elements of collage and found sounds are still present but used sparingly, adding inflection points to the surface. Silence is always present, either through implication in the sparseness of the sounds and the low dynamics throughout, or the extended pauses which separates the work into chapters. It’s both the strangest and the most conventional work I’ve heard by the duo; an extended composition of endurance and restraint which is never passive or fully at rest, even in its most subdued moments.

Parkinson Lee

2026-04-06T20:51:55Z

Tim Parkinson: The Projects [untitledwebsite]. I had something smart to say here but I forgot it so I’ll start over. I think I’ve previously described Parkinson’s music as acting like a non-sequitur to something never said. The four pieces presented on The Projects are all very different but try to convince you that they’re all alike. Siwan Rhys neatly trips through the piano piece untitled 2021a in a way that at first reminds of Christian Wolff’s later music, but the tonal language used here is less rarefied and deceptively sophisticated. Rhys spins the piece with a jazzy, insouciant breeziness that suddenly pulls up short at unexpected moments. The following pieces find other ways of being lulling and nagging simultaneously, leaving everything momentarily balanced but still unstable. Project 3 is a duet between Travis Just on saxophone and Parkinson on a motley assortment of keyboards. Across five movements Just plays two- or one-note riffs over obtuse, wandering keyboard lines and low-tech drum machines, with the sax managing to sound as affectless as a free MIDI instrument patch. The po-faced directness starts to accumulate arbitraty collisions between the instruments until it all ends on the verge of chaos; an even-tempered chaos, but still. Parkinson’s keyboards double piano and MIDI piano on the solo piece untitled 2021b, which seems to follow some sequence or process that chases its own tail, looping through harmonic circles while counting down to a preordained endpoint. Skipping ahead to Project 9000, we hear something that sounds programmatic but is entirely baffling. Rhys returns to bang out sporadic piano clusters, eventually joined by percussionist George Barton on various tasks of musical carpentry, all while Parkinson grandiloquently rhapsodises on an otherworldly Mighty Wurlitzer. It’s enough to make Kagel scratch his head. I don’t want to trivialise this album by asserting there’s a point to it all, but nevertheless Parkinson presses upon our assumptions and our anxieties that subconsciously play out when we listen to music, digging into the cognitive dissonances of misapplied logic that can amuse or frustrate us, to instill responses in the listener that are complex and strongly personal.

Okkyung Lee: just like any other day (어느날): background music for your mundane activities [Shelter Press]. Okkyung Lee dispenses with the cello and makes an album entirely of home recordings with electronic keyboards, computer and a cheap cassettee recorder. Ten pieces that are gnomic but fully realised. The setting and pervading mood of comforting melancholy recalls the convalescent feeling produced by the “lockdown aesthetic” of a few years ago, but the music here is more definite and complete. The keyboards hearken back to the clean synth sounds of the early 1980s, here brightly coloured but not strident, mellowed by a soft VHS burr of nostalgia. The slightly lo-fi sounds evoke the domestic form of techno-optimism from that period, when home computers were new and suggested boundless potential, simultaneously futuristic and quaint. Each of the ten tracks evokes a mood while also suggesting a quiet wit operating behind its pithiness. I mentally bracketed it with Tim Parkinson because it seems to share the peculiar combination of being friendly but aloof. The pieces are charming and seemingly trivial, too candid to be ambient, too obliging to be musique d’ameublement, but as with The Projects this music has an oblique way of acting on the senses.

Fields and elsewhere

2026-03-29T15:23:10Z

Clinton Green & Allanah Stewart: Yarrow and Clinton Green & Barnaby Oliver: Steady State [Shame File Music]. Two more collaborations from tireless improvisor/innovator/label mogul Green. Yarrow collects two outdoor improvisations with Allanah Stewart from early 2023, using found objects, derelict electrical goods and homemade doodads of various kinds. Both live recordings are further demonstrations that authenticity as an aesthetic value is not enough by itself. There is murk, as promised in the blurb. The crunchy, grungy vérité of the performance is swathed with the grey grot that pervades all recordings made in suburban backyards, which casts a pall over the proceedings. Green and Stewart are working with recondite instruments and at times are audibly stuck trying to make something happen. It’s realism with all the dull bits left in, for all the good that does. My attention wandered and I suspect I would have been even more distracted at the event itself, seeing someone else’s backyard. Green’s work with Oliver on Steady State is more explicably musical, continuing from their earlier collaboration The Interstices Of These Epidemics. In the first of two pieces, Oliver solos on a piano in a way that’s both floaty and earthy at once, while Green fills in an atmospheric wash of stuck and bowed gongs. As with the following track, the duo improvisation is greater than the sum of its parts. For the second piece, Oliver switches to banjo, employing the instrument’s vinegary sound to complement the gongs in often confounding ways. Somewhat ambient, somewhat exotic, but always prickly enough to keep you alert, exploring sounds to hugely effective ends.

Eamon Sprod: FOIL VOID JOIN AVOID [Aposiopèse]. There seems to be a crucial difference in the way that Australian musicians handle field recordings, compared to European counterparts. The British, for example, always seem to be searching for something essential in the sounds, much like in their frequent reversions to folk music. Australian field recordists seem no less earnest, but are always ambivalent about how much they can claim as authenticity. This can manifest itself in various ways; in the case of Eamon Sprod, FOIL VOID JOIN AVOID is one of the most comprehensive, oblique, and sophisticated statements of that ambivalence. Sprod, who’s previously recorded under the name Tarab, works with field recordings and the sounds of non-musical objects. With this new work, about a hundred minutes long, he has successfully produced an example of anti-field recordings, in which source, context and place are irrelevant. Each section is marked by fast cutting, with an emphasis on percussive effects created by short interruptions, strung together with empty moments of almost inaudible hum and, between sections, silences of arbitrary duration. It resembles some works by Luciano Maggiore, in that it all sounds deliberately incoherent on first listen, but on the second time around you can hear it’s cannily composed: I guess no coincidence that the two of them have discussed these very issues in their music (link is PDF). The large scale and employment of punctuated disinterest creates an overall impression of an elusive but compelling argument being made. The sounds could be nondescript in themselves but gain force through rapid juxtapositions which highlight contrasts; then again, the selection of sounds also turns out to be vast, suprisingly detailed and richly coloured. Further listening reveals compositional tension as elements move back and forth between the brief and the continuous, suggesting other layers that are yet to be discovered.

Cassia Streb & Tim Feeney: Lampworking [Kuyin]. Streb and Feeney were both part of Tasting Menu, reviewed here before. Improvisations on objects was the M.O. then, with the twist of using the recording space as an additional percussion instrument to be struck and scraped. Lampworking takes these basic ideas and develops them further, much to the better. Both pieces on the album are recorded live in a gallery, as part of an installation. Recordings of objects are played through spatialised speakers, sometimes filtered through other resonant objects, and then re-recorded in space with live performances on another set of objects. Complex means for simple materials lead to engagingly textured, site-specific soundscapes while still remaining open to alternate dimensions through the pre-recorded material. “Pasadena” adds rubbed wineglasses for musical drones draped over the percussion, “Chinatown” is more slippery, with sustained ambient resonances emerging during the middle sections before the intrusion of bass percussion from field recordings of fireworks.

Strings enhanced: Alessandrini, Fusi, Cetilia

2026-03-22T21:26:45Z

Patricia Alessandrini and Marco Fusi: Proximity, Distance [Sideband]. I’m all about using feedback as a musical method, so I’ve been getting to grips with viola d’amore adept Marco Fusi‘s collaboration with Patricia Alessandrini. Alessandrini works with acoustic feedback and electronics, and has spent about the last five years on and off creating with Fusi an elaborate but lucid style of electroacoustic music. The two musicians’ respective instruments form a symbiotic relationship, with Fusi’s violin and viola d’amore acting both as resonant bodies and tone generators, each playing roles which can simultaneously generate and condition the feedback conditions in real time. Alessandrini makes use of amplification, including contact microphones, and the resonance of the recording space to introduce the feedback tones through the speakers. She has also built the “Feedbox”, a collapsible, portable wooden container with transducers fitted to it to act as a surrogate loudspeaker, large viol and small room all at once. Fusi and Alessandrini work together very closely, with a degree of interaction that shows up much live electroacoustic music as little more than a form of accompaniment. The thinking here is beyond instruments-plus-electronic processing, instead harnessing electroacoustic phenomena to create a mercurial compound instrument with a life of its own. The opening piece “Adjoining, Touched” shows this best, in that you quickly give up trying to distinguish one musician from the other as it misses the point. Each of the pieces maintains a serious mood for the album, even as the colour and shading is far from monochromatic; the focus is on producing varieties of tone. On “Squared, Boxed” percussive effects are introduced, either from the Feedbox or one of Fusi’s instruments magnified by amplification (both violin and viola d’amore are used throughout, with one often present passively as an additional resonator). In the later pieces some more obvious bowed and plucked sounds seem to emerge, but these are used as a means to an end, or as another coloration device to the overall sound: the title piece “Proximity, Distance” sounds like an ensemble transformed, while on “Fractured, Undone” the strings seem to function as triggers for different kinds of feedback oscillation. It’s a rare case of an album focused on demonstrating innovative techniques that both succeeds as a musical experience and wordlessly reveals a depth of insights into the ramifications of pursuing this technique. It also makes me sad that I won’t be able to get to Fusi’s solo gig in London this week.

Laura Cetilia: gorgeous nothings [elsewhere]. It can’t be just me who’s thinking there’s been an awful lot of albums in recent years by female cellists who also sing a bit. Not quite as prevalent as solo albums by crossover-type composer-pianists, but still. This is why I initially balked at an album by just such a cellist with the title gorgeous nothings. Forgive me, I forgot she’s also a member of the ensemble Ordinary Affects, whom I’ve heard giving fine interpretations of works by Mangnus Granberg and Michael Pisaro-Liu. Her three works on this album are spare, thoughtful pieces: the title work is indeed for solo singing cellist, but the nothings alluded to are more John Cage than Taylor Swift. It’s a calm, sombre affair: bowed notes are slow, soft and translucent, but within a low, restricted range and in no mood to float. Cetilia’s voice provides harmonic overtones that resonate with or beat against the cello playing. I’d call it melancholy, but then the second piece is titled six melancholies, with Cetilia joined by fellow Ordinary Affects members Morgan Evans-Weiler on violin and J.P.A. Falzone on vibraphone; the percussion is often bowed, acting in a similar manner to Cetilia’s singing in the previous piece. It’s an introspective, self-effacing work, the three performers studying each note, chord or short phrase in isolation, treating each event with close attention before moving to the next. The longer piece soil + stone is a cello duet with Hannah Soren, Cetilia again adding voice very unobtrusively, as coloration and troubling the certainty of the cellos’ pitch. It’s not a heavy piece, neither a drone nor a drag, but it does not deal in trifling lyricism. The two cellists ground themselves with slow descending passages, taking the harder road. The gentle beauty that emerges from their playing comes through as a reward for their efforts, rather than assumed as a premise.

Vestiges of tonality: Joseph Branciforte & Jozef Dumoulin, opt out

2026-03-20T17:42:13Z

Joseph Branciforte & Jozef Dumoulin: Iterae [Greyfade]. With its slightly fuzzy chimelike sounds and reverb, the electric piano (particularly the Fender Rhodes variety) has always struck me as a dreamlike instrument, always somewhat aloof from its context. It hadn’t occurred to me that there might be musicians who work with mutations of these instruments, but that’s just what Joseph Branciforte and Jozef Dumoulin have been doing independently for some time. Iterae puts the two of them together in a two-day recording session of manipulated improvisations. Their respective Rhodeses are treated electronically, both in their sounds and in how their playing is restructured, with real-time editing guiding how the unfolding music is shaped. With the use of distortion and filtering, the small amplified sounds of a Rhodes piano quickly lose their resemblance to the conventional instrument. The live editing consists of loops and processes that mimic tape delays, with elements repeating while being slowly transformed or effaced. Branciforte and Dumoulin thus make use of short gestures that provide both continuity and change, allowing large-scale developments to emerge out of small elements in near-stasis. The press release mentions “post-glitch” to save critics from having to risk it themselves, and indeed the album has the traits of that genre, including the association with ambient music. The emphasis is always on creating texture and atmosphere, with none on representing the improvisers’ chops, happy to explore one space without ever settling into a comfortable groove, then, little by little, events start to drift away from the familiar. Things start out hinting at melody and then gradually evolve into more complex atmospherics, but even in its crunchiest moments the musicians always retain suggestions of melody inherent in their instruments, without ever breaking into full-blown song or all-out noise. The two of them maintain this tenuous balance throughout, over four extended pieces that each fall into a two-movement form. That dreamlike quality is also present, in a shapeshifting, time-slowed-down way.

The blurb suggests the structure of the album is modular, by which they mean you can play the thing straight through as one large work or as four pairs of tracks. The physical media version emphasises this by packaging the set as five discs: one regular CD and five mini-CDs (remember them?). Vinyl collectors will be relieved to learn that the dust jacket comes with a wall-hanging tab already fixed to the back. It’s not out yet but they’re touring Europe right now.

opt out: Geography_VII [Moonside Tapes]. The premise of this short album seemed intriguing from its brief blurb: pieces synthesised and sequenced in MaxMSP, built on some of Erv Wilson’s microtonal scales. Sadly it’s not so interesting to listen to. It isn’t a dour academic exercise, as many microtonal works can be, but the pieces are fairly rudimentary and don’t seem to particularly benefit from using Wilson’s tuning. Those two factors in tandem work to defeat the apparent purpose, producing a set of pieces with windchime-like repeating patterns with not much accompaniment or development, pleasant enough without demanding attention. The exception is the track “Presence_chamber”, which uses longer, strained notes with almost no melodic movement, making the astringent intervals themselves the musical subject and substance. It also reminded me that you can get Warren Burt’s classic Harmonic Colour Fields on Bandcamp.

Almost Nothing: Pisaro-Liu, Reinhard, Ullmann

2026-03-20T22:42:59Z

Michael Pisaro-Liu: Concentric Rings in Magnetic Levitation [Sawyer Editions]. Just last month I was carping that Fata Morgana, Pisaro-Liu’s collaboration with Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard, had both not enough and too much going on all at once, making for stultifying listening. This realisation of his 2011 composition, on the other hand, is the real stuff. It shows the profound difference between almost nothing and not enough, with much of the hour’s duration passing almost inaudibly. The near-silence is observed with intense concentration by the three musicians, and their concentration becomes infectious. The name of the ad hoc trio is Forming; they listen in to a cycle of almost imperceptible sine tones, articulating the presence of sound, if not always its manifestation. Andrew Weathers marks off tiny inflections with small piano notes, Ryan Seward’s cymbals augment the upper partials of the faintly humming air, Carl Ritger uses electronics and field recordings to compound the implicit hum that pervades the absence of activity. By the end of the hour, what had at first been inaudible has soaked into your consciousness, radiating sound. This recording captures a very special moment.

Samuel Reinhard: For 10 Musicians [elsewhere]. I described Reinhard’s earlier piece For Piano and Shō as “tinting the backdrop of silence”. In For 10 Musicians the forces are larger but the music is even more intangible. Two pianists – Paul Jacob Fossum and Gintė Preisaitė – reiterate a single chord at their leisure, with some free interplay on a small gamut of single notes. They are circled by an ensemble of clarinets, violas, cello and double bass, who play as softly as possible at their discretion. There are faint developments that occur by chance, through small changes in colouration and harmony, keeping everything still but alive. The ensemble’s presence reminded me of the electronic treatments that shadow the solo pianist in Michael Pisaro-Liu’s Green Hour, Grey Future, but in Reinhard’s case the sound has greater depth and the form is more rigorous. There are four movements, each identical other than the pianos’ chord; as always, same but different, each resembling the other but cast under a different shade. It’s a large work which is always present but elusive, with the musicians and recording successfully transcending the music’s substance into the aether.

Jakob Ullmann: Solo I / Solo IV [Another Timbre]. Way back in 2013 at Huddersfield I heard the first (successful) performance of Jakob Ullmann’s Son Imaginaire III. It had a galvanising effect on me. “Again, a piece that hovered on the threshold of audibility, but in Ullmann’s case the music contained a faint but indelible richness, a mystery in how the sounds blended together in ways that couldn’t be understood, from one musician to the next and with ambient sounds in and outside St Paul’s Hall. Sitting there, attention focused on perceiving the music, you could lose yourself, your concentration on a sound so diffuse that your attention becomes a sort of dream state. Over a hundred years ago painters really started to pull apart the idea of what it meant to see something; we still don’t know what it means when we say we’ve heard something.” In a talk before the piece, Ullmann described his compositional methods, making use of a kind of palimpsest of overlaid pages. These translucencies partly reveal and partly obscure. In the Solo works, the musician accompanies themself with recordings of alternative interpretations, covering additional aspects of the suggestive score that cannot be realised in a single take. On top of this, pieces can also be played simultaneously. Rebecca Lane plays Solo I on quarter-tone flutes, Jon Heilbron double bass for Solo IV: both have a strong history and affinity for this type of sensitive handling of small sounds. Their combined performances produce superbly evocative sounds for compositions that expect the material to be kept at a level below perceptible, wide-ranging in timbre and register without ever seeming deliberate or intentional. Everything just seems to emerge and persist organically, creating an experience both indistinct and indelible.

Obstinacy

2026-02-28T21:00:26Z

Sachiko M: Sounds From M [Party Perfect!!!]. The latest two Party Perfect releases return to their abrasive and bloody-minded roots. I heard Sachiko M play live in Melbourne back in (checks sleeve notes for this album) 2001? Gosh. She had a sampler with nothing in the memory and somehow got the high-pitched sine wave that emerged from it to move about a bit, after a fashion. Since then, I have never actively kept tabs on her career but I had always hoped that she was still doing more or less the same thing, somehow. It is therefore a pleasure to say that Sounds From M proves the last twenty-five years have neither softened nor diluted her end-point aesthetic. The piece, recorded one day in 2024, falls into seven nested movements of precisely five minutes each, forming a kind of palindrome. A high-pitched sine wave pierces the air, ducking and diving depending on where your head is in relation to your speakers. Pulses of digital switching create pops and crackles at various frequencies; the sine wave returns, but higher pitched and out of phase, creating dead spots in your room. In the central section the sine wave pushes upwards against my threshhold of audibility, becoming frangible with more pulsing. Then it recapitulates on each action in reverse. Digital pops aside, it’s all mastered at a very low level. There’s a level of commitment here, beyond experimentation, to create sonic objects that evoke a physical presence while seeking an absolute minimum of texture and colour.

Luciano Maggiore: tordo + uah + cick [Party Perfect!!!]. It’s Luciano Maggiore, so as is the custom I must admit I have no idea what is going on. This time, however, he is unwilling to help me, other than to say he composed and performed this piece a small number of times around Europe in 2024. I think there’s a sampler invovled here too, maybe with CD players, Walkmans, stuff like that. Track 1 was recorded live in London and has lots of low-level twittering and the occasional chirp on a farily regular basis. It goes for over half an hour so you know he’s committed and you’ll have to start paying attention sooner or later, but what that attention will get you is something never really answered. He’s confronting you but giving you the freedom to be unaffected by it; a rare commodity in modern art, to accommodate indifference. Maggiore makes insistent but neutral sounds, refuses to elaborate, then on track 2 goes and does it all over again in Berlin. Hilariously, the two sample extracts on the Bandcamp page are each thirty seconds long, because really anything more is superfluous. You can also get it on cassette, so that the low-level twittering is submerged in hiss.

Repetition and novelty

2026-02-21T23:17:24Z

Andrew Greenwald: for Distractfold [dFolds]. A couple of new interpretations of Andrew Greenwald pieces which have previously appeared on a Kairos CD, with a newer ensemble work. Greenwald credits Distractfold as being part of “the beginning of a metamorphosis in my composing” and this half-hour programme gives some insights why. The brief solo for electric guitar A Thing Made Whole VI is played here by Daniel Brew at a more relaxed pace than on Kairos, using a “bifurcated electric guitar”. This is not as painful as it sounds; it’s just that the guitar is miked up at both ends to capture the small sounds produced above and below the fingers to be heard in close-up, spatialized detail. Instrumental colour thus becomes a greater feature in this performance. Greenwald’s colours are complex but take on additional brightness and vividness in these recordings, as can be heard in the Distractfold version of the ensemble piece A Thing Made Whole IV which even breaks into fleeting moments of unexpected radiance and stilness amongst the thicket of contested sounds. The newer work, (Coda) A Thing Made Whole for bass clarinet, violin, cello, and acoustic guitar, signals a change in approach, coming after Greenwald felt he his current approach to composition had lead to a dead end. (Coda) may turn out to be a transitional work or the start of a new phase: the material is noticeably “poorer”, making do with less and with less overt focus on technique, finding ways to still produce surprising blends of timbre and creating variety out of coloration and texture as the music’s substance. This suits the Distractfold musicians down to the ground, as they find moments of beauty in the unlikeliest places. The album is bolstered by a phone recording of the rehearsal and a copy of the score in full, if you want to get serious about finding what makes this music tick.

Jürg Frey: Composer, alone [elsewhere]. A few years back Reinier van Houdt presented a three-disc set of solo piano pieces by Jürg Frey. Composer, alone is another triple helping of piano works from 1990 to 2024. The sequencing is out of chronological order, allowing the older, more notorious pieces to appear interleaved with his more congenial compositions of late. The earliest work is Invention, a skeletal drawing of ascending scales that barely elaborate into a slight framework for a piano piece, with van Houdt giving just enough tension to hold things in place. Klavierstücke 1 and 2 are both present, with their obsessive repetitions acting as prolongation and obstruction to each piece’s progress, caught in a paradox of finding no need to go further as yet, while aware that this impassivity is itself a provocation to the listener. The lengthy journey of Pianist, alone (1) is at the centre of this collection. In comparison of these works as performed by van Houdt compared to the earlier recordings I’ve heard by R. Andrew Lee, I’ll go back to my previous observation that van Houdt’s interpretation give greater prominence to each piece’s overall shape, over the succession of details that are encountered from one moment to the next. The two newest works, Composer, alone (1) and Composer, alone (2), open and close the album, inviting comparison with the earlier pair of Pianist, alones. More varied in their introspections and less stringent in their reflections, each of these substantial works suggests a kind of subjective retrospective, including echoes of the earlier works softened and transformed with time. Van Houdt’s interpretative approach here meshes particularly well with Frey’s late style.