Boring Like A Drill.

Harwood, Keravec, Martlew, Gamut Inc, Beaudoin

2026-11-05T19:45:35Z

Mark Harwood: Two Actors [AKTI].I’ve previously described Harwood’s music as… self-evasive, I think? Ah yeah, “disingenuous exercises in deflection from the absurdity of the audience-performer situation“; which on record transfers the onus almost entirely onto the listener, as the performer’s presence must be deduced rather than observed. What can we infer from the title? There are voices, more than two, so who is playing multiple roles, or who is the patsy? The album begins firmly but gently, arch enough to be sincere. There are oblique laments and fragmentary reminiscences. Each short track is a vignette, captured verité, quotations of quotations, exercises in style, collaged like a film-maker’s diary. Allusions to genres jostle. In the second half things spread out into haunted ambiences, shadowy and sombre; any remaining pop allusions become more disturbed amongst the general air of foreboding. It all ends with a brief moment of self-interregation, followed by an extended dense hum that crowds out any possibility of meaning or resolution. The ways in which this album differs from a lot of Harwood’s earlier stuff is that the process is less in evidence, so that what you hear must be accepted as the complete, finish product for you to contemplate on its own terms. The offhand, even jokey way of presenting itself to the listener to slip past their consciousness has been replaced with dense, thoroughly worked out tracks with an emphasis on depth. (His recent turn to painting may have something to do with this.) This time, the parts all add up to something, even though you may never be sure what that something is.

Erwan Keravec: There will be no miracles here [Buda Musique]. This is a good drone, I mean like a really, really good drone. They don’t get much better than this. First, it’s the real deal: seven bagpipe players literally playing just the drones of their instruments, with no melody whatsoever. Besides the dense sonorousness of multiple bagpipes in unison, the distinctive piercing, nasal aspect of the melodic instrument is entirely absent, except for the subtle brilliance of the fixed low tones. In addition to the pipers, there are three musicians playing on large metal basins; they clamp bundles of long rushes to the rim of each bowl and drag on them, causing the metal vessel to resonate as with a lion’s roar. The continuous pulsing sound of the basins contrasts with the pipes, building up a swirling, irridescent sound. The piece amplifies itself and creates internal movement through its own persistence, shimmering and ominous, until it slowly oscillates across the span of a semitone. This is monolithic music made through ancient means: both the bagpipes and the reed-pulling are drawn from traditional Breton culture, placing this piece outside of time, simultaneously very old and very new, and very powerful. The title is a challenge to the listener.

Zoë Martlew: Album Z [NMC]. I heard a charming work for solo cello by Martlew a while back, Salat Babilya, played by Louise McMonagle. It’s derived from an Iraqi lullaby and shows Martlew’s tender insight into the instrument as a cellist herself. The pieces on Album Z were all composed over ten years later and the charm is conspicuously absent, replaced by a desire to convey style and attitude. The opening track is Martlew herself on amplified cello with effect pedals: G-lude is a fairly convincing and fun display of tube-distortion braggadocio, amongst some lighter theatrical gasping. Other works, like the song cycle Musae, come across as confused and self-conscious attempts to cross-breed racy modern social mores with Proms matinee decorum, producing a musical language that’s akin to arts-admin bureaucratese. It’s not a case of trying too hard as such, but the music is often at pains to make its effects heard. Two works are for soloist and electronics: bravura work by Ben Goldscheider on horn in Nibiru and Mark Simpson on Atma for clarinet is pitched in amongst sound effects and aural cinematics which impress as much for their gaudy bravado as their bold reaching for significance. Both works contain spoken (declaimed, whispered) texts, music itself not being quite enough. It feels mean-spirited to say this and I’m getting it all down here as a way of setting out what does not work for me in music: anything that seems to stake itself on an appeal to a supposed higher authority than what it sounds like. After all, the main point of criticism is to impress upon the reader what sort of person the critic is.

Gamut Inc: Music For Air [Karlrecords]. Who doesn’t love a computer-controlled pipe organ? Humanly-impossible keyboard stuff is almost always fun, whether computerised or mechanical, dazzling with superhuman effects, amusing in the way it flouts expectations, breaking free from apparent physical limitations and rewiring the mind with an expanded consciousness of what is possible in this world. Gamut Inc – Marion Wörle and Maciej Sledziecki – have been doing this sort of things for years, apparently, but I’ve just heard of them with this record. Their work involves getting settled in with a church organ, in this case Église du Gesù in Toulouse, and then wiring up and programming the controls to wring the most out of it. The fast tracks near the beginning resemble Ligeti’s barrel organ arrangements, lots of choppy sounds nimbly dancing about in off-centre but still precise clockwork. They then make great use of controlling the air through the pipes, creating waves of woozy sliding tones as they keep stepping off the gas. By switching things on and off, they can get curving tones that rise as well as fall at different rates, for better microtonal complexity. At times it recalls a wood at dawn, scattered with listless cuckoos. At other times, the intensely rapid effects merge to form blinding illusions, to the point where the organ itself isn’t so much transcended as made superfluous to its own purpose. In one way, that’s saying it’s all a bit gee-whiz, but in another, it made me wonder if I was hearing anything intrinsic to this particular church organ, or if subjected to this level of technical intervention they all start to sound alike.

Paul Beaudoin: bright shining light [Edition Wandelweiser]. More church organ, but completely different. In fact, this is unlike any other organ music released through Wandelweiser, as you can actually hear it. Possibly unlike anything else released on this label, both in motivation and immediate effect. Each of the five pieces here marks its presence immediately upon your consciousness; they’re slow, but never too soft. At times, they’re even forceful. Beaudoin’s inspiration behind these pieces is explicitly spiritual and driven by a need for self-reflection; for us to relfect, that is – he’s not flaunting his own refined sensibility but effacing his ego in the hope of finding betterment for all. One work explores “the powerful emotions tied to our deepest beliefs”, another “the concept of grace… as an ever-present force that reaches beyond us”. It’s almost religious, but he never resorts to a specific deity or a defined belief system; it’s definitely spiritual in the contemplative sense, rather than mystic. Each piece unfolds with the inner calm of a hymn, only the phrasing ebbs and flows from moment to moment, freed of fixed metre. All of this – anonimity, spirituality, immobility, contemplation, aspirational thought – locates the music in the same grounding as John Cage’s later work, even though this sounds nothing like Cage. Beaudoin’s music is informed by that same strength, which is how it holds itself up while seeming at first to be innocuous. I’ve just realised this is the reason why I discussed Martlew’s album above: both compose music with strongly held convictions and meaning, striving to communicate, yet all those qualities are imbued within Beaudoin’s music, while Martlew’s wears it on the outside, a body that gets suitably dressed up for each occasion. Beaudoin trusts us to listen in, gives space to find ourselves, and trusts us to act for the best. The organist is Carson Cooman, playing at Harvard’s Memorial Church, where he fills each piece with a luminous warmth and disarming humanity. The only tiny nod to the capital-E Experimental is the electronic track in stillness emerging, where gentle rumbles and rustling that resemble the amplified workings of the instrument are illuminated by Cooman with the gentlest of colours. The longer work, notes of union and longing, is particularly fine, masterfully contrasting timbre, register and dynamics in a way that seems to happen all by itself.

John Tilbury At Home

2026-11-02T00:09:25Z

John Tilbury: At Home: Domestic And Archive Recordings [Another Timbre]. Simon Reynell’s Another Timbre label is a worthy vessel for a commemoration of Tilbury’s 90th birthday and the sunset of his career as a pianist. As one of the pillars of Britain’s musical avant-garde for over sixty years, it is impossible to summarise his accomplishments in a manageable collection, but At Home gives a coherent and perceptive insight into Tilbury’s work from a personal perspective. The bulk of these recordings were made at Tilbury’s home between 2018, when he retired from public performance, and Spring this year; as such, the collection acts as a retrospective more than an overview. The home recordings are clean and clear, even with the faint household and seaside ambience, with a focus on recent works by friends and colleagues. Scratch Orchestra alumni predominate, as expected, but there are twists and turns over the five-plus hours in this box set.

The collection begins with Tilbury and Tania Chen playing short pieces by Machaut, arranged for two pianos by György Kurtág. It seems an unusual deviation from the otherwise almost exclusively Anglophone composers heard here, but when listening through all of this music it’s striking how much of it seems timeless, and thus placeless: one of the great achievements of this post-war generation of musicians was that they were able to break free of provincialism and regional vernacular without adhering to an imported philosophy (mostly) as a crutch. Tilbury and his peers helped to redefine what British music meant, or could mean. Kurtág’s Machaut arrangements have a similar imperative, to hear things anew without the need for a verbalised context. The recording is from 2002: in addition to the home recordings, the collection is supplemented with previously unreleased archive recordings, going back as far as 1970.

Many of the pieces are dedications. Linda Catlin Smith’s Poire was composed for Tilbury; it shares a sparse, simple elegance in its construction with the set of recent miniatures by Howard Skempton. What always gets me most about Tilbury’s playing is his sense of timing, even more than his feel for dynamic shading; it gives greater eloquence to the exposed single notes and small chords in these pieces which could otherwise appear to be trivial. Each moment is alive in its own way. (I wonder if that’s why I’m also a lot more receptive to his interpretations of Mark R. Taylor, whose Five Nocturnes are included here.) Several pieces are played on clavichord, an instrument which allows no room for niceties of touch or decay. As an instrument made primarily for personal use, Tilbury gives a formal graciousness to recent pieces by Michael Parsons and Christopher Hobbs. Taylor also contributes a piece which includes recitation, touching on another aspect of Tilbury’s work. Acting and dramatic recitation, particularly of Samuel Beckett, became part of his later performances, represented here by a 2015 reading of What Is The Word, accompanying himself with an improvisation on organ. In turn, this ties into his skill as an improviser, with solo and duet pieces with Keith Rowe, Klaus Filip and Sebastian Lexer. All three collaborations are with electronics and are particularly fine examples of the genre, for Tilbury or anyone, really. The recording with Rowe is from a concert in Leeds in 2004, with Tilbury on organ, building up layers of magnified ambient noise over impossibly low drones, the piece is literally incredible: “Noone has ever identified it as Tilbury” says Rowe, recalling the times he’s played the tape for others.

Hopefully I’ve given some idea of how comprehensive this box is, illuminating many of the various strands of his work over the decades without ever feeling as though it is reaching to cover all the points. In the booklet notes, Tilbury suggests that he leaves a lot of interpretive details to the moment itself. Listening, it’s possible to detect that spiritedness even when the music is at absolute repose. His improvisations to drawings by Morgan O’Hara, recorded on the last day of the home sessions, are particularly beautiful for their colouration and delicacy of touch. The piano reductions of Cardew’s Bun No. 2 and Feldman’s Madame Press Died Last Week At Ninety are also beguiling. I need to make special mention of two substantial pieces here. Dave Smith’s Al Contrario, recorded in 1995, is an extended contrapuntal fantasy inspired by Alkan’s excursions into G# minor. Rather than elaborate, it simplifies, turning everything into a dreamlike suspension of method and time, both routine and irrational, measured out subjectively by Tilbury’s supple phrasing of a steady tread. John Lely’s Sycamore is the longest piece in the set: a home recording of quiet contemplation, silences tinted by a veil of sustained notes, immersed in a moment outside of time, imbued with receptive stillness.

As a download-only bonus, he also plays a version of Christian Wolff’s No Security Rope on clavichord and prepared piano, and a full traversal of Skempton’s 24 Preludes and Fugues on clavichord alone. The latter is a tough sell without the piano’s warmer tones and the intonation gets wonky, but it does lay bare the craft behind Skempton’s seemingly artless music.

Laplante, Pozzer, Duplant, Reviriego, Poppy

2026-10-18T21:19:19Z

Travis Laplante: Estuary [Carrier]. “All sounds on the album are full exhalations through the tenor saxophone.” I don’t know how he’s put them together, but each of these two pieces were recorded in separate, single sessions. First track Blue Fire glides and buzzes like a bowed electric guitar, alternating between dark and light, with Laplante using overblowing to produce the requisite distortion. The title track sounds more traditional – I’m assuming droney saxophone pieces qualify as a tradition now – with light and floaty sounds, almost ethereal except that the breath gives enough body to remind you of Laplante’s physical presence. A good album if you are leery of saxophones.

Federico Pozzer: Musical Faces [New Portraits]. A definition of the ephemeral, a set of nineteen one-minute pieces, each for a different soloist, and each piece is little more than a scattering of dust. Pozzer has drawn a face of each friend over a sheet of musical staves and then erased it almost entirely, leaving behind a few slivers of unresolved marks. In each piece, the subject is the performer, their instruments ranging from voice and violin to drum machines, field recordings, sine waves, pen and paper. At this scale, the insubstantiality becomes the substance itself, an elusive quality as each musical moment is so fleeting, with no scope for continuity. It invites instantaneous, momentary listening, even while raising questions over how much faithful the performers are to the score: can they interpret their own erasure objectively? A strange album, especially considering I know Pozzer only for his album on Another Timbre.

Bruno Duplant: athanor [Dissipatio]. Didn’t expect this from Duplant. This time he’s playing an organ with “electroacoustic devices”: they’re drones, I guess, but the first track sublimation is extraordinarily dramatic, with orchestral swells that transform the nature of the piece section by section, chanting choirs and a range of expression quite unlike other works I’ve heard by him. Second track éternité fits into a more conventional drone genre but still contains enormous depth and detail in its densely-packed ambiance. The final track albedo seems more aggressively minimal at first, with bass organ tones held beneath what appears to be a sort of automated hurdy-gurdy that loops and buzzes on metallic strings. The interaction between the two becomes fascinating, austere and intricate all at once, but then it falls away into an extended coda of a keening solo. An unusual album that plays with your perceptions of sound and genre.

Àlex Reviriego: Huesos de corceles exhaustos [self released]. Didn’t expect this from Reviriego. Where’s the guitar? More electric organ and “electronic devices”, this time producing a triptych of evocative, slightly creepy mood pieces. Nice handling of tone and blending of sounds, stretching to some icy melodic figuration in the first track. After a shorter interlude, the concluding title work starts to either decay or sprout into something both more abstract and organic, with hints of unstable noise held in restraint. There’s even a little guitar, almost unrecognisable. The brief, allusive sleeve notes suggest that this was indeed composed intuitively, with a kind of dislocated subjectivity taking hold, which might explain why it can have a strong effect on the listener’s emotional responses.

Andrew Poppy: The Beating Of Wings (40th Anniversary Edition) [False Walls]. An album that’s too ingrained in the foundations of my aesthetic understanding for me to say anything critical about it, so I will merely note the pleasure it gave me just to hear that it has been reissued. I haven’t played this new edition, because it’s running through my head while I’m writing. Looking back, it signalled that “minimalism” as it was then understood had become a point of origin, which could be taken in multiple directions. That’s precisely what Poppy proceeds to do in these four pieces, while retaining a clear compositional voice of his own. It gives the music unusual resilience: it was catnip back in the day for precocious highschoolers from whom the rest of the Zang Tumb Tuum catalogue wasn’t quite pretentious enough and yet has aged better than anything else on that label. The Anniversary Edition consists of a remaster (shrug) and no bonus material such as demos, false starts or invaluable snippets of the engineer saying “rolling on one”. Christ I’m old.

Electronics etc.: Huerta, Carey, Szlavnics

2026-10-11T18:58:39Z

Concepción Huerta: No Queda Nada Todo Resuena [Signal Noise]. Oh yeah, thinks me, a nice do-over of Mikrophonie I, all these metallic roaring rumbles with scintillating partials coruscating over the top as the microphone magnifies all these small abrasions on a resonant surface. Then, hold the ‘phone, oh yeah! This ain’t percussion at all, it’s all analogue electronics: Huerta was feeding sound from a vintage Buchla synth onto tape, then pingponging it back and forth on cassettes to create this pair of ruins from the future. The first, No Queda Nada, starts out dirty with fat noisebands and filtered static, but eventually starts to reveal the clinical origins of the sounds when the signals cancel themselves out with neat, eerie fadeouts into complete silence. The use of analogue tape and particularly cassettes acts as another set of filters, which become increasingly aggressive in their instability with each reiteration, making the whole piece come alive in its unpredictability. There’s a process at work, even though it cannot be heard, which gives both pieces a lean form and structure even as the sounds sprawl out and forwards with relentless intensity. No Queda Nada follows the process to steadily filter itself into ringing frequencies, Todo Resuena reveals the non-physical origin of the sounds by dissolving into strange loops and phases of feedback, before suddenly cutting off dead. Huerta cites Daphne Oram as her main influence (and source for the title), discussing entropy and information theory in a kind of metaphysical way. I’d add to this by citing Ron Nagorcka’s “the very essence of electronic media is distortion” and saying that these two pieces reminded me more of early Pauline Oliveros, so I like it.

Ben Carey: Inventions [Hospital Hill]. Carey has also been playing with vintage synth gear, with these six tracks making a compilation of his globetrotting adventures in studios around Europe, North America and Australia. The striking feature that unites these pieces is the depth and the detail, and the abstract flow of large and small sounds contains a wealth of elaborate, but never dense, counterpoint with a great variety of character. The thing about attention to detail like this is that it suggests taste is the primary operating method at work, rather than any conceptual integrity to hold the work together. To a certain extent, this might be true on Inventions, but Carey does have some philosophy to back him up (via Gilbert Simondon), to treat the electronic processes in his equipment as organic functions, and so lets the instruments speak to discover where they may lead his compositional thinking. It works, largely due to Carey’s sensitive handling of the instruments and willingness to listen: moments that seem flashy will titillate the ear without dominating the overall piece, nothing stays still for long and yet never feels like Carey is trying to push things into activity for its own sake. With each successive piece, the presence of an internal logic appears to be more evident, even if this is an illusion. You think you’ve got a bead on his aesthetic and then halfway through the album things suddenly get very crunchy, forcing you to recalibrate. The last track is what I always imagine Autechre should sound like.

Chiyoko Szlavnics: Structures in the Mind’s Eye [Populist]. It’s been too long since I heard anything by Szlavnics. Structures in the Mind’s Eye is a composition from twenty years ago but given new life by Marco Fusi, who plays a viola d’amore for this interpretation. The instrument’s sympathetic strings add another layer of electroacoustic resonance while Szlavnics adds spatialisation to the sine waves that play against Fusi’s bowing. It’s a precise work, with Fusi’s own precision enhancing the complex of real and imagined sounds, produced both directly from their respective sources and indirectly by their interactions. A peculiar transformation takes place, as in the latter half Fusi has his viol subsumed by the pure electronic sounds; his playing takes on the role of activating the inert sine waves and modulates them, adding a ghost to the machine’s cool industrial humming. It’s also strange how this piece never really sounds austere, despite the slow, deliberate motions and discrete phrases neatly separated by silences. This is a binaural recording so use your earbuds not the phone speaker when you play it on the bus.

A second Mittwoch

2026-09-27T18:24:19Z

Fourteen years later, the Birmingham production of Stockhausen’s Mittwoch aus Licht is still fresh in my mind. I was persuaded by a friend to go to Berlin to see this new production staged by Le Balcon, the French company which has been steadily working its way through the entire Licht cycle with insightful, imaginative productions based on relatively limited resources. The main motivation was to see how they interpreted the theme that underpins Mittwoch: a double image that both celebrates humanity’s ability for aspirational cooperation, while also judging it as inadequate without devotion to the divine forces of the universe, as personified in the opera cycle by Michael, Eva and Lucifer. As other critics had observed, the Birmingham version tended to focus on the optimistic side, with only faint insinuations of the more sinister undercurrents that appear throughout the opera. The performance was held at the Deutsche Oper, which already implied limitations in how the opera would be presented; confined to a proscenium arch with the audience looking on, the staging would not have the immersive qualities envisioned by Stockhausen in his conceived opera for the future. In a way, it appeared Le Balcon were going to press this to their advantage, emphasising that the activities we witnessed were compromised and incomplete.

I’ll start with the helicopters, since that’s what everyone always wants to talk about. They were, of course, not presented live on-site as they were in Birmingham – we were deprived of that spectacle. We were given a replay of the event, staged earlier in the month by four pilots with camera crew and the slightly apprehensive-looking string quartet of the Deutsche Oper taking to the skies in the fields outside Berlin. By way of introduction, we heard Stockhausen speaking before the world premiere some thirty years ago. The sound mix was loud, hot, the strings straining to be heard over the chatter of rotor blades and the roar of the engines; it buffeted the audience with a constant barrage of noise for half an hour. When the score called the musicians to recite numbers, they instinctively bellowed them out above the din, without consideration of aesthetic refinement. The quartet appeared as beaten down as the audience felt, each looking very cramped and claustrophobic in their small cabin; their brows with unrelieved expressions of concentration on the task at hand. It was an atmosphere of highly controlled desperation. Helicopter-String Quartet is often described as an analogy for space travel; at the Deutsche Oper we were reminded that the act itself is a difficult, rigidly disciplined and exhausting chore. Perversely, these reasons made it the best performance of the work I’ve ever experienced.

That feeling of generalised anxiety pervaded the entire opera. What exactly were we witnessing? Birmingham Opera gave the work a carnivalesque staging, complete with additional dance and theatre during the initial Greeting and the concluding Farewell. More detached in Berlin, we observed. Deutsche Oper’s chorus gave a superb rendition of the choral Welt-Parlament, backed by a rather unpleasant video animation of rippling and cascading sand, partly blocked by a large piece of modernist public sculpture. The sculpture and video projections remained throughout, the animations all sharing the same quality of either very out-of-date computer graphics or almost up-to-date artificial intelligence rendering. The unstable, hallucinatory images started to grow on me during the night as their slippery, insubstantial attempts at appearing real became a thematic element with growing importance. Le Balcon’s ensemble performed Orchester-Finalisten under dim lighting, the soloists scattered listlessly about the stage, stirring into action when needed, gaining enthusiasm only when it was their turn to lead. The accompanying collage of sounds that plays through the scene was again mixed very high, blurring the difference between what was played live and what instrumental sounds came from the soundtrack. Human figure and video image became harder to distinguish, the real became illusory. Over each successive solo, a trend towards diminishment and entropy became noticeable. The Helicopter String Quartet followed immediately, without a break.

Le Balcon provided the singers and the musicians for Michaelion, the long, strange scene that concludes the action. The mystery play aspect to Stockhausen’s operas was most obvious here, just as the exact argument he is presenting remained obscure. Heroically committed performances by the soloists and some bizarre pageantry held the audience’s attention while the scene progressed in the unhurried manner of later Stockhausen, but you kept wondering where it was all leading. A low state of anxiety had steadily built up during the night, so that the ambiguously-framed conclusion of the opera became more stinging in its lack of neat resolution. It ends with hopes; hopes that people can follow the principles of Michael and Eva and that Lucifer may work with them, which are high hopes indeed. Cynicism has no place in Stockhausen’s reality but in this production it’s hard to look at the scene’s ending in any other way: whereas hope is typically a positive note on which to end a drama, in this case it arrives as a settlement, unsatisfactory but the only workable alternative. Was it all too negative? Perhaps, acting as a counterpoint, yin to Birmingham’s yang. I doubt if it’s possible for an ideal interpretation of Mittwoch to be imagined, let alone performed. Both stagings I’ve seen had their own, opposing ways of warping your perception.

Jules Reidy: Clerestory

2026-09-18T22:37:11Z

Jules Reidy: Clerestory [Thrill Jockey]. Reidy continues to develop a subtle but sophisticated form of tonality in the two pieces paired on this album, all originating from the unprepossessing source of playing acoustic guitar. Clerestory follows on from Instants & Their Echoes, further expanding the palette of sounds while keeping a coherent but pronounced concept of tuning. The first piece is Shadow Symmetric, commissioned and performed by the JACK Quartet as a result of their recent round of workshopping sessions. A straight-up, unadorned acoustic quartet, in which Reidy builds upon a simple, harmonious texture by alternating between two sets of just intonation scales, each fairly normal in themselves but with enough divergences between them to create a perceptible tension between consonance and dissonance as the Quartet moves from one chord to the next. The steady pace, evenness of dynamics and lack of vibrato suggest a concert of viols, and the slightly grainy, rusticated harmonies add to the impression of music arriving from somewhere outside of time. The JACK musicians know their just intonation and don’t need to make heavy work of hitting the unusual pitches specified by Reidy. You could crank it up to get the full effect of the strange harmonics but it works better as a quiet piece, seemingly still on the surface but faintly bustling in its depths.

Clerestory Windows is the counterpart, where material from the quartet is repurposed into a fixed media work for various electronics, complemented by Reidy’s guitar. The inspiration comes from a sound installation for transducers attached to suspended panes of glass, and so the piece is a set of shadowy, translucent echoes of the original. MIDI instruments produce the pitch-perfect harmonies in thin, glossy tones, slightly off-putting in their falsified timbres – it’s a nice homage to a previous generation of musicians working with microtonality. Later, some early digital synths recover some of the material, adding to the nostalgic futurism. This suite of inventions on the quartet’s material are given substance by the intervention of Reidy’s signature steel-stringed acoustic guitar, with playing that is simple and direct but dazzles with the glittering timbre of the strings. The lightness and brightness come as part of the mediation between real and virtual sounds, creating a double image where the electronics are both a representation of the harmonic sonorities and its embodiment.

Gentle Fire: Further Explorations

2026-09-18T20:03:57Z

Gentle Fire: Further Explorations [Paradigm Discs]. I called Explorations, the first Paradigm issue of Gentle Fire recordings, an example of all that is best in archival box sets, combining historical interest and importance with a compelling and exciting listening experience. Further Explorations extends the previous collection with a single disc of performances recorded by German radio in 1973 and 1974. The group, musician/composers Richard Bernas, Hugh Davies, Graham Hearn, Stuart Jones and Michael Robinson, play a combination of conventional instruments, electronics and home-made instruments. Yeah, they’re British but they also worked closely with Stockhausen (Sternklang) and so their ways of making music are an intriguing hybrid of the empiricist, do-it-yourself methods espoused by the Scratch Orchestra and the abstract or mystical idealism that directed improvisations under the European avant-garde. This permits them more than a single dimension to their playing, allowing for interpretations of these very open scores that question and play with the assumptions upon which these compositions operate, whether expecting rigour or anarchy, high seriousness or sly irreverence: there’s a bit of everything in the way they tackle these pieces, without resorting to making the vehicles for their own ideas. The new face amongst the composers here is the late Erhard Grosskopf, whose Looping 1 begins the album. Composed for the ensemble, the piece is built out of playback of tape loops of filtered electronic tones and speech, which the musicians must match with suitable harmonic relationships. This gives it an unusual consistency, as though the piece is all straight-through playback, with a fixed, minimal texture. The voice fragments are electronically treated and distorted, gradually becoming clearer. The text is, almost inevitably, by Mao Zedong, as period-perfect as a Raleigh Chopper.

Graham Hearn’s Art Must Be Fed sets the musicians randomly-selected tasks to perform, either to play something “badly” or sing, hum or whistle some remembered music from elsewhere. The wonky, humorous nature of the piece is tempered and made more poignant by the gentle pacing of the work, guided by a slow, repeating piano phrase that resembles the beginning of a Satie piece that never gets going, enhancing the atmosphere of melancholy absurdist theatre. Their rendition of Christian Wolff’s perennial Edges is a different performance from the London EMI recording from a few years earlier and shows the group’s interpretative chops in a more conventional light. While very different, both pieces require their performers to make decisions on the fly, where the given instructions are unstable, flexing back and forth between acting as a waypoint and a limit. The two group compositions are striking in the way they take a monolithic premise and then build variations out of it. Group Composition III is made by the ensemble as it goes along, each musician working on a gong tree built by Michael Robinson, using methods roughly similar to those in Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie I. The surfaces are worked over with various mallets and microphones to create an extended abstraction of resonant metallic sounds shaded by reverberation and filtered noise. It’s with this piece that you realise how much modern free composition and improv is still modelled on these performances from over half a century ago. In Music Project V-II, the numbers refer to intervals in the traditional diatonic scale; in short, it’s a pop vamp stretched and stripped to its barest essentials of hovering between dissonance and resolution. Like an early, unexplored path of minimal composition, it takes a simple idea and transforms it by taking it in an unexpected direction, finding strange sounds in a confined harmonic space. The conception of the piece, as something so open and irreducible as to defy authorship, produces something that sounds like something quite different from any other possibly related works from this time.

The sound quality is as good as you would expect from 1970s West German radio production, perhaps a little dry in places, which was the style at the time for presenting new music. None of these recordings have had a legitimate commercial release before now, so this will sound better than that untagged MP3 you downloaded from some blog years ago. The accompanying notes and booklet are again excellent and informative, including the original programme notes from the concerts and a radio talk given at the time by Michael Robinson, in whose memory this album is dedicated. It’s another step towards recovering a past which is still felt today but is not yet fully recognised.

Some older stuff I had saved but forgot about (2)

2026-09-15T20:24:35Z

Vilhelm Bromander: aurora [Warm Winters Ltd.]. Well this is all quite lovely. I think I found its charm truly ineffable and so refrained from trying to write anything intelligent about it. A suite of short pieces for a septet of winds, brass, low strings and pump organ. The modesty of its expression comes from the quiet formality of its presentation and the slightly scuffed ensemble playing in its execution. Subversive in its self-effacement, rather like those new British composers from the 1970s. In fact, the musicians here are mostly playing instruments unfamiliar to them: Bromander for example usually plays double bass, as heard on the equally surprising ...for some reason that escapes us. Here, he’s on soprano sax and organ duties. They’re not the Portsmouth Sinfonia, but as they ring the changes on these cascading chorale-like pieces, they do evoke the dignified amateurism and communal pride that the Scratch Orchestra aimed for.

Jackson Greenberg: Apartments from Sybarite5: Collective Wisdom [Bright Shiny Things]. Throwing out a pile of emails I found Greenberg’s The Things We Pass On Through Our Genes from 2023, a piece which started out as a string quartet recorded in 2012. Ten years later Greenberg fed the recording through effects pedals and other processes, playing through the piece live to tape. The sleeve notes say it was therapeutic, and the spontaneity of the treatments can diminish the uncanny quality that sometimes emerges in favour of raw texture, leaning into authenticity over more profound communication with the listener. More effective is Apartments, a 2023 composition for string quintet with tape loops and live AM radio, played with poignant wistfulness by the ensemble Sybarite5. The radio inevitably creates a melancholy mood, something familiar yet distant and unattainable. The simple part for strings supports the elegiac and reflective atmosphere, while delicate flourishes of electronics act both as alienation and enhancement of the feeling of emotional displacement. Made to be played while looking out the window on a rainy day.

Christopher Whitley: almost as soft as silence [self-released]. Critics (me) could get in a cheap shot about Whitley thinking too hard when commissioning violin pieces, going by his adventurous if flawed Describe Yourself from a few years back. I should point out that he followed it up with an album going the opposite direction, by simply playing with as little thought as possible. The fifteen tracks on the sub-thirty minute almost as soft as silence are the merest slips in the wind, blowing past the ear with felicitous facility. Title track excepted, nothing feels fragmentary or self-aware about form (no deconstruction here) as each piece is absorbed by technique while seeming to be effortless. Pleasant to an almost baffling degree, and it’s only in the last track you feel you’ve heard something substantial. It all sounds lovely, what with Whitley being darn good and the instrument a loaned Stradivarius, which I suppose obliges him to play nice.

Jeff Kimmel & Jack Langdon: The other side of the air [Dinzu Artefacts]. I’ve just been listening to a few releases by Low Impact, including Jeff Kimmel’s In Plain Sight and Exhausted Mechanisms by Kelley Sheehan and Jack Langdon. Both were a little fiddly for my tastes, but I remembered those names: early last year Kimmel and Langdon released The other side of the air, a set of duets for clarinet and organ. It’s one of those cute little miniature pipe organs, matched by Kimmel playing clarinet with as little affect as possible. The whole thing was recorded in one session. In the first piece, Langdon plays chords without quite enough air, adding microtonal shifts as the intonation falters, rubbing up against the slow, careful clarinet melody. For the second piece they shift to suspended unisons, where the beating frequencies and halos of overtones become foreground material. From here and for the rest of the set the two spread out to explore the same phenomena in wider pitch ranges and discovering new timbres along the way. Between the two of them they may sound like a recorder ensemble, a chorus of ocarinas or a blown set of bottles, building up these pallid but unstable colours to create fascinating variety from increasingly immobile playing.

Pianos: Eldritch Priest, Linda Catlin Smith, Emilie Cecilia LeBel

2026-09-13T22:17:18Z

Eldritch Priest: Too, So Like Nothing [Halocline Trance]. Three piano pieces by Eldritch Priest, played by someone else. …soot?aporia from 2005 begins with a stutter and seems to be breaking down before it’s even begun, and the fleeting, fragmentary nature of the piece carries on from there, finding the most unlikely continuity out of the abrupt positioning of stumbling chord sequences, delicate arpeggios and unequal phrases of unexpected tenderness. The someone else playing is Roger Admiral, who interprets EP’s jostling, angular movements with supreme felicity and tact. All three pieces share a louche, hazy nocturnality under Admiral’s hands as he finds the undercurrent of cool late-night jazz beneath the surface agitation. In …soot?aporia he sounds like Milton Babbitt playing a cocktail lounge: the textures are more relaxed but shares the phrasing that seems erratic disguises a canny understanding of the flow of time against rhythm. nape…wrinkle…linger is a shorter work from 2002, more open in its texture and so more tractable for the listener’s sense of direction. Admiral plays it all with a loving touch and delicious sensuality; he insinuates jazz impressions out of supple technique, even more than the compunded harmonies do. The title piece is a later work from 2020: the same tricksy energy is less obvious, but still present in a more refined form. On the album, it seems to find a balance between the two preceding tracks, and Admiral still manages to rhapsodise at fascinating length upon recondite musical language.

Linda Catlin Smith: The Complete Piano Solos (1989-2023), Volume 2: The Underfolding and Early Works [Redshift]. After Volume 1, dedicated to the recent, hour-long The Plains, Cheryl Duvall turns her attention to Smith’s earlier pieces: The Underfolding is from 2001 and the remaining eight pieces are short works from the last century. These are generally less well-represented on record than her later stuff, so to hear a collection of them gathered together affords a glimpse into a world of inspirations and influences which have shaped her present work. Some time ago, it took me a while to get a bead on where Smith was coming from; as heard in this collection, she spent the Nineties trying to find a clarity of language, which I had first assumed was a pose of folksy simplicity. That clarity is produced in different ways: Poire is deconstructed Satie, Iceberg isolates rising arpeggios from one of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The earliest work here is Zart, a homage to Feldman by way of Schoenberg, making use of touch, attack and decay to dwell upon clotted harmonies; the surprising variety of dynamics and cut-off of resonances also appear in 1990’s Music For John Cage, clarified both in technique and harmonic language. Duvall plays these pieces with a directness, even bluntness, the stark dynamics and clean attacks giving it an unvarnished sound – that may seem like I’m gearing up to use ‘folksy’ again but that doesn’t apply here. Duvall’s directness takes on the appearance of attempting to explicate Smith’s various methods, but in fact conceals questions of compositional technique behind the need to show the unity of a common goal which unites these works. 1999’s For Udo Kasemets is another tribute piece, where Smith honours the dedicatee by adopting a system of permutations and yet she and Duvall produce a piece which sounds warm and intuitive; the earlier Bloom is also dedicated to Kasemets and shares qualities with Smith’s pieces for Feldman and Cage. In all of this experimentation, it’s really only The Surroundings from 1995 which left me cold, sounding a little too stark and formulaic in this company. The key work to understanding Smith’s later music is The View From Here, a 1992 composition that eschews direct references, systems and intellectual querying to instead rely on personal experience, not as a means of self-expression but as a means of contemplation. The assimilation of all these tendencies can be heard in The Underfolding, which slowly roils and churns through successions of dense chords for 22 minutes, maintaining an internal calm even as it never reaches a point of balance or stability. At times the pace slows or pauses, lingering on a particular sonority before continuing as before. The tension and relaxation in the piece feels like an organic process, yet still leaves the listener with the memory that the piece was more difficult and disturbing than it seemed at the time. Duvall’s head-on approach comes through here, neither overstating nor soft-pedalling the confrontations contained within the piece.

Emilie Cecilia LeBel: Landscapes of Memory [Redshift]. I described LeBel’s earlier field studies as admirably spare in places but susceptible to moments of fussiness. The two halfhourish pieces on Landscapes of Memory are both composed for piano with e-bow drone. Ghost geography, played by Wesley Shen, focuses on a figure which articulates a repeated chord, followed by a high single note. This gets elaborated upon, but gently. The bowed piano string acts as pedal point and sounding board for the decaying chords and pitches, giving additional colour to each iteration of the chords. Later, there is a dramatic flourish, characteristic of LeBel, with loud arpeggiated chords and then some hushed inversions of the opening motif. The dramatic effects sought after by the composer are based in sonority more than any direct theatrical reference and so appear more focused and coherent than in the previous collection I’ve heard. Pale forms in uncommon light was composed a year later (2023) and is played by Luciane Cardassi. It’s equally slow and deliberate, as you would expect in making the overtones heard against the drone. The bowed string is a higher pitch and the figures played by Cardassi are a bit less reticent, allowing a hint of chord progressions, cadences or melodic fragments to appear; as such, this piece is in five named sections which explore each of the immplicit facets a little further. They’re not the easiest pair of compositions to get along with, each being very sombre throughout, but they are two serious attempts to make expressive music out of psychoacoustic phenomena, without resorting to cheap drama.

Diez Fischer, Granberg

2026-08-31T16:13:58Z

Santiago Diez Fischer: Songs [Another Timbre]. Kept meaning to write about this one but it always seemed a formidable task. It starts out simply enough, with and your mouth is like the sound of many waters, a grave but mellow baritone sax tracing out a slow, looping line over atmospheric electronics; then it all goes to hell. The backing track stutters and breaks up, the sax barks back, then when everything has fallen back into place the music is a shadow of what it once was. The following pieces are even more disturbed, making poetry out of harsh, battered sounds; like a lovingly rendered and deeply-hued portrait of a bruised thumb. I had to double-check I was listening to the right record because this does not sound like an Another Timbre release. At its extreme, the poetically-titled under the redwood tree begins with an obtrusive noise floor and ekes out harmonics and partials from the hollow resonances obtained by grinding and striking metal objects against a pair of snare drums, punctuated by growls and bursts of static interference until it’s all taken up with the persistent buzzing from a prepared electric razor. The piece resolves, if that’s the right word, with muffled, wordless singing, without accompaniment. The description does not do justice to the sonic and evocative depths the musicians find in this hostile materiel. tres ciegos, an earlier work, keeps the sax and adds accordion, bowed student guitar and Tupperware containers of various sizes, making for a brooding study in low timbres that swells and ebbs away, the grain of the brass and reed rubbing up against the groaning sounds of bowed plastic and strings. The musicians also vocalise, thickening out a compound sound that threatens to become a tonal miasma but somehow retains definition. You start to realise Diez Fischer is composing in a grey zone somewhere between the arrangement of pitches and the pure timbre of noise, where the conventional elements of music are always present, however faint it may be at times, but complicated by the messy physical processes of producing sound. The Gyre Ensemble is the trio who play on all of the pieces here, showing enthusiasm and inventiveness as they tread the fine note-v-noise line laid out by the composer. rise in the sky to be a reminder of comfort says it’s for solo accordion and electronics but sounds at first like a duet for accordion and bowed cardboard, with lots of higher, purer-sounding reeds producing near sinelike tones from the acoustic instrument while the electronics get dirty. The two elements merge and then swap places, with more guttural sounds pitched against unsteady synthesised chords. The final trio, Sappho’s song, uses more complex forces including “voltage controlled fan preparation of student recorder” to evoke a submarine tableau of deep, wafting organic forms that slowly rise against the composer’s own voice.

Magnus Granberg: Aus der Nacht [New Focus Recordings]. It’s always good to hear a new Granberg recording, especially when it provides a new perspective on his music. Most feature Granberg as a performer, with his open and indeterminate compositions typically heard as the result of his close working with the ensemble in rehearsal. Aus der Nacht, von den Wehen was composed for the Chicago ensemble a·pe·ri·od·ic for a concert in early 2023, with Granberg spending a week in advance preparing the concert with the musicians. Granberg is not heard here: usually his prepared piano acts like a kind of spine which threads its way through the variable events over the course of the piece. There is a prepared piano, played here by Nomi Epstein, but its role is closer to those of the other instruments – winds with cello and percussion, occasional sine tones. The flow is thus very different from his other pieces, as the instrumentation waxes and wanes in a comparatively dramatic fashion. The piece is structured in many short sections, a set of events (Moments if you’re Stockhausen) which allocates each performer a role but still allows for some flexibility and independence of mind in how to achieve it. Surprising details emerge, as when a group of winds suddenly merge to play a short ensemble figure, or a passage of added drama from a bass drum. A distinctive feature is the recurring high, long tones which appear throughout the piece, flute and voice with or without other instruments, which begin as a form of unusually sustained texture but gradually seem to bind the broader range of sounds together. I wonder how much of this is down to Granberg’s composition in this case or the approach taken by the ensemble, but the greater variety in overall density and texture from moment to moment in this piece makes the number of musicians and the scale of the piece seem larger than they really are.