Boring Like A Drill.

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.

Old News In Brief

2026-02-08T23:08:38Z

Michael Pisaro-Liu: Tombstones II [Circum-Disc]. Four years ago, Barbara Dang and the ensemble Muzzix put out a recording of selections from Pisaro-Liu’s songbook Tombstones: a set of essential distillations of song-form. Here are the rest of them, again sung by Maryline Pruvost. Again, the material and the interpretative approach can be likened to gemstones under a magnifying glass. The remaining pieces in the cycle allow for a sort of interlude to appear at times in this batch: “The outside of everything” focuses on long-held tones and beating frequencies, the stop-start of “Rattle” is intuitive but impersonal – a good analogy for the entire set. Around the middle of the album “Time may” brings everything almost to a standstill before the music becomes a little more expansive again, with the final work played here “The darkness is falling” recalling Cage’s Experiences No. 2, sung well.

Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard, Michael Pisaro-Liu: Fata Morgana [Edition Wandelweiser]. I get the idea; but you can’t listen to an idea. First part is Løkkegaard outside somewhere idly tootling a recorder for a good while, with wind blowing into the mic now and then to remind you this is all spontaneous and artless: life with the boring bits left in. Second part is same again with fidgety electronic schmutz overlaid by Pisaro-Liu. There’s too much fiddling about for its own sake: the sounds aren’t interesting enough to reward attention but also too intrusive to be sufficently uninteresting that your attentiveness open outwards. Just looked at the cover and remembered it’s Wandelweiser.

Bryan Eubanks: Songbook [Sacred Realism]. I can’t imagine ever getting enthusiastic for an album of soprano saxophone solos, even if it’s only about half an hour long. Eubanks plays horn: there’s electronic schmutz here too, but subtle. Is it necessary? I guess, in that the soft crunch and distorted thuds that underline the more forceful notes don’t so much punctuate the solos and ground them, pinning each one down to a flattened, cubist perspective. Eubanks’ expressive lyricism on display here is similarly cubist in its muted palettes and calm angularity, melodic lines reminiscent of Brant or Wolpe at their most serene (sorry, I’m devoid of suitable jazz references). I find it all kind of ugly but maybe your ears work better than mine for this stuff.

Jordan Topiel Paul & Bryan Eubanks: Pushovers [Sacred Realism]. Eubanks is back to pure electronics here, applying a modular synth to Topiel Paul on snare drum. That’s not the most appetizing combination on paper either, but the two of them really pull out the stops to make it work, Paul mining the amplified drum for a surprisingly deep array of textures and timbres, using it as a source of sound more than rhythm, with smart and sympathetic treatments by Eubanks. At times the synth reworking of the drum sounds like real-time tape manipulations, giving both acoustic and electronic musicians the feel and flow of live performance – I’m guessing these are studio improvisations. They actually do achieve the “ambiguous textural and rhythmic universe where synthetic and acoustic meet” as described in the sleeve notes; that doesn’t happen every day. Each of the four tracks, ranging from five to twenty-five minutes in length, combine a dramatic sweep with attention to detail that make listening to it at home as much fun as listening to it half-cut in a noisy art club.

Cosimo Fiaschi: unveil / unfold [Insub]. I can’t imagine ever getting enthusiastic for an album of soprano saxophone solos, even if it’s only about half an hour long. I can make exceptions though, and the two pieces Fiaschi recorded here (both on the same day, it seems) hide the source of the instrument by making each piece a study in tone – prolonged notes approach what appears to be pure, uncoloured pitch, until an added overtone or small change in breath reveals the hidden coloration. The sounds and the methods are electronic, even though both are achieved acoustically, through human means. Never quite drone, never quite ambient, Fiaschi’s pair of works carve out space into a clean acoustic shape which leaves an immediate impression that becomes more intriguing with prolonged examination.

Loose Pianos

2026-01-31T23:19:26Z

Christopher Fox: Unmeasured
[Huddersfield Contemporary Records]. Stupid here missed the Christopher Fox recital at City University this week, so I’ve been compensating by listening to his Unmeasured, a set of three recent piano pieces expertly played by Kate Ledger. There’s an intellectual playfulness lurking behind Fox’s music, to a greater or lesser degree, and it’s a little more conspicuous here, exposing a constructivist game that underpins each work which tilts the conventionally expressive into the realms of the uncanny. The album title points to the compositional theme in these three works, that of rhythm, or perhaps timing. Opening with the most recent piece, Figures of Light takes ambiguous, chromatic chords and staggers them into slow arpeggiations that are left to resonate; the result strikes the ear as a single melodic line that erratically loops and folds upon itself, stopping and starting at unpredictable moments, freezing time to reveal the particular harmonic content in each segment. Tension builds through the steady pulse of notes, broken by irregular phrasing and pauses. As mentioned above, it’s more about timing than rhythm, and Ledger’s playing adroitly tests and teases how far the disruptions to continuity can be stretched. This aspect of playing has an increasingly important role in the next two pieces. Es war einmal requires Ledger to silently read excerpts from Grimms’ fairy tales as an internal guide to the phrasing and expression of the music on the page. It takes on the surface musical appearances of animated narrative speech, yet without any conscious attempt to mimic the human voice or illustrate semantic meaning; the rhythmic cadences paired with Fox’s colourful musical material function as a story on a deeper, subverbal level, as one told to you while falling asleep. The longest and oldest work here, senza misura, gives Ledger licence to determine both the ordering of the twenty-odd sections that make up the piece and the durations given to each event. It’s mostly chordal, with Ledger choosing how the relative density and dissonance of each successive sound may be reconciled through judicious timing, treating notes on the page as a plastic material to be stretched and shaped into a complex but balanced musical sculpture. Ledger’s performance acts as a superb vindication of Fox, whether intentionally or not, composing a virtuosic rejoinder to Ezra Pound’s Great Bass theory.

Morton Feldman: Intermission 6 [Another Timbre]. Antti Tolvi has a background of playing various instruments in experimental jazz and free improvisation, so he has a flexible sense of timing too. He takes this to an extreme in his realisation of Morton Feldman’s Intermission 6, a piece composed in 1953 for either one or two pianos. It’s one of Feldman’s most open works, despite specifying pitches: just fifteen single events notated onto fragments of staves, haphazardly scattered across a single page. The brief instructions begin “Composition begins with any sound and proceeds to any other.” This opens up all sorts of questions which cannot be easily answered, as James Pritchett has noted when he played the piece. “Can you repeat any of the sounds? and how long the piece should go on?” The suggestion of a second piano permits further speculation on how freely the piece may be interpreted. It’s a thought that has occurred to me, too, but I lack a keyboard and the ability to test it for myself. Fortunately, Tolvi has given us one answer, in the form of a solo performance that lasts a little over seventy minutes. His phrasing and articulation are unconventional, with Feldman’s usual performance note of “as soft as possible” given some leeway, allowing for a piano with recalcitrant dynamics. I’m relieved to say it’s not one of those recently-fashionable slow interpretations that treats Feldman as a pioneer of ambient music; Tolvi uses silence and near-silence as a motivating force, creating a torqued stasis that keeps the listener alert. (To answer your anticipated questions: (a) Yes it’s Feldman, but not as we know it, and (b) Great work! Don’t do it again.) The material is relatively simple even by Feldman’s standards, which does provide a lot of the strangeness; that transparency also suggests extended repetition is permissible, and Tolvi demonstrates that you can sustain this music with almost nothing.

For Philip Guston, later

2026-01-19T23:55:57Z

Thirteen years ago I heard the GBSR Duo of George Barton and Siwan Rhys performing Morton Feldman’s For Philip Guston in the chilly back room of an art gallery for four-and-a-half hours. On that occasion, the flute part was played by a tag-team of two, working in shifts.I remember the earlier performance being slightly rough around the edges, in a clear and sympathetic interpretation – particularly Barton and Rhys. The flute part is especially tricky, for the listener as it is for the flautist: as Feldman understood, it is a loud instrument. How should it blend with piano and celesta, vibraphone and chimes? It can tend to dominate (e.g. the rather forthright recording made by the California EAR Unit). This afternoon, at Kings Place, Rhys on keyboards and Barton on percussion accompanied Taylor MacLennan on the flutes for a new interpretation of the piece, to launch their recording of all three of Feldman’s large trios. In this version, their understanding of how the three musicians relate was clear, with the flute primus inter pares in what aspires to be a soliloquy of the simplest and most elemental gestures, complicated by piano and percussion mirroring and echoing the parts in a fraught balance.

The immediate impression when they started playing was that they understood the dynamics, with MacLennan’s flute as gentle as possible (allowing for the impossibility of a quiet piccolo). I shouldn’t have to tell you that GBSR have better chops now than when they were kids. Barton plays mallet instruments with supreme softness, just enough to be heard through the hall. Rhys made her two keyboards blend seamlessly with Barton’s playing and with each other, creating a mercurial compound instrument. MacLennan seemed indefatigable, giving the audience full licence to find a wide range of interpretations alluded to in the programme notes without ever needing to emote. The spare, unadorned material and thin textures made substance from outlines. While I expected some degree of raggedness to inevitably creep in over time, the trio maintained a dignified stillness throughout, with a suprising consistency in sound where any tiredness was sensed and expected rather than aurally present. Better still, they maintained a flow throughout the piece’s excessive length, minimising the tendency in Feldman’s writing to create a series of episodes that inevitably wind down before starting over.

I mentioned before that I hear this piece differently every time. In the subterranean recital room of Kings Place, with such disciplined musicians, there were no external cue to the passing of time. The piece seemed longer than I remembered, particularly as it started to double back upon itself. This, with the way the trio played, left me at times entirely disorientated. I started finding certain passages too long, or too inert, then suddenly becoming alert and enthralled again, for no evident reason – this composition is a cussed beast. Like too many things in life, I wanted it to be over while knowing I’d be sad when it was done. (Why does he bring in the piccolo so early in the piece?) It all comes together in the long ending and coda, possibly the most audacious and subtle of Feldman’s compositional tricks. I need to hear MacLennan, Barton and Rhys’s recording of it soon, along with their versions of Why Patterns? and Crippled Symmetry.

New Year Weirdness

2026-01-03T17:56:02Z

Back from a break, but before I left I was able to hear Magnus Granberg and an expanded version of the group Skogen play Trouble, Had It All My Days in London. Thirteen musicians, with locals and Toshimaru Nakamura on his no-input mixing board adding to the colour and texture. After just going through some of his other recent compositions it was a pleasure to hear this work live, there being no recording available yet. Apart from the innate theatre of experiencing the music live, the piece showed another subtlety to Granberg’s approach, using his source (alluded to in the title) both as material largely untraceable for the unprompted listener and as inspiration for the direction the composition will take over its lengthy course. There is notated music, but it’s pooled as a resource for improvisation and repetition as directed; despite this apparent freedom in details, the piece is shaped to head from activity to quiescence. Sustained, simple textures predominated as the piece progressed, with fewer changes or overt disruptions from Granberg’s usual resources of ambient electronics and percussive small objects. (Nakamura’s feedback sounds were occasionally a distraction, but these appeared to be down to getting the balance right on his finicky electronic setup.)

Pacha Wakay Munan: El tiempo quiere cantar [Buh]. I need to talk about two of the most downright weird albums that came in last year. El tiempo quiere cantar is on the Peruvian Buh label, credited to Pacha Wakay Munan – a duo of musicians “and researchers” Dimitri Manga Chávez and Ricardo López Alcas. The sleeve notes somewhat modestly describe it as a “showcase” of the sonic possibilities of pre-Hispanic South American instruments in a contemporary musical context. Listening to it sounds like so much more than a demonstration; the strangeness is multiplied by the absence of a convenient musicological or anthropological basis to rationalise what you’re hearing. You’re already thinking of pan pipes, rattles and drums, but this collection of eight pieces will periodically reinforce your preceonceptions only to confound them. As described in the notes, the instruments survive but their method of use has largely been lost, leaving any existing tradition a piecemeal assembly of repurposed practices. This gives our two musicians the freedom to invent a new context, which when heard as an album appears to be created on the fly, drawing in references to older ethnographic recordings, adding occasional European instruments and modern electronics. It becomes impossible to hear this music for what it is, as our heads are already filled with pre-existing interpretations of what it should or should not be, thus rendering even the familiar at odds with our expectations. It’s worse if you’re better educated to prioritise the “authenticity” of ethnic experience, as your aesthetic values become more prescriptive and constricted. The music shares Kagel’s understanding of slippery, subjective relativism which more dogmatic musicians attempt to deny. As with Kagel, it’s hard not to think there’s some conceptual programme at work behind the album when hoarse, distant whistles are succeeded by a slightly sentimental piano accompaniment to a siku melody, before suddenly giving way to a chugging vamp overlaid with braying ceramic trumpets. You can tie yourself in knots trying to intellectually justify it all on the musicians’ behalf, or just let it happen to you and marvel at the sonic variety.

Jason Doell & Naomi McCarroll-Butler: FOUR FORMER MYRRH FORMERS FORMED HER HORN FOR MURMURS [Watch That Ends The Night]. The hell? Bunch of gamelan-cum-windchime sounds that appear to be played by a machine, Fifties musique concrète noises with a zither, fidgety electronic noodling with insouciant clarinet fripperies? Waat is this all supposed to add up to? It isn’t, and I’m not hearing it right; I’ll spare myself some embarrassment and say the misdirection is part of the point. McCarroll-Butler is the (very) human musician, and Doell (I should have known) has wrong-footed me again with his algorithmic programming. All three (computer code included) are jointly credited with composition. The sleeve notes offer “improvisations sampled and algorithmically composed” and that’s it. No wonder each of the four pieces here remain uncrackable nuts of inscrutability, but what particularly bamboozles the listener is how the choice of instruments, manner of initial playing and computational reorganisation defy the usual impassive mood that prevails when hearing non-human (or sufficiently alien) cultural artefacts: there always appears to be something at stake. To drive this point home, the final, long track glides effortlessly on a buzzing, chiming drone that could seemingly go forever, until a saxophone creeps in until it’s front of stage and joined by a drum kit in an ambivalent homage to Yoko and John’s Cambridge 1969.

Harry Partch: The Wayward [Bridge]. A welcome piece of vintage weirdness is the latest instalment of Bridge’s series of fresh interpretations of Harry Partch, beautifully recorded and played by the Partch Ensemble. The Wayward is a sequence of five compositions Partch identifies as a suite, which until now hasn’t been collected into a complete recording it says here. Partch’s time as a hobo in depression-era America is the subject matter here, so his signature earthiness is at the forefront. That earthiness can make one want to prefer the gentle crustiness of his own recordings from the Fifties and Sixties, but the world owes him these crystal-clear renditions on lovingly recreated instruments to renew his legacy in the next century. That said, what immediately struck me is how damn well Partch’s original ensemble played his weird-ass music at the time; these new recordings won’t make you re-evaluate anything, but they will give you greater appreciation of Partch’s compositions as living music more than historical arefact. There’s still plenty of history here: Partch is one of the great exponents of that explosion of vitality in American English in the mid-20th century. The exotic instruments and tunings all serve to provide thrilling music more than exemplify a theory – one advantage of these new recordings is that the instruments don’t fade into the background. The Partch Ensemble’s musicianship and recitations are spot-on, capturing the zeitgeist of the language as well as can be expected without lapsing into pastiche. Veteran just-intonation guitarist John Schneider is the main narrator and his voice has gained a rasp with age that bears an uncanny similarity to Partch’s own. This take of U.S. Highball is a keeper, and if Barstow runs the risk of being overfamiliar in your household then the unbridled vocabulary used here will still make you perk up. The new item with this release is the alternative versions of Ulysses at the Edge, one with added improvisation on trumpet and baritone sax from when Partch envisioned the piece as a vehicle for Chet Baker.