Boring Like A Drill.

Electronic Noise Shootout, Summer 2026

2026-07-12T22:56:00Z

Nolan Hildebrand: Noise Trip Explosion [Redshift]. The five compositions presented here sound like pure anarchy, so I like it; they seem to just happen rather than follow any organisation or pattern, which is good. They’re all electroacoustic works, so Hildebrand – working with liver mixer feedback, data-generated noise and interactive electronics – and his acoustic musicians are all to be commended for the unbridled anal expulsiveness they display as they whip up one huge sonic mess after another. There’s a perverse glee to their noisemaking as they try to be as grating, abrasive and hyperactive as possible and the pleasure is infectious, in a way that is so often promised by the hip kids but seldom delivered. Hildebrand as a composer appears to see his task as goading the musicians into fresh extremes as much as setting any parameters or restraints for them. For nearly an hour, nothing pauses for breath or takes so much as a moment to look back on what havoc has been wrought, it just relentlessly plunges forward at full tilt. It’s exhausting, but in a satisfying way, and yes you will listen all the way through. Strike another blow against the myth of Canadians being polite.

Josh Mason: Kicking A Dark Horse [Greyfade]. The latest in Greyfade’s folio series, which combines an album with a hardcover book. The nine tracks were composed on modular synthesizers fed into digital data processors, exploiting the mismatches between the two systems to create distortions, errors and discrepancies (see cover art). The book is a free-form, fragmentary collage of poetry and diary that makes for “a nonlinear travelogue of the states [sic] of Florida”. The two are intended to form an emergent artwork, each illuminating the other – discontinuity something something simulacra etc. – which will take more time to see how it pans out, so I’ll focus on the music. Warm analogue sounds warped by electronic artefacts, with a cool ambient vibe throughout. Old heads will immediately hark back to the fin de siècle avatars of Oval and Pole, and this music seems to combine the sound of both: nervous stutters and crackling tension over an impassive surface. Mason comes by this sound honestly, detailing how it’s the result of working with unfamiliar and recalcitrant equipment to achieve a serendipitous travesty. He keeps the drama implicit, anticipated rather than felt, which enhances the wary mood maintained throughout. They’re evocative but ambiguous landscapes, or rather, keeping with the concept and the fin de siècle fashion, a soundtrack to the book.

Hunter Brown: Stoppages Vol. 3 [Party Perfect!!!]. I was all stoked about Brown’s Stoppages Vol. 1 [∞] and then skipped Vol. 2, so here’s me getting stoked all over again over Vol. 3. Like I said last time, Brown takes a David Tudor-like approach to glitch, interrogating the principle upon which the digital error operates and then applying it as a compositional method. The effect is transcendent. On this outing, he exploits the noise floor algorithms used in audio systems to distinguish signal from background noise; by reducing the audio level until it merges with the background, the system merges the two into a hybrid data bit. The results then have to be cranked up again to make them audible. For source material, Hunt subjects tracks from the two previous volumes to this process, creating pieces somewhere between variation and trope. It’s less immediate in brute force than Vol. 1, but more complex and sophisticated in its intricate sounds while equally rigorous in its conception and execution, with a concomitant inscrutable logic in structure and form. Why didn’t I mention Vol. 2 until now? Because I lost my copy. Guess I’ll have to go get it again.

Laurent Güdel: State Music [Insub]. There’s a book with this one, too. Güdel has toured the venerable bastions of electronic music – EMS Stockholm, Columbia University, etc. – and produced a disquisition on the relationships between cultural and political power located inside 20th Century institutions dedicated to music research. It’s an exercise in poking through the leftovers of history, with the six pieces presented here composed on location on vintage Buchlas, Serges and EMS Synthis. The essay follows suit, raking over the past with an (ironically, academically popular) ethnocentric assumption that the Cold War was created in a vacuum and fought entirely on one side. It’s light on the pseudo-Marxist analysis and more of a verbal conspiracy board, using vague syntax to assert a link between synthesisers and fascism, eugenics and other maladies including, inevitably, the Jewish Menace. With chapter titles like “Vladimir Ussachevsky: Agent and Target of US Imperialism” it recalls pleasant memories of the shitkicking the American avant-garde got up to in the 70s with varying degrees of earnestness. The music? It’s strange, and for the most part unlikeable, possibly by design. Each piece gathers a wide array of timbres, textures and effects and throws them together one after another as though Güdel is impatient or dissatisfied, making each piece sound more like a demonstration reel for the instrument than actual music. The exception is the last piece, made on the non-functional RCA Mark II synthesizer, which Güdel uses as a resonator, antenna and resistor to transform field recordings and ambient sound. It’s a transformative work which shows creativity and insight into the relationship between sound and technology in a way that is not evident in the preceding tracks.

Troubled Quiescence

2026-07-05T20:27:13Z

Conner Simmons: any sense of where we were gone [Sawyer Editions]. A floaty, mild-tempered expanse of soft – but not always gentle – sounds; curiously, the free-form feeling gains from being sorted into a modular structure of five compositions: two string quartets to open and close, with a larger central work for unspecified instruments, which in this case is a larger ensemble including voice. The three pieces are unified into a single work by two short interludes for bowed prepared piano, composed a year later but also apparently heard as a whole from the first performance, which is the recording presented here. There are fairly subtle electronic treatments throughout, designed to emphasise lingering tones and after-images. The outer quartets are marked by a lack of movement, with most of the changes coming from a small amount of harmonic expansion and some ramping of dynamics. In the central piece, titled explain it to itself as wind, the improvisation allowed to the musicians emerges slowly, tentatively, each producing sounds individually that take care not to coalesce into a single image, for listening in the moment as opposed to coming away with a clear impression. Simmons alludes to all the pieces drawing upon “postmodern fiction, obscure geometry textbooks, and poems about time” and quotes from Cortazar’s Hopscotch; in short, it’s a synthesis, albeit one that steers clear of Delibes and Saint-Saëns, not to mention Rose Bob and Alix Alix.

Wilson Tanner Smith: Perpetual Guest [Sawyer Editions]. Reflective solos on a harmonium, interspersed with some cello. The mood of cautious tranquility prevails throughout and Smith plays with simple, homespun diction. It’s the sort of thing we’re all sure we’ve heard somewhere before, not least because the music originates from a site-specific basis: “created in the abandoned Kreenholm Textile Factory complex on an island in the middle of the Narva River in Narva, Estonia, a stone’s throw from the Estonian-Russian border.” It’s the cosiest form of exoticism, with a hint of potential danger and sometimes with this kind of situational art it seems that one is hoping the situational pathos magically substantiates itself in the music – a form of implicit hauntology through psychogeography. None of that really matters though, as Smith’s approach to making music here is direct and unconcerned with intellectual justification. As such, the familiarity of it all locates this music securely within a nascent tradition of site-specific improv, where the practice and the craft take precedence over cleverness or subversion. Most importantly, Smith found the antique harmonium and restored it to working order himself, so it’s a perfect example of site-specific music and he’s earned the right to play whatever he damn well likes on it. Just as well his playing is studious and pretty.

Maya Bennardo, Erik Blennow Calälv, Kristofer Svensson: For a Lemon Tree [Another Timbre]. You may remember Bennardo and Svensson teaming up with percussionist Etienne Nillesen for Improvisation on Āsthita, January 2, 2024. This time around, we hear Improvisation on Prakāśa, June 10, 2024, with Calälv on bass clarinet replacing Nillesen on drum; Bennardo and Svensson continue respectively as before on violin and kacapi (I looked it up, it’s a Javanese zither). Svensson has devised the distinct tunings used in each of these improvisation, on this occastion using 11-limit just intonation, a scheme that stretches outside the bounds of what Western ears would normally consider as “in tune”. The improvisers are set rules on what modes to play within the scale and an overall shape but are otherwise free to play as they wish. As with the earlier improvisation on Āsthita, its companion piece, the trio play within the mode more than upon it, but there are differences. The greater range and sustain of Calälv’s clarinet allows him to form the harmonic backbone of the piece, using the lower registers sparingly. Svensson’s muted zither plucks out tropes on the clarinet’s long tones, sometimes leading, other times elaborating, while Bennardo threads a translucent harmonic layer between the two. It sounds wonderfully composed, in either sense of the word, with each displaying an instinct for when to remain silent, giving the music greater definition beyond an ornate drone. To illustrate the point, the album begins with For a Lemon Tree, which is a distillation of their acquired technique into a formal composition.

Maya Bennardo: rustlings [elsewhere]. The title could be a self-deprecating description of Bennardo’s style of playing, where she nudges her violin to the threshold of breaking up its tone into pure, whispering friction. Her two compositions here make use of this breathy style of bowing as a means of formal development, rising and falling between sounds that are nearly full of their pitch, to almost empty. The 23-minute dormant gardens i. is for violin and viola, played by the duo andPlay (Bennardo and Hannah Levinson). It resembles a horizon line cast with shadows in low sunlight, drawn freehand and rendered in long, feathered strokes. Small amounts of colouration and harmonising play over what strikes the listener as a single pitch which wavers and shimmers, establishing its presence through an apparent immobility that emerges through the constant microscopic activity. The work’s duration opens up the scale of this activity fom miniature to landscape, giving the small sounds greater seriousness. The 27-minute summer rustlings is Bennardo solo, the relatively dry acoustics exposing how little adornment there is to her playing other than through the sounds arising from within the instrument when subhected to her technique. On the microcosmic scale, there is plenty of technique to be heard. The piece falls into three sections with a coda: in the first she draws a line firm but pale, adding flecks of plucked strings to the constant, fragile bowing, figure and ground in the lowest possible relief. The second slowly breathes pitch into frail harmonics, nuilding up into fast arpeggios of high notes, still half whispered. The third is a long monophonic drone that then starts to generate a kind of internal polyphony out of the timbral changes in bowing technique, like a doubled voice. The coda is disarmingly simple. It’s a virtuosic work which impresses without feats of pyrotechnics or endurance.

Back to work: Morgan Evans-Weiler & J.P.A. Falzone

2026-06-30T22:24:51Z

Morgan Evans-Weiler: Grid and Gradient [Kuyin]. Morgan Evans-Weiler & J.P.A. Falzone: Penumbra [Another Timbre]. J.P.A. Falzone and Morgan Evans-Weiler: Ascending Music [Sawyer Editions]. Can’t believe I haven’t yet written anything about the collaborations by Morgan Evans-Weiler & J.P.A. Falzone, two musicians and composers who make a virtue out of abstemiousness and rigour. I was going to say simplicity, but there’s nothing particularly simple in the way the two of them do much with little. Evans-Weiler plays violin, as sparingly as possible; Falzone plays keyboards. In Penumbra, recorded in 2024, the prepared piano takes the foreground, augemnted on occasion by celesta. For each of the four pieces, Falzone establishes a reticent, contemplative mood, picking out notes gently while leaving plenty of space for Evans-Weiler to add the faintest colouration, wisps of bowed violin or an occasional low, electronic hum. On Ascending Music, the keyboard is a reed organ, recorded in a stairwell for additional reverberation. The textures are therefore more homogenous, playing out as a set of chorales in light, sustained tones. Both musicians’s playing may sound quite a bit freer than on Penumbra, but their meticulous approach is apparent through the delicate changes in colouration they both achieve in each piece, emphasising the style of musical mindfulness they used to record each of the five pieces here. The opening and closing title works on the album are credited jointly: they do more than just ascend, but there is greater pitch movement in these two works, with Falzone using electronics and slide whistle to pair off against Evans-Weiler’s slow glissandi. The three middle tracks are by Falzone, using cycling permutations of pitches with close attention to intonation and reflecting upon the resonant frequencies of the recording space. 22nd Century Music is a short work referencing Joseph Kurdika referencing Laurence Crane.

The new album on Kuyin is Grid and Gradient, an open-score composition by Evans-Weiler performed by the duo on violin, quarter-tone pianos and celesta with electronics. Besides the microtones, this comes across as a more developed performance by the two – more complex in thought, though not in surface activity. Bearing a superficial resemblance at first to Penumbra, both musicians play in an equally restrained manner, the violin’s presence still discreet but more of a counterpart to the pianos. It’s a long work that falls into six stages, each working within a different set of musical conditions, leaving the performers to find their way in maintaining the atmosphere. The methods and the processes are more obscure than before, but this allows for a greater depth of expression in the music, even as its substance remains elusive. The impression it makes is susceptible to small but profound changes, much like the rare introduction of unexpected sounds that open up new perspectives on what you’ve just heard.

Electric Guitar: Jon Catler, Cristiàn Alvear

2026-06-07T21:10:43Z

Jon Catler: The Young Mountain of the East [Chaikin]. If the title doesn’t tip you off, the Jung Hee Choi cover art will: this is an homage to La Monte Young. Catler is a veteran of Young’s Forever Bad Blues Band and Choi’s own Sundara All Star Band, with a long history of playing microtonal electric guitar across a range of genres. As an homage, The Young Mountain of the East is a well-informed and constructive extension of Young’s legacy, more than any derivative or sound-alike “tribute”. Catler takes the opening chord of Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano and builds upon it, extending the paired intervals beyond Young’s imposed limit om harmonic complexity into even finer gradations (to get technical and quantitative, Young’s composition sticks with pitches relatable to the first seven harmonic overtones – Catler’s goes as far as thirteen). Written as a double quartet for overdubbed fretless guitars, Catler produces rich but translucent sonorities made of e-bowed strings in esoteric tuning. The generated harmonies of the chords are very tasty, with the signature sound being the use of sliding tones to resolve from one set of intervals to another. The piece is organised into twelve sections, each of precisely equal length, suggesting the formal rigor beneath the music’s superstructure. While there is a logic to the piece as it progresses from one set of intervals to the next, it also allows development and further apparent flexibility to emerge as a consequence of the process – from one section to the next things get more complex, until reversing and resolving back to the initial stability of the opening section. Catler uses the complexity to extrapolate rhythms out of the beating frequencies in the centre of the piece, breaking the prevailing gloss of the sustainer guitars, and even cuts loose a little with some melismatic soloing before stability reasserts itself. It’s a different beast from Young’s own works, as you would hope, while sharing some of the same qualities: interrogative study, self-discipline, a devotional approach to expression, an immaculate surface. It does not, however, make demands on the listener’s endurance.

Cristiàn Alvear: Sin título #30 – Singularidad #1 (Carrasco – Astaburuaga) [Insub]. Alvear is a guitarist who brings a necessary attitude somewhere between patience and bloody-mindedness to pull off pieces composed out of the slenderest means with an absolute rigor and austerity. He makes each of these works inexorable and inevitable, without ever seeming machine-like about it. The composers here for these two solo works are Nicolás Carrasco Santiago Astaburuaga, both of whom I’ve heard Alvear play before. Each piece sounds either antecedent or precedent to the respective previously recorded work. Carrasco’s previously heard sin título #26 is a study in stasis, as is this sin título #30. Over half an hour, Alvear begins by ringing the changes on harmonics and then settles into a repeated, chiming chord. In terms of form, it’s the skeleton of a James Brown jam slowed down about ten times, staying on it until over halfway through when the harmonics briefly come back before resuming as before. Well, not quite as before, as the chiming chord is now a single low note that broods at length before suddenly cutting out. Astaburuaga’s Singularidad #1 is about half as long but works on a similar scale. As with the Carrasco, it’s a puzzling, oblique non-sequitur of a piece, beginning with Alvear slowly picking out a loose, repeating riff disturbed by occasional off-kilter bursts of electronic chaff. A field recording interrupts, leaving us with some audio verité while the guitar grumbles with bass reverberations until it eventually rebuilds into a slow, indecisive vamp. A few other intrusions occur before everything just breaks off. As observed last time, “Time passes in a dreamlike state, with no logical connection or momentum, and so will either soothe, frustrate or disturb you.”

Music We’d Like To Hear (again): Eldritch Priest, Jürg Frey

2026-05-31T17:56:26Z

A “mongrel array” of musicians were conducted by Jack Sheen in a performance of Eldritch Priest’s pleasure drenching… last Thursday. The piece was written in 2003 and this was its second(?) airing. The difficulty comes from several sources: its instrumentation (electric guitar, lap steel guitar, organ, piano, clarinet, harmonium, assorted strings, percussion and bass), its length (about ninety minutes) and its scoring (combining notation of various precision and suggestion). The angular melodies and lopsided meters heard in other Eldritch Priest works are present, but smoothed out into a sort of dissolute lounge jazz that moons about as though to fill up time before something else happens. The lap steel, organs and vibraphone add an oily sheen to the smoothness and insinuate a sinister aspect lurking in the background. A demotic drum kit of cymbal mounted on snare erratically rapped out the absence of a consistent beat. Everyone seems to drift in their own reverie, more or less together. There are pauses, then everything resumes apparently much as before. And so, questions of orientation, direction, structure and form steadily become irrelevant, replaced by a simple sense of scale. As the music drifts, so does it gradually drift apart. The suggestion of an ominous presence occasionally rears back into consciousness – a sudden snare strike, a louder chord – but the foreboding imprints itself more through absence, as the established elements drop away, not always to return. For much of the time it’s all ensemble playing, before breaking out into smaller groupings; but once that has happened the full ensemble never really seems to return. Solos become precarious. At one point the music dwindles away to a lo-fi recording played into a mute room of musicians. The cymbal finally stops but then you wonder why it never comes back. More and more, your attention comes to what is missing. Chatting to someone afterwards, he described it as hearing smooth jazz slowly bleed out. The overall character of haunted loucheness was expertly conveyed by the ensemble, an expanded form of Apartment House, including Sam Cave on guitar and EP himself on the lap steel, which had the last word. I do hope someone can get together a good recording of this piece, sooner rather than later.

The following night had the UK premiere and second performance of Jürg Frey’s Clarinet Quintet, played by the same musicians as in the first peformance last week on Bologna and in the recording. I won’t add much to what I’ve already said, except to comment on the difference between hearing a recording and hearing it live. For the recording I wrote “I suspect the listener’s responses to it will alter a little each time it is heard”, which will obviously be the case when hearing a live performance, but this time I picked up more on the aspects of Frey’s earlier styles that have been retained in his new work, such as when the quintet gives way to the viola plucking a single note, lingering over this moment before moving on. There was also the more general difference in that in a recording you listen for what has happened, but when live you listen for what will happen. The different anticipatory sense drew attention to what seemed a slightly more hesitant opening to how the piece was played, which made the Apartment House quintet’s interpretation on the night seem more fragile and their accomplishment more earned than taken for granted, with the piece’s strength to be found in the course of its performance rather than assumed from the start.

Michael Finnissy And The Guitar

2026-05-26T22:50:02Z

Michael Finnissy: Finnissy And The Guitar [First Hand]. “For this year, the usually anniversary-happy Proms have programmed sweet F. A.” I wrote this ten years ago as a passing comment on Michael Finnissy turning seventy. Now he’s eighty, the Proms has again conspicuously ignored him; I’m not sure if that matters for the Proms, any more. Meanwhile, some new albums have been coming out, with Métier adding another hefty volume of piano works adroitly tackled by Ian Pace (includes English Country Tunes) and a complete collection of his organ works, played by Forrest Eimold. The latter is a less-known facet of Finnissy’s work, as are the works for guitar. Finnissy And The Guitar: Complete Works 1966-2022 is an especially rewarding compendium both for bringing these works to light and for displaying the great clarity in Finnissy’s compositional voice; a voice that once acquired a reputation for speaking a recondite language. This may be down to the eclecticism of his style, which mixes a feeling for the more abstract harmony and counterpoint of 20th-century Europeans (and so looked at askance in Britain) with references to the musics of other times and places. He combines these tendencies intuitively, with a traditionally English empiricism.

The earliest work dates back to when Finnissy was about twenty: Two Cut-Ups of Three Fantasias by Alonso Mudarra makes free use of William Burroughs’ cut-up technique to collage fragments from the 16th-century composer, creating a pair of studies which explore polyphonic implications within an “economy of gesture”. It’s a youthful work so it can be called ‘limpid’, favouring construction over direction to make two pieces which are immediate but obscure, opening up a new way to hear how sounds fit together. It also captures the tone of ambiguous melancholy that permeates many of Burroughs’ collages. This is a first recording, made by Sam Cave, who also unearthed the piece while compiling this collection; he’s done a superb job in conception and execution. Cave plays four of the seven pieces here, the others played by guitarists closely associated with the music; all but one have not perviously been recorded commercially, if at all.

In the Two Cut-Ups any continuity is of course self-constructed, and the subsequent works carry over a sense of continuity that is friable, illusory or complicated to varying degrees. Felix namque, a compact work from 2012, carries over traces reminiscent of baroque lute and Spanish folk but metamorphoses between different expressions of one or the other, with sudden schisms and an abrupt end. The more elaborate but perhaps less refined Song 17 from 1976 contrasts flourishes of more esoteric language with moments of stillness and quiet, extended tremoloes. Cave takes those tremoloes to the threshold of hearing; his playing beautifully conveys Finnissy’s affection for the instrument, interpreting the music in a deceptively simple way, appearing not to take on a false persona for each piece or assume a burden of emotional strain on behalf of the avant-garde. (This is a more nuanced way of saying he makes it sound easy.) More particularly, Cave and the other musicians empathise with Finnissy’s observation that “one can become intoxicated with the sound, and forget about continuity and structuring”, giving attention to each moment while securing its place in the overall construction. Finnissy’s writing for guitar always makes time for the ear to linger on sensual details, even in the protean monologue of Nasiye (1982), played with pointed momentum by Diego Castro Magas. It’s a piece which creates its own shape out of attempting to reconcile, or at least find balance between, its inconguities, without ever resorting to easy despair. The duo Normal Deviates (2017), played by Daniel Bovey and Julian Vickers, who commissioned it, is even more of a headlong rush, with the two guitars locked in heated dialogue that alternately meshes and clashes. It’s complex, but never rushed to the point it feels like trivial scurrying; the Vickers Bovey Duo brings out its eloquence. Bovey also commissioned the guitar quartet Albion on the Road to Hell in 2019: played by him with the Mela Guitar Quartet, it begins as a shocking study in brutal timbre with all four musicians ferociously plucking out a series of repeated chords in unison. After finally exhausting itself, the piece slowly rebuilds from quiescence into a hazy miasma of mingled voices. The final work is the most recent and the longest, with Cave playing Outcast, a piece started during the Covid pandemic and finished in 2022. Both the most variegated and the most introspective in mood, Outcast is a musical transcription of sorts, or a translation, of the 9th-century Welsh poem Claf Abercuawg and so is in form another monologue. Cave imbues the work with tenderness, even in it’s bleakest moments and violent outbursts. It’s a pleasure to learn this music is now not so overlooked.

Not quite there: Stepančić, McIntosh

2026-05-24T22:56:08Z

Teodora Stepančić: Transparent Duo [Cloudchamber Recordings]. I dismissed Stepančić’s O A | F G as “precious”, accusing it of “silences, hushed tones, reverential playing and exquisite delicacy”. Transparent Duo reveals her bravado and commitment to this seemingly unrewarding aesthetic by producing a work of forbidding harshness and austerity, even as it is almost imperceptible. Composed for two string instruments with field recordings and written on transparent paper, the score’s pages either indicate towards a direction and length of glissando, or otherwise towards bowing style. The two sets of instructions may therefore combine to form an ephemeral but definite structure and substance. The realisation here is for two cellos, played by the n/ether duo of Laura Cetilia and Hannah Soren, heard recently in Cetilia’s own soil + stone. If you expect this combination to produce a warmer, fuller sound than the meagre materials suggest, you will be disappointed: Stepančić’s score admits that the glissandi played will be “mostly inaudible”. What is heard is whatever seeps through, however faintly, almost by accident; tentative silences open up and then persist, and as they do so become harder to dispel. The sounds lightly scratch upon the ear, as though carried by wind. This sensation is matched by the interludes of field recordings, open air with distant rural sounds. It’s all incredibly sparse, but it is not precious; it’s saved by the heiratic formality that arises from the piece’s conception, where raw but unconfronting sounds are studiously interspersed with silence, human and natural sounds separated, all arranged through impersonal, non-hierarchical means. The two cellists of n/ether exemplify concentration and seriousness of purpose in the extreme reticence with which their playing may be heard; as though to hammer the point home, the unyielding strictness of this realisation produces what sounds like a recapitulation at end.

Andrew McIntosh: Fixations [Kairos]. McIntosh, who composed A Moonbeam Is Just A Filtered Sunbeam and who we recently heard as violist on Ian Power’s Brace and various bits of Jürg Frey, returns with three compositions for strings, without electronic processing, extended techniques or field recordings. The strings are retuned throughout, in just intonation. Besides the inherent resonances of the tuning McIntosh makes the perceptual tension, between our brains hearing it wrong while our ears hear it right, integral to the fabric of his music. The title work, a thirty-minute string octet, alternates between brief melodic passages on individual instruments with passages of stillness where a couple of harmonies float back and forth irresolutely. They act on the piece’s supposed momentum as though time were suspended, but that suspension of time and lack of movement becomes the subject. As observed in Moonbeam, “either the time is filled with greater complexities of tone and colour, or even less happens than before, depending on the attitude you take while listening”; Fixations has a more defined structure and as such those complexities arising from apparent insensibility become the focus of attention, more than the moments of activity. In other words, these pieces have a curious effect on the listener, being indisctinct but tough. The musicians are an ensemble called Wild Up, including McIntosh himself on viola and Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick on cello. Duo for viola and cello, with any number of violins features the duo tracing out faint patterns against an even fainter halo of the higher strings in shallow relief. All play in a similar range, rising up gradually until the soloists reach harmonics. The patterning is vague and subtle enough to make you forget the notes as such and remember only the translucent timbre of the work, until a sudden flourish of rapid, elegant arpeggios towards the end. The opening track is a brief amuse-oreille titled 434.6, played by the Aperture Duo of Adrianne Pope on violin and Linnea Powell on viola. A small secret is revealed here, as to how McIntosh uses his melodic material: the phrases are blunt and even simplistic, but played with great delicacy and refinement. To keep things suitably oblique, the booklet doesn’t contain notes on each work but a transcript between McIntosh and Cassandra Miller, which begins with the former questioning the latter.

Jürg Frey: Clarinet Quintet, etc.

2026-05-19T22:29:16Z

Jürg Frey: Clarinet Quintet [Another Timbre]. The live premiere of Jürg Frey’s new Clarinet Quintet took place in Bologna last night; it will receive a performance in London next week. The musicians, all members of Apartment House, have also recorded the work for Another Timbre so you can hear it right away – the work was commissioned by the label founder Simon Reynell. The quartet, with Heather Roche on clarinet and a string quartet consisting of violinists Mira Benjamin and Chihiro Ono, Bridget Carey on viola and Anton Lukoszevieze cello, perform the piece with their usual exemplary dedication, with all the confident, self-assured understatement of, say, the Melos Quartet playing Brahms. Kids these days won’t remember that Frey used to be considered a radical, with compositions that focused on silence and repeated, single sounds to the extent that it felt like a provocation. The thing here is that he has not mellowed with age, or rebelled against his earlier style. The Clarinet Quintet is a sublimation of his earlier instincts and interests, showing consummate mastery over materials and technique as he works his way through from the beginning of the piece to its end. It’s a complex work that feels simple and approachable, yet on its own terms. The music steadily rolls out at a comfortable pace, instruments never straining to extremes, with hints of subdued melody woven throughout. I’d tell people it has a kind of pastoral feel. Almost too subtle to consciously register, there are fleeting moments which disturb the peaceable atmosphere: a melodic loose end, a skip in the rhythm, a brief transition where the voices clash and you understand that Frey has determined to things the hard way. What could have passed as merely pleasant becomes a reflection on how such contentment is precarious, negotiated and hard won, thus making pleasure fulfilling – there’s no sermonising on this; the values are imbued in the music that has resulted. The Apartment House strings mesh together but not too sweetly, each voice having its own quirks and quiet flashes of tetchiness; Roche’s clarinet blends into the overall texture, then emerges as soloist, steps back for periods then resumes blending into the background, making a character out of her part. Beyond its overall initial impression of solidity and suppleness, several listenings so far indicate a profound depth to this music and I suspect the listener’s responses to it will alter a little each time it is heard.

Jürg Frey: Je laisse à la nuit son poids d’ombre [Another Timbre]. It’s interesting to compare the Quintet with a work from about five years earlier, Je laisse à la nuit son poids d’ombre, released by Another Timbre last year. Of similar length, nearly an hour, but very different in its means and methods. The French ensemble]h[iatus with sopranos Hélène Fauchère and Géraldine Keller recorded this in 2021: a setting of lines by Swiss poet Anne Perrier and old Japanese haikus that fills out at a deliberately slow pace, seemingly to emerge one pitch at a time. Sounds, like words, are felt out and tested, with each one gradually finding a place in the larger scheme. For an ensemble of eight instruments plus voices, the texture is kept very thin until late in the piece; we’re well into the work before the presence of two voices is unmistakeable. Opposed to texture, the timbre is often strange and exotic, with unexpected percussion sounds and the addition of an analog synthesiser which nudges the ensemble towards the uncanny. I can’t write about this piece in greater depth now, but just wanted to draw attention to how Frey has produced two works that are apparently diametrically opposed in approach while sharing the same care and interest in sound and its effects, an equal level of craft.

Welcome returns (2): Timothy McCormack

2026-05-17T22:02:02Z

Timothy McCormack: The Hand is an Ear [Kairos]. It’s rare to hear music that makes you think differently about things: about the composer, the genre, music in general. I’ve seen a couple of equally enthusiastic reviews of this album and both start with descriptions of something beyond the music itself that struck the reviewer, which should give you some idea of how people react when they’re confronted by these two pieces. The pieces are your body is a volume, a fifty-minute string quartet played by the JACK Quartet, and the hand is an ear / the ear is a heart, a twenty-minute piece for solo violin played by JACK member Austin Wulliman. For me, I started thinking how they both delivered an emotional impact out of brutalist handling of sound, as I’d previously experienced when hearing his piano piece mine but for its sublimation. Then I went back and listened to mine but for its sublimation again and realised that I’d been hearing something completely different in the way it left its lingering impression on the listener. Turns out I’d been bamboozled, hearing those close-spaced and unresolved piano chords and thinking Feldman. There’s nothing of the kind on the new album, as niceties of pitch have lost all relevance. your body is a volume is an exquisite tour de force in noise, instructing the JACK players through a gruelling regimen of bowing speed, pressures, direction and placement, finger pressure, multiphonics and (at one stage) subharmonics, treating the musicians as conductors of an unstoppable current, filtering and modulating the spectrum of audible noise. It begins as a prolonged gasp, before suddenly unleashing a thunderous wall of dense, hyperdetailed granular sound; from there on it runs the listener and the players ragged. Obvious reference points I’ve seen cited are Lachenmann (fixation on extended techniques as the primary source of sound) and Scelsi (treatment of sound as a plastic medium); besides Lachenmann, I heard connections with Nono (self-created forms made out of impoverished material), Xenakis (visceral effects from conceptual abstraction) and Harley Gaber’s The Winds Rise In The North (prolonged sounds at once distant and uncomfortably close). So many discrete references can be found that, even if it were a synthesis, the work and its voice is unique. You’ll have noticed by now that I’m throwing ideas together just to convey and impression of this quartet’s power: it builds a grand, encompassing statement from an entirely new language, made out of the margins of the instruments’ vocabulary. The strings never fully speak yet they convey meaning at a gut level, with coarse eloquence. There’s a tremendous intellect at work behind it, even though one endures it as though it were a force of nature, immune to reason. The music teaches you a lot that you won’t understand right away, except for the idea that the JACK Quartet are heroes for achieving this. In conception and execution, it’s perfectly realised.

So far I haven’t given the hand is an ear / the ear is a heart its due. It is in no way overshadowed by your body is a volume; rather it achieves an elevated status by both complementing and transcending the preceding, larger work. Written a few years later, it fills the same sort of miraculous space occupied by Nono’s violin duo “Hay que caminar” soñando, using sparse sounds and silence in a way that feels like you’re hearing the instrument for the first time. Wulliman plays this piece with a stern, commandeering tenderness – such a thing is evidently possible – with all the alien yet touching sentiments that can instill in the listener. Rigorous in its orientation while more capricious in its method, the piece feels as though it’s been lived through more than composed.

Welcome returns (1): Sylvia Lim, Eldritch Priest

2026-05-10T13:27:36Z

After being knocked out by Timothy McCormack’s mine but for its sublimation last year, I have now been blown away by the two pieces on The Hand is an Ear: an immense string quartet and a stringent violin solo. Both demand a fresh vocabulary to do them justice so let me get back to you on that asap. Speaking of brilliant follow-ups…

Sylvia Lim: Flare [Another Timbre]. It’s good to hear some more music by Sylvia Lim, having first heard her Sawyer Editions album back in 2022. On Flare you can hear her quietly individualistic style taking shape, resisting easy definition. Her compositions show an interest in acoustic decay and a peculiar method for exploring it. There’s no apparent system at work, relying on her curiosity and imagination to discover new ways of hearing instruments. The title work is for piano solo, played by Ben Smith: the instrument is treated as a resonator, using muted strings to eke out overtones from two keys, repeatedly struck in a trill. The substance of the music comes from the sonority, articulated by rhythm and phrasing, creating a piece made of shadows and echoes, a translucent projection of music. The small, intimate things we overheard is aptly named, a discordant congregation of clarinet and bass clarinet, violin and percussion passes by the ear as though partly concealed. The piece is played by various Apartment House alumni, as is shadowfolds, a recent piece for five musicians made in an attempt at polyphony; this manifests itself in compound, heterogenous changes in timbre. As shown in the piano piece flare, there’s a reductive approach taken in a number of Lim’s works: the Miyabi guitar duo of Hugh Millington and Saki Kato play the diptych same but different with one string prepared, snapping and buzzing against the others as the guitarists pluck single notes with only small variations in pitch, working their way down to one repeated, naked sound treated with minute attention. It’s striking how the reductionism never comes across as cold or affected, seeming to be born out of a strong affection for even the simplest sounds. Grafting, a trio for bass clarinet, violin and cello played by Mira Benjamin, Heather Roche and Natasha Zielazinski, might be the most completely realised composition here, with languidly winding melodic fragments surfacing briefly amongst slow, droning notes that are both tender and remote; it ends with a coda that recapitulates the material as a frail impression of its former self. By the time you reach the last piece Field of Play you become aware that the range of sounds has reduced down to a small, softly-lit space, reaching a minimum with this suite for prepared cello. Natasha Zielazinski, credited as co-composer, adds a single object to the strings for each section, muting the pitch and opening up a complex of frictional noise. All sorts of deep sub-tones and hoarse upper partials emerge from Zielazinski’s bowing, sounding as though barely above a whisper but recorded so closely as to seem immense, adding suspense that the delicate sounds may suddenly break. It’s common to describe a work as explorative, but this hushed work comes from a gentle but intense focus on a single spot.

Eldritch Priest: dead-wall reveries [Another Timbre]. A collection of three more pieces by Eldritch Priest, including the promised recording of his string quartet dust breeding performed by Apartment House. When I heard them play it live I was struck by the way each of the seemingly incongruous threads that make up the piece seem to frequently end up chasing their own tails, likening it to “a complex knot, slackened to the point where you can’t tell if grabbing one end will pull it tight or unravel it completely.” Hearing it again now, the emphasis on harmonics and fast, heavily ornamented playing suggest that the work is an alternative interpretation of the string quartet form, transposed to a different order. The high, floating sounds add colour while removing the substance of the pitch, hinting at something transparent which is nevertheless obscured by the layers of filigree. dormitive virtue is a piano piece from 2001, recorded by the composer in his apartment around that time. It’s been heard before as a short track for solo electric guitar on his same-titled album, a collection of “wistul, bluesey jazz rumination”. Here the jazz is less in evidence, as the piano version takes a much longer time, lingering over phrases and repeating chords as though they were echoes, pausing before ready to move on to the next section. Strangely enough, its the earlier, longer take which is the fully composed version; the guitar’s improvisation is a distillation of certain motives and mood. The introspective nature of the solo piano carries over into the other works to some degree. dead-wall reveries continues in his style of angular, discontinuous melodies and antimelodies to construct an ergodic composition that would otherwise seem typical for him, except that in this work the music is cast in a more mellow and vulnerable mien than the usual bluff statements that take on mystifying twists and turns. An ensemble of clarinet, vibraphone, violin, cello and piano (played here by the ensemble Arraymusic) picks its way through a confounding course of contradictory conversation; yet even as it does so seems to reflect upon itself – it never resolves, of course, but it does seem to be reaching some sort of understanding of the situation and adapts its behaviour accordingly. The violin part is the most frequently active, loosing off fast melodic passages charged with nervous energy, or cutting across the other instruments with electronic distortion. All three works find new ways of elaborating upon knots; self-interfering structures that feed upon entropy. Apartment House will also be playing his long, earlier work pleasure drenching… in London later this month.