hilary robinson

The Catacombs of Yucatan

[ review of: The Catacombs of Yucatan by Dan Senn (CD Album) ]

Given a cursory glance at the spindly wires and suspended metal serving platters of the Shmoos, Too Flutter and Penduling in The Catacombs of Yucatan's liner photos, you might be forgiven for wondering whether they were rescued from a sixties sci-fi movie set. But Dan Senn, creator of these beautifully intricate "sculptural instruments", is neither a kitsch fetishist nor a mad inventor: he is a professor of music and sculpture, veteran of dozens of installations, composer, performer, video artist, and even a potter. Senn's instrumental designs are informed by raku, an ancient Japanese ceramics method that gives unpredictable results, and like Paul Panhuysen, whose long string installations inhabit similar audio-visual territory to the sculptural instruments, Senn favours the incorporation of automatons which allow his instruments to sound by themselves with little or no human intervention.

Therefore, the prominence of chance in Senn's aesthetic makes it unsurprising that "found objects" appear amongst the instruments' components, or that the opening track, Hands Off Coursing, itself originated as a "found" composition that Senn captured on tape when he came across his Shmoos Harp unexpectedly playing on its own. In Hands Off Coursing, the gentle hum of the Shmoos Harp's soft feedback tones is used as a smooth, flat acoustic surface across which the jangling interjections of the Too Flutter - an instrument comprising paper-winged metal washers that spin freely down vertical metal rods - clatter repeatedly. The carefully-mixed spatial elements of this piece, recorded live, demand your best headphones.

Following the soft/hard contrast and tonal clarity of Hands Off Coursing, the Fayfer Harp ("Fayfer" is Yiddish for nervous whistler) delivers a spiky sonic cocktail of steely scraped and twisted sounds, rasps, and pizzicato plinks in Eight Ways to Fix a Windmill. Tempting as it is to explain the piece in programmatic terms, the improvisations prompted the title post-recording rather than the other way around, though as titles go, they don't come much more descriptive than this.

Of an entirely different scale and scope, The Catacombs of Yucatan is one of several substantial offshoots of an installation Senn put together in a Minnesota limestone cave which was used as a dance hall for a brief period in the 1930s. (For more information on this and Senn's other "percussive video" installations, see his fascinating website.) Senn used video-taped interviews with former employees of the Catacombs as the basic fabric of the work; these stories were interwoven with the sounds of carefully-selected sculptural instruments to create an evocative text-sound narrative. Unlike other highly manipulated text-sound works with similar expressive aims such as Steve Reich's Different Trains, The Catacombs of Yucatan preserves the integrity of each individual contribution. The result is poignant, accessible and completely unpretentious.

Finally, this wide-ranging album ends on a tongue-in-cheek note with Toons After Noon, five miniatures improvised on the Bass Shmoos. The eyebrow-raising titles aroused (if that's an appropriate choice of word) by the emissions of the Bass Shmoos include the hilarious Trucker Sex, all leather seats, creaking chassis and low baritone grunts, and the oscillating whine that flaccidly trails off to nothing of Boner Drone. Your encounter with Dan Senn's sculptural instruments on The Catacombs of Yucatan is guaranteed to be an enjoyable, engaging and stimulating ear-opener.
Posted by hilary robinson at 00:00, 24 Nov 2000

Burning Water

[ review of: Burning Water by Martin Bartlett (CD Album) ]

During the seventies and eighties, efforts to advance live electronics pushed composers and technicians on both sides of the Atlantic to develop music software capable of responding to the nuances of live instrumental performance as well as generating music by itself. Interactive systems promised players a partial release from the tyranny of the click-track (a pulse communicated through headphones to keep performers in time with a running tape and/or each other) and audiences a truer, "liver" edge to that awkwardly unfocused event, the electronic music concert. But what did composers themselves do with the technology?

IRCAM spearheaded the evolution of interactive electronics in Europe, and what emerged from that hallowed Parisian bunker was, predictably, something that sounded like a product of IRCAM (a noteworthy example being Pluton by Philippe Manoury, for MIDI piano and live electronics). However, over on the Pacific Coast, the aesthetic possibilities of interactive software went hand in glove with a contemporary blurring of composer-performer roles and it was here that Martin Bartlett began devising his own interactive systems through tinkering with primitive PCs and dedicated synthesisers in a quintessentially West Coast spirit of discovery. Three of the strikingly vivid improvisatory electro-acoustic works his innovations led to are showcased on this Periplum disc, to my knowledge one of only two complete Bartlett collections currently available on CD.

It kicks off with the ever-widening swirls of "Hexachords" (1984), an alluringly pied-piperish amalgam of Peter Hannan's plaintive soprano recorder improvisations with Bartlett's metallic, fluty microtonal electronics. I was entranced by "Hexachords" after a single hearing, on Periplum producer Herb Levy's excellent Mappings Internet radio show. Next, the first of two (highly distinct) versions of "États", for trombone and live electronics (1987), pitches soloist George Lewis into a dialogue with the software. Lewis responds to images on a monitor indicating what sort of musical material his electronic duo partner "likes" in an amusingly flatulent thumbing of noses, by turns humorous and sinister.

The centrepiece of the disc is the vital, fluid "Burning Water" (1979) for computer-controlled live electronics manipulated by the composer. "Burning Water" is intense, concentrated music drawn from the same textural palette as "Hexachords", burbling with incessant motion and harmonic freshness. The final track, a second, more spacious rendering of "États" (chronologically the first recording of the piece here), features cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, with whom Bartlett worked during a residency in Amsterdam. Uitti gives an extraordinarily sensitive account tinged with delicate nostalgia, fascinatingly unlike its trombone equivalent, which serves as a poignant reminder that Bartlett meant his works to be performed as living creations, not fossilised on tape. As such, his premature death in 1993, to quote Matt Rogalsky in the informative liners, leaves his oeuvre in a state of "suspended animation", awaiting rescue and reconstruction by the early music societies of the future. Rogalsky's advice, which I second, is that we enjoy and learn from what we have now. It's a treasure, and for anyone curious about the twentieth-century's more liberated and colourful electro-acoustic explorations, I'd call it required listening.
Posted by hilary robinson at 00:00, 25 Sep 2000

Chamber Music

[ review of: Chamber Music by Michel van der Aa (CD Album) ]

Michel van der Aa attracted attention last year as the first Dutchman in a generation to score a home win with that most coveted of awards for composers under 30, the Gaudeamus Prize. Already fairly well-established as a collaborator on several multimedia and dance projects, Van der Aa was an appropriate choice, given the inclusive mood of the moment in mainstream art music circles (or any art circles in which interesting things are happening, for that matter). The gradual shift of performances out of concert halls into less exclusive, and some would say less effete, spaces has been occurring for years in the Netherlands, if only recently catching on elsewhere in Europe. That said, the chamber pieces on this disc would sound equally at home in either the concert hall or "alternative" spaces (Between, the prize-winning work, has been performed in both; latterly in Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum). Kicking off the recording is Auburn for guitar and tape (1997), an obviously affectionate paean to the composer's own instrument in which various musical and emotive characteristics associated with the guitar - Spanish-tinged plaintiveness, the rhythmic impetus of strummed chords, percussive bumps and squeaks, to name but a few - are reflected and refracted through a tape part that functions as an acoustic hall of mirrors. Van der Aa favours a pointillist, moment-by-moment focus on fragments of altering texture; this avoidance of linearity is also crucial to the success of the multidimensional Between (1997) for percussion quartet and tape. Here the composer, through M. C. Escher-esque tinkering, fashions a kind of virtual musical space by first splitting his taped percussion sonorities into brittle shards of sound, then levering the percussion ensemble's music in between them (hence the title). This process, with a leap of the imagination, allows the rendering in time of an object that exists in space, though I had to go to the composer's website to discover this information (which could perhaps have been included in the liner?) and to learn that the object in question is an extraordinary multifaceted Chinese ivory ball. Between is immensely attractive music, but this manipulation of musical and temporal dimensions is what makes it remarkable music. Double (1997) for piano and violin, after a Feldmanesque start, breaks into a chase between the instruments that compels the violin to scuttle away from the piano's sinister percussive knocks and bumps in a flurry of repeated figures. Similarly, the interplay of instruments in the taut, enigmatic Oog (1995) for cello and tape threatens to become a skirmish rather than a dialogue, if an entertaining one full of unexpected manoeuvres. Dormant, in the shade of the big blue (1993) for clarinet, guitar and cello offers an easygoing, laid-back contrast to its predecessors, while the penultimate work, Wake (1997) is a straight-up percussion solo with a twist (missed on the recording - the entire piece should be mimed on stage by a second, silent percussionist). An unadorned soprano voice, recalling moments in the oeuvre of Van der Aa's teacher, Louis Andriessen, distantly intones a poem on Stilte (1994, meaning silence in Dutch) over a desolate background of electronically-treated sounds from a hospital cancer ward, drawing this disc of fresh, finely-detailed and inventive music to a poignant close.

Posted by hilary robinson at 00:00, 12 May 2000