Constructions I - IV

text

Since 1997's Alterstill, London-based composer John Wall has been slowly building one of the most unique - and important - bodies of work in contemporary electronic composition. Wall's modus operandi has seen him classed a "sampling composer". Descriptively speaking, this is accurate enough; John captures tiny moments (what he terms "fragments") from other work, then collages entirely new work from them. In that sense, then, yes, John can be compared to David Shea and Christian Marclay and John Oswald and SH&W and... well, you get the picture. But that hardly begins to describe the results at all. In fact, since the previous album on Wall's own Utterpsalm Records, Fractuur, Wall has been increasingly sampling from work he himself has recorded. Accordingly, Constructions I-IV, sees the contributions of bassist John Edwards and percussionist Mark Sanders, as well as those of clarinetist Andrew Sparling, cellist Mark Wastell and trumpeter Axel Dorner, sitting right alongside elements taken from - among others - Ikeda, Birtwistle, Kagel and Penderecki. What Wall does with all this stuff, though, is utterly unique. If I had to use one word to define Wall's work, it would be "narrative". For while his is highly abstract work - largely bereft of steady pulse, tonal centre, you name it - it nonetheless always tells some kind of story. At the end of one of John's pieces you feel like you've been somewhere. It is, to put it bluntly, extremely COMPOSED, and that alone marks it out from the more improvised approached of most of his peers. There's no question with his work that every sound is exactly where John wanted it. Which isn't to say that he's at all standing still. Indeed, sonically speaking, Constructions is lightyears away from its predecessors. For where Fractuur and Alterstill were both marked by a certain lushness in their sound sources, here Wall's palette is extremely harsh: with extreme frequencies, grating textures and sudden outbreaks of violently jerking rhythm. Wall's also caught the glitching bug. But his use of that little digital accident is as startling and unique as Oval's was back on 94 Diskont (which isn't to say that I wasn't wary of it at first, but as a composer who works over months and years, Wall can hardly be blamed if one of his working methods becomes fashionable with the conceptually-challenged). I suspect this new direction in Wall's work will win him new fans - it takes a certain degree of masochism to listen to this really closely, and there's never a short supply of "new music" fans who mistake endurance for close attention. I just hope that they get the rest of what John is trying to achieve. Wall has begun to take this music to a live audience, using Sanders and Edwards to improvise along to backing tapes made from these pieces. It'll be interesting to see how this feeds back into new work. I, for one, will be paying close attention.