Mediavolo is a band like no other. Based in Brest, France, they offer insight into the human condition with honest and patient attention. Back in 2014, I interviewed core members Géraldine Le Cocq and Jacques Henry, adding my own throughts on their discography as it then stood. Away Within is their first full-length release since that time, and I was recently honored to write the liner notes for it. The album is available on Bandcamp here. Once you dive in, you’ll never go back…
Although Quint is the second album from Boston-based Shibui, it is also the first in what one hopes will be a longstanding relationship with Ronin Rhythm Records, the label of Nik Bärtsch, whose influence on bandleader Tim Doherty is as obvious as the stars at night (and just as beautiful to regard through the telescope of the ear). The core trio of Doherty on bass and percussion, Curtis Hartshorn on drums, and Céline Ferro on clarinets opens through the inclusion of Bradley Goff on keys, Derek Hayden on marimba (a key timekeeper throughout), and violinist Chris Baum. The latter makes his only appearance on “2.1,” which opens the first of five submarine doors. Through gradual appearances of percussion and bass clarinet, it travels from pianistic sediment to a glittering epipelagic zone. The final five minutes offer a glorious conspectus of the band’s relativity, offering plenty of opportunities for intake.
“2.2” is a chunkier groove, made all the more worthy of our mastication by the savory bass snaking its way throughout, while “2.3” offers a more pleasurable spectrum of delights, especially in the transfigurations of clarinet and piano between solids, liquids, and gases. The resulting states lean more in the direction of ineffability than concretism. Smoother textures await in “2.4,” where arid sands and moist breaths intertwine as equals. The bass is especially present, each note a trunk from which pianistic branches are given room to sprout. The marimba’s echoes tread like creatures too light to sink on water yet too heavy to be carried away by a breeze. Lastly, fluidity is the modus operandi of “2.5.” Here, the impulse to sing is never more than a step out of reach. Gritty electric keys give us a sense of inward focus and emanations of heat, weaving delicate cymbalism through shafts of shadow.
While fans of Bärtsch and other masterless musical samurai will surely rejoice over the rudimentarily numbered set list and modular approach, the uniqueness of vision rendered on Quint urges relistening. Doherty’s compositions are proof that instrumental discourse operates differently from speech. Whereas saying the same word over and over strips that word of meaning, Shibui’s aesthetic enhances clarity with every cycle. It also proves there is no such thing as truly identical reiteration in a world of constantly moving molecules and energies between them.
In an enchanting bit of coincidence, the album’s cover artist, Sevcan Yuksel Henshall, came up with the five circular gestures before even knowing its title. Such confluences are part and parcel of music that lifts the spirit with the same weight so that both appear to float in unison, forever suspended between firmament and fundament.
Quint is available from Bandcamp here.
French vocalist Muriel Louveau understands the human voice is never a solo instrument. It is comprised of flesh and bone, but also of vibration and forces beyond what the body can immediately contain and make sense of. It is simultaneously worldly and divine yet exists without contradiction (save for the words it may force against the grain of truth). Louveau’s voice is, of course, very much her own, but it is also ours the moment she shapes it to fit the contours of poetry. In this case, the words are a soul unto themselves, housed by artist Elizabeth Hayes Christopher, whose imagistic renderings give credence to the side paths we ignore in linear everyday wanderings. Once offered as a sound installation at Five Myles gallery in Brooklyn, these multitracked pieces now live on as five standalone experiences, presented both individually and as an unbroken mix.
In “Rose Light,” a brief speech song that opens the sky like a folding fan, Louveau draws a vocal line through clouds described with tearful honesty. We meet each element of daybreak as if it were a person in need of an embrace. Whether or not we open our arms is ever the challenge of language and sound, in the middle of which we must choose who to serve: the heart or the dust of which it is formed.
Through careful alterations, Louveau reveals hidden layers in her singing, as in the spiritual blues of “Soulhandlips” and the prayerful contours of “Blue Refraction.” In each, she expresses the materiality of things we cannot touch and the ephemerality of things we can. In partnership with Christopher’s insightful realism, she lends folklike qualities to “I meditate wings.” Splashed against a throaty backdrop and tickling the nape of our consciousness, memories of nights that will never be recaptured rush like blood to a head spun in unexpected directions—only here, that feeling is evoked in slow motion. As in “Salamander,” Louveau and Christopher’s hybridization births a third voice of internal flow. Thus, the self expands until every trauma glimmers as a crack in the eggshell of our contentment with the way things are.
Vocalscapes is available on bandcamp here.
Check out my latest review for Sequenza 21 of this long-awaited album from Joe Hisaishi and Deutsche Grammophon. Click the cover to read!
For many, the term “field recording” evokes the greatest hits of natural sounds: ocean waves, rain, and birdsong. Indeed, one of the earliest field recordings dates to 1889, when an eight-year-old Ludwig Koch wax-cylindered the song of a white-rumped shama. In more recent history, anyone of reading age in the heyday of National Geographic may remember Roger Payne’s Songs of the Humpback Whale, inserted as a flexi disc in a collectible 1979 issue. Ten million copies of it were printed—more than any album ever produced in a single run. Payne’s classic and others like it endure for their scientific value, serving as springboards for studies of language and the potential for interspecies communication. They also spawned a robust environmental movement at a time when modernity was threatening to divorce humanity from nature. By the same token, microphones can get too close to their subjects, as in Hans Lichtenecker’s “archive of endangered races,” which documented descendants of the very peoples his comrades slaughtered in German Southwest Africa (what is now Namibia). Even the most benign anthropological motivations have fallen under retrospective scrutiny.
I will not be reviewing such projects here. Instead, I wish to examine—and, I hope, bring fresh ears to—a visceral stream of experimental field recordings. While tracing the origins of such an amorphous category can be difficult, an indisputable pioneer is Jeph Jerman, whose seminal work tops the list below. Kindred visionaries in this sphere of influence include Francisco López, Alan Lamb, and John Tulchin. I highlight their endeavors, subjective as my favorites among them are, in the interest of expanding their embrace of sameness through difference.
These recordings constitute a form of sonic travel to worlds at once internal and distant. Some are spliced and collaged within compositional frameworks in tandem with electronic and acoustic instruments, others manipulated beyond recognition, and still others presented as they are—but always with an aesthetic in mind, even if that aesthetic is simply to let sounds “happen.” Their significance cannot be overstated—not because they represent an overarching artistic ethos but precisely because they shun that motivation in favor of genuinely borderless spaces. It’s not often we can listen to a corpus of sounds without transfusing the blood of our politics and ideologies into it. Here, we can. Such comfort means more than ever in a world on its knees, wondering whether the healing will begin.
Jeph Jerman: Early Recordings ’81-’85
Also known by the moniker Hands To, Jeph Jerman first set out with his cheap cassette deck in the 1980s to document the act of listening while questioning its practices and apparatuses. What continues to fascinate about his recordings is how raw and curated they feel. And while some of his most unadulterated work (e.g., Beach Tree and Birds, 2001, A Pyrrhic Victory) is woefully difficult to track down, this compilation of early recordings is a grounded place to start. Lo-fi swaths of mostly industrial settings (e.g., “Metal Fabricating Shop, Colorado Springs”) reveal an unimaginable depth in the mundane.
Alan Lamb: Archival Recordings: Primal Image/Beauty
In 1976, Australian biomedical research scientist Alan Lamb first discovered the abandoned stretch of telephone wires that would define his artistic endeavors to come. Dubbed the Faraway Wind Organ, this massive vibrating skeleton loosed eerie songs at the touch of an air current, echoing since his childhood into a mature desire to record them. That he did, often for hours at a time, assembling choice passages into this otherworldly diptych. Whether whispering the mantras of uninhabited terrain or choiring like a Glenn Branca symphony, these requiems step out of time and ooze their way into the bloodstream.
Maggi Payne: Ping/Pong: Beyond The Pail
Maggi Payne is a venerated composer and multimedia artist whose output has largely focused on electro-acoustic constructions. Her field recordings of “dry ice, space transmissions, BART trains, and poor plumbing” congregated to astounding effect on 2010’s Arctic Winds, but 2003’s Ping/Pong: Beyond The Pail preserved another level of intimacy. Its two 30-minute tracks, recorded in a galvanized steel pail, offer complementary experiences of rainfall through the intermediary of the album’s eponymous vessel. The first catches the rain openly, while the second inverts the pail for a drum-like effect, sealing us in a metallic chamber without excuse for distraction.
John Tulchin: Location Recordings
This collection’s first track, “Fire Alarm From A Distance (Winter Park, FL.),” is indicative of John Tulchin’s questing spirit. It’s also one of the most haunting field recordings in readily available form and an entry into an album unlike any other. The pragmatic titles—“Metal Structure In The Desert (Dead Horse Ranch, AZ.),” “Log Partially Submerged In Water (Seattle, WA.),” etc.— only deepen the possibilities of interpreting them. Somehow, knowing what we are hearing makes it clear how much we miss. Thankfully, we have Tulchin to fill in those gaps with heartfelt portraits of time incarnate.
Quiet American: Plumbing And Irrigation Of South Asia
Quiet American, an homage to the novel by Graham Greene, is the sound manipulation project of San Francisco Bay Area artist Aaron Ximm. Plumbing And Irrigation Of South Asia is at once exactly what it sounds like and something else entirely. Nominally, it is a vast collection of field recordings of various community fixtures, such as a drainage pipe in Madikeri (India), a water pump in Khulna (Bangladesh), and a toilet in Kathmandu (Nepal). Other locations include Vietnam, Burma, Laos, and China. Beyond that, it is an unassuming travelogue filtered through the mesh of a respectful phonographic memory.
Jgrzinich: Insular Regions
John Grzinich is a sculptor combining found sounds and instruments of his own design. For this 2005 release, he gathered personal impressions of Mooste, a rural Estonian village. Insular Regions is among the more tactile albums in this guide’s category of interest. Its resonant intersections of wood, wind, and wire feel like a portal into another dimension. And yet, we are constantly reminded of their fleshly purview, which Grzinich sees no reason to hide. What we hear is what we get, even when we know it has been transformed through technology, because every electrical circuit runs on our conductivity.
Loren Chasse: Synthesis of Neglected Places
Loren Chasse is a humble public school teacher in San Francisco who seems never to have lost that childlike wonder for the world around him. Synthesis of Neglected Places was originally produced as a cassette in 1998 by the Unique Ancient Tavern label. Over the course of eight parts, it lives out every moment in the full knowledge that the act of recording will change its genetic makeup. As Chasse’s most crepuscular album, it speaks in tongues of light and shadow in equal measure, drawing out tasteful keyboard touches as if from within.
Loren Chasse: The Air In The Sand
Loren Chasse leaves behind precious recollections of experiences you never knew you had. That such dreamlike qualities are elicited from unabashed reality sets his work apart. The Air In The Sand shares the spirit of 2002’s Hedge of Nerves, which meshed the crackle of vinyl with sounds of the elements, expanding that aesthetic to welcome wider-reaching absorptions. By revealing the natural in the artificial and vice versa, he pays deference to the molecules common to all matter, guiding them in chorus even as they lead him in kind to voices hibernating until they can be amplified.
Click on the sub-cover titles below to see my reviews of other vital albums in this loosely allied genre.
Francisco López: Addy En El País De Las Frutas Y Los Chunches
Eric La Casa: The Stones Of The Threshold
David Dunn: The Sound of Light in the Trees
Lionel Marchetti: Portrait d’un glacier
Jonathan Coleclough/Murmer: Husk
When using the word “inspire” today, we tend to think of it from an emotional perspective. If you look it up in a dictionary, however, you will find that it also means to inhale (think of it as a combination of “in” and “respire”). In that sense, the music documented on Medna Roso, the third and latest release on producer Sun Chung’s Red Hook Records, is inspired in the most physical way one could imagine. Recorded live at Cologne’s Agneskirche in the summer of 2021, and meshing the voices of Kit Downes (organ), Hayden Chisholm (alto saxophone, shruti box, analogue synthesizer, and throat singing), and Zagreb-based female vocal quintet PJEV, the program resituates songs from the Balkans, cultivating endangered traditions in the foreground of our attention in search of new growth.
Downes’s organ is firmament in which the album’s breaths flow from the pursed lips of invisible ancestors. The pipes, resonant and harmonic by virtue of their location, feel omnipresent—never close enough to touch yet never far enough to deny. What begins as a statement of heavenly creation reveals an earthly heart as PJEV churns the soil of “Listaj goro ne žali be’ara” (Bloom you mountain, don’t regret the blooming flowers). In combination with the subsequent “Ova brda i puste doline” (These hills and desolate valleys), it captures the carelessness of youth and the darker realities of adulthood. The titular landscapes and their features are the measures of a contemplation that pales in scope, always struggling to evoke the majesty of a universe so vast that, ultimately, death is required to comprehend it.
The ensuing journey takes us two steps inward for each outward. Through the solo strains of “Što si setna, nevesela” (Why are you sad and cheerless?) floating over a gong-like substrate, the haunting call and response of “Odkad seke nismo zapjevale” (Since when sisters, we haven’t sung), and the a capella “Službu služi viden dobar junak” (Been in service, a good hero), in which the singers hinge themselves in a massive temporal pivot, we can feel the immensity of things.
Connecting these songs are six instrumental interludes where the divisions of reed, metal, and breath melt in the crucible of singularity. The resulting alloy looks like silver, tastes like copper, sounds like gold. As with the throat singing that sometimes escapes Chisholm’s lips, it trembles in the presence of something formless. Settling beneath the weight of our transgressions, it takes shape in the listening while the terror and fury of nature, but also its quiet invitation, attune us for the time being—because time is only being.
Two Centuries is the second album from former ECM producer Sun Chung’s Red Hook label and may one day be regarded as its most defining release. As electronic musician Qasim Naqvi, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and drummer Andrew Cyrille put 11 of Naqvi’s tunes under their triangular microscope, the cells of our listening are magnified.
“For D.F.” opens with a political charge. Written for Darnella Frazier, who captured George Floyd’s murder, it uses distortions to evoke the white noise of our collective trauma. As subtle as this music is, with its near-comforting swells and honest lyricism, it offers not a moment of reflection but the reflection of a moment, a vivid gaze at a life lost on the brink of a society in turmoil. This is, perhaps, the deepest nuance of the titular centuries, the dividing line of which is drawn not numerically but on the shifting sands of justice.
What follows is a veritable tilling of melodies made possible as much through listening as playing. The foundation is often forged between Cyrille’s tools and Naqvi’s febrile choices of color. In fortifying each for harvest, they dip into disparate references. Hear, for example, the influence of Bryn Jones in “Sadden Upbeat,” while “Tympanic” recalls Sofia Gubaidulina’s String Quartet No. 4.
Contrasts in mood abound, ranging from sunlit (“Palaver”) to brooding (“Wraith”). “Bypass Decay” is of special note, chugging like a train against (and ultimately losing to) an encroaching night. Throughout, Smith speaks (e.g., “Spiritual is 150”) and sings (e.g., “Organum”) in equal measure, but always with a message to convey in the role of griot, reminding us of something spiritual, though severed from any particular tradition. As is evident in “Orion Ave,” where the free-floating hymn reigns supreme, faith walks these empty streets alone, trailing its shadow like a burden of care.
“What is grief? Can only the sun name its layers?” So writes Edie Meidav in her lyric novel, Another Love Discourse. What the author soliloquizes through words on a page, Portland, Oregon-based electronic musician Patricia Wolf actualizes through synthesizers, algorithms, and the emotional transistor of her own throat and lungs. Written and recorded in 2020 following the loss of her mother-in-law and a close friend, I’ll Look For You In Others treats the interface of flesh and technology as a force to birth something meaningful in the wake of deaths that may feel meaningless.
These messages activate every molecule of “Distant Memory,” which in its first breaths betrays the oxymoron of its title: No matter how distant a memory may seem, it is always nearer to us than any external trigger. Memories are as much a part of us as the oxygen and neurons that complicate them, and I cannot walk through this music without feeling accompanied by the echo of a past self who knew no better than to live as if mortality were a tragic lie. Every swell, pulled from the corona of active denial, finds its way into acceptance. And yet, “The Culmination Of” reminds me of the darker times when solitude cultivates necessary mourning beyond the prying eyes of those who care a little too much. Here, as in the title track and “Severed,” the human voice sheds its communicative uniform in favor of raw expression.
It’s a stark reminder that even if we haven’t lost someone directly over the past three years, the pandemic has turned us all into targets of its burning arrows. In the eyes of a virus, there is no parsing of memories into categories to be filed until we are ready to reckon them. Rather, it destroys what it can, mutating when it can’t, and scars the skins of souls. Such is the tenor of “Funeral,” in which an organ bleeds across the floor of a chambered heart, even as the light of dawn cracks a smile through tear-stained windows. And though we are left to wander with only pieces to show for our future, “Recombination” is possible with that near-magical glue of cohesion: time.
In the same way that the absence of bodies magnifies the presence of spirits, “Lay to Rest” throws a handful of slow-motion dust onto the coffin in emphasis of the bereaved funneling its descent. And while “Letting Go” promises closure, it may just be another link in the chain that binds the living and the dead. If anything, loss is an opportunity, and an opportunity is a portal of transformation. We cannot go through Wolf’s journey without being changed, knowing that loss has sewn its threads through all of us.
To quote Meidav again: “On the wheel of feelings, is wonder the true antonym of grief?” If so, this album is a wonder of healing at a time when the world itself has been reduced to an ailing organism in more ways than one. Let it hold you close, never letting go until your cheeks are dry.
I’ll Look For You In Others is available on bandcamp here.
Soprano Maacha Deubner, whose voice has graced such masterpieces as Giya Kancheli’s Exil, folds her operatic pleats into the tapestry of the KAPmodern-Ensemble in a program of latter-day chamber music. Bessonnitsa is Russian for “insomnia” and points both to an overarching theme and to Valentin Silvestrov’s eponymous piece for soprano and piano. Reminiscent of Francis Poulenc’s songs, it is the album’s crown jewel. Its flowing sense of time and evocation is like a storm turning into ocean and touching the shore with its final breath. One can also trace a line of continuity between this and Edison Denisov’s At the Turning Point for soprano and piano (1979), a set of temporally brief yet spiritually far-reaching evocations of flesh and word in a self-shadowing mode. Deubner navigates them as one might tell the story of their life.
Sofia Gubaidulina’s Brief an die Dichterin Rimma Dalos for soprano and violoncello (1985) begins with the solo voice, floating yet carrying the weight of a monument carved in time. “My soul is a Sphinx,” she sings as if to give that monument a name, setting the immaterial self upon an altar of ruins and unfinished verses. The words come from writer Rimma Dalos, whose texts have also been lovingly set by Hungarian composer György Kurtág. Gubaidulina’s approach, however, is never so compact, as proven by the solo cello commentary that follows.
Most of the pieces here belong to the mind and heart of Elena Firsova, for whom the poetry of Ossip Mandelstam (1891-1938) is a touchstone. Sorrows (Tristia II), op. 145 (2013) carries over the same scoring from Gubaudulina’s contribution and bears a dedication to Deubner. The music is at once a reflection of and counterpoint to the poetry, which looks deep into the night to uncover its many layers of shadow:
Who knows, when the word ‘departure’ is spoken
what kind of separation is at hand.
Such words point not to dialogue but to prayers walking parallel paths. They can see but not hear each other, ever caught in cycles of pain and healing.
In Towards the Starlight for soprano and string quartet (2017), receiving its world premiere recording, we have a different side of Mandelstam. Whereas in Sorrows he praised the uninterrupted life, now we get:
I hate the starlight’s
monotonous spectrum.
Such is the duality of consciousness. In the second movement, “How slow the horses go,” we encounter a more sorrowful glow. The poet sees things he cannot see, speaks of things that have no voice. Cello and soprano engage in subliminal communication as delicate pizzicato and high strains give way to flowers of darkness. In the final movement, lyrical self-deprecation:
To read only children’s books,
To cherish only children’s thoughts.
Yet another facet of Mandelstam catches the light of From the Voronezh Notebooks, op. 121 (2009). This cantata, also for soprano and string quartet, moves into organic textures following a nervous prelude. From the raindrops dripping from leaves in “Greens” and the pouncing delicacy of “A Cat” to the frantic trajectories of “In the Sky” and the final “Madness,” fear is never far behind. Deubner expresses these states of mind with lucid projection.
Peppered among Firsova’s more substantial assemblies are three monologues, of which Starry Flute, op. 56 (1992) is the most intimate. Dedicated to the late Aurèle Nicolet, it captures the brilliant flutist’s penchant for extended techniques, each of which naturally extends the breath. Sustained notes float as if made of vapor (and indeed, that is what our life can only be), so that by the end, we are left in stasis with memories of those enchantments now wilting in the hot sun of reality.
Taking account of these works in the aggregate, I am inclined to treat them as a face seen from different angles of light. It smiles and frowns, sleeps and awakes, screams and whispers, showing us that the continuity between states of mind is where our existence is defined.
Between Sound and Space: ECM Records and Beyond 