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Some more of my short reviews in this month’s Liminal Minimals: Vieux Farka Toure, The Caretaker, Ollie Bown/Brigid Burke, Richard A Ingram, Khyam Allami, Huntsville, and Tuusuunuskat. Read them here.
During the opening night of this two week-long Sound And Music-presented Triptych series on the work of the French minimalist composer Eliane Radigue, her archivist and collaborator Emmanuel Holterbach was discussing the young Radigue’s interest in classical music. In what seemed like a fairly throwaway remark at the time, he mentioned that she was particularly fascinated by the pieces between movements. While he was talking about intersections, overlaps and cross fades in a very specific sense, the notion of transformation from one state to another is one that has huge resonance when discussing the work of Radigue. Having experienced a number of the Triptych shows, it is clear that the idea of transformation is not only relevant in the technical sense of how she has produced her own music over the last forty-plus years, but also in a more personal, and spiritual sense. Read the rest of this post at The Liminal.
(photo credit: Alex Delfanne.)
The notion of an instrument that is up to 31 metres in length may seem slightly preposterous at first, but there is a lot of logic to what Ellen Fullman is doing, and it fits neatly into a continuum of twentieth century music. Like Harry Partch, she invented an instrument that could realise her precise musical vision. She began work on her Long Stringed Instrument, which comprises dozens of strings stretched out over a space, and played with rosin-coated fingers, in 1981. This was a few years after Alvin Lucier recorded his Music For A Long Thin Wire, but Fullman takes the idea much much further. Read the rest of this review over at The Liminal.
In a Q&A before this show, Splashgirl pianist Andreas Stensland Løwe was, in a quiet and unassuming way, making the point that his music was not jazz. Indeed, the band’s biography cites their primary influences as being the likes of Earth and Sunn O))). Their new album Pressure has in fact been produced by Randall Dunn, who did likewise on the most recent albums by those two bands, The Bees Made Honey In The Lion’s Skull, and Monoliths and Dimensions respectively. But listening to the young, softly spoken, smartly dressed Løwe, you couldn’t help but doubt that he was about to start shredding some black metal drone. If he was about to tear up the jazz rule book, the Pizza Express Jazz Club would probably have been an odd place to start. Read the rest of this post over at The Liminal. (photo by Tim Ferguson)
This event wasn’t originally due to be held at Cafe Oto, but in Bush Hall on the other side of town. Would such a stately venue, with its elaborate Edwardian plasterwork and ornate chandeliers, have been any place for a band like Æthenor? Its members – Stephen O’Malley, Daniel O’Sullivan, Kristoffer Rygg and Steve Noble – may draw from genres as disparate as jazz, metal, prog rock, and electronic music, but they are essentially an experimental music band, and one increasingly drawn to the idea of live improvisation, and as such it felt right that they played at London’s improvised music venue Cafe Oto, with its pockmarked concrete floors and single 60 watt lightbulb swinging above the stage. Read the rest of this post at The Liminal.
Cross-pollination is the germination of one species using seed from another. More specifically, the name of this album comes from an event that was held on the South Bank a couple of years back, which sought to combine human voices with the sounds of insects to produce new musical hybrids. As part of this, the sound recordist Chris Watson and the composer Marcus Davidson created ‘The Bee Symphony’, which took recordings Watson and Touch’s Mike Harding had made at bee hives, and set them in a choral context. The production of this piece came at a time of increased focus on the relationship between bees and humans, thanks to the worldwide spread of Colony Collapse Disorder, the causes of which are still unclear, but which are more than likely man-made. A quote is famously (if perhaps erroneously) attributed to Albert Einstein in which he was purported to have claimed that if bees were to entirely disappear from the planet, then humans would be extinct within four years. Without their role in the pollination process, the plants which we rely on for food (or to feed the animals we rely on for food) could die out, with terrible consequences. It is an extreme example of how one species can not just make convenient use of another to prolong the life of its genetic material, but actually be entirely dependent on another for its continuation. Read the rest of this review at The Liminal.
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