Taking the Temperature...

Fergus Kelly is an important figure in the world of Irish experimental music, both as a performer (often on the delightfully named 'Cabinet of Curiosities"), and as a sound artist and composer. He also maintains the Room Temperature label as a vehicle for documenting his work, often featuring releases with David Lacey, Dennis McNulty, and Paul Vogel, and proving that Irish artists can more than hold their own among the big boys (and girls) of international improv. (See here for more details.) I recently obtained two CDs from Room Temperature, a live set with the above-mentioned quartet (Trinity College Chapel 8 October 2005) and and a set of what you could describe of sculpted field recordings made in ex-Guinness sites in Dublin, Material Evidence. (Might I comment at this stage that Kelly designs his own releases, and does a fine job of it as well? I particularly like Material Evidence, a 3"CD; both can be seen at the website.) (On a related note, can I point out that I'm starting to develop a great fondness for 3" CDs? I love their dinky size, along with the fact that they provide a quickly digested alternative to the full-length CD and are thus a great way of sampling an artist's work, as well as highlighting excellent short pieces without the necessity for extra filler. I recently received some 3"CDs from the Compost & Height label which, in addition to showcasing fine music (I particularly like Gino Robair's two "Norwich Fragments"; as well as being abrasive yet controlled and powerful percussive music which, although only lasting five minutes each, I could have listened to for hours, they have a wonderfully evocative title that sounds like a lost Lovecraft story) are beautifully packaged: a small wooden block wrapped in plastic, in which sits a bone-white tiny CD. Although poverty prohibits me from splurging on CDs of any size, I would hope that I can afford to pick up some more of these in the near future!)

But enough rambling. Kelly's Material Evidence is, as stated earlier, made up of sounds recorded "in ex-Guinness sites in Crane Street and Watling Street in Dublin..." and arranged into three tracks, two little vignettes "Ullage" and "Dregs" (the former is only a minute long!) and one lengthy beast: "Grist", which opens the CD and clocks in at over 15 minutes. Now, as a person who has always had a fascination with crumbling, abandoned industrial sites, finding in them a strange melancholy poetry of rust and silence, these tracks were music to my ears in more ways than one! I'm not sure how much alteration has been made to the original recordings made in the sites; clearly they've been processed and "arranged", but they never sound forced or artificial. In "Grist" Kelly has constructed a wonderfully varied and imaginative soundworld, transforming from turbulent clangorous mayhem, as a torrent of crashes, scrapes and bangs erupt out of the speakers, to a more subdued, sparse place where individual sounds can be savoured more easily. There is a great feeling of freedom and spontaneity, a liveliness, which such music can sometimes lack if the sounds are overly processed and forced to sound like "music". One thing I must comment on is the sense of space, movement and texture which Kelly creates; one can really sense the damp, cavernous warehouse, cluttered with dented barrels and whatnot, that one could hear these sounds in. Fine stuff indeed (even for those not overly partial to the sound of scraping metal!). "Ullage", a very brief percussive piece, provides a breather after "Grist", and the final piece, "Dregs" is a quieter, almost delicate (comparatively speaking) composition which rounds out the CD nicely. Highly recommended (and reasonably priced, too!).

Trinity College Chapel 8 October 2005 is a live set recorded in the eponymous venue and consists of one 35-minute track, a group improvisation which ebbs and flows from muted, spectral sounds (very suited to the tradition-soaked environment in which the music was played), to powerful, surging attacks, featuring the kind of control and invention which one would expect from these performers (joined twice by an uncredited police siren at two points in the performance; interesting, it fits rather nicely! There's also a very curious section at the end where we hear what sounds like someone playing a short tune on a ghostly synthesiser, backed by scratchy electronic muttering which, when I first heard it, sounded very like the audience laughing. I say curious because, to my ear, it seems weirdly out-of-place with the rest of the performance). Oddly, though, while I think this performance is very fine and at times beautiful, for some reason it doesn't involve me in the way that other music by these and similar performers does. Perhaps "uninvolving" is the wrong word - I think "hermetic" might be a little closer to how this music sounds to me, like watching a remarkable foreign film sans subtitles. I'm not sure why, and I wonder if hearing it in the setting on the CD cover (dark, wood-panelled, baroque, and heavy with tradition) would give a deeper understanding of the music. I could put this record on in six months and be utterly mesmerised, clutching my hair and wailing, "what! was! I! thinking! when I wrote that this music left me somewhat indifferent!" (Don't laugh: it's happened before, and with records that I initially reacted to with considerably more hostility than this one. And if it does, I'll write an updated review!) I hope the above doesn't put any potential buyers off purchasing the CD, though: I'd love to hear an alternate reaction, and it is, despite my reservations, well worth seeking out. I'm certainly going to be ordering more from Room Temperature, and I hope that others would join me, and support their local composers!

Here's a recent performance from Kelly (with Max Eastley and Mark Wastell in London). Enjoy!

Gráinne Mulvey: ‘Agglomeration’

Tucked away near the splendid pile of Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin is the small building which contains the Contemporary Music Centre, a repository of all that is wonderful in modern Irish composing. For those of you who, like myself, are far from the capital, they have an invaluable website here, which contains both a wealth of information and a handy concert calendar. “But I’m (largely) unfamiliar with the music they recommend,” you may cry! Have no fear: the centre has also released a series of CDs which showcase the work of practically anyone who’s anyone in the ‘scene’, and can be obtained for free! Plus a small charge for postage! It’s a small price to pay! I’d never realised there were so many people I’d never heard of! (Something I am vigorously rectifying even as we speak...)
I apologise for the flippancy, but it’s a sad fact that in Ireland, with a few exceptions such as Raymond Deane, Roger Doyle, and Ian Wilson, contemporary composition is up there with contemporary dance as the art form most ignored by the general public. If you doubt this, go the section labelled ‘Irish Music’ in your local CD emporium and see if, among the many fine traditional albums and the somewhat less noble Declan Nerney or Big Tom releases [author pauses as a shudder racks his scrawny frame], any of the names of any of the composers on any of the CMC CDs can be found therein. And one of them is Gráinne Mulvey, whose piece 'Agglomeration', composed in 2007 and premiered by the Concorde ensemble, is the subject of the following appreciation. More information, and lots of examples of her music, can be found at her website here.
The piece is scored for violin, cello, accordion, clarinet and bass clarinet (handled by one performer) (the two horns, not the whole ensemble; it’s not a one-man band!), and the title means “1) the action or process of collecting in a mass; 2) a heap or cluster of usually disparate elements” (according to Webster’s online dictionary). This alone should be a key as to where Mulvey’s influences lie; the concept of masses and clusters of sound is one that I would associate with composers such as Iannis Xenakis and Gyorgy Ligeti and indeed a cursory listen to her orchestral music will show the influence of the Greek (always a plus for me, as I’m a huge fan of his violent, densely textured sonic structures). Although it starts quietly, with distant strings scratching (sounding a lot like cats fighting way off) it soon brings us on a turbulent, at times abrasive, journey, with the strings scrabbling away furiously and at times creating a wonderful sawing rhythm while the various clarinets wail hoarsely like wounded animals. But while there is a lot of abstraction here, Mulvey works in moments of remarkable melodic beauty, taking the edge off the violence and creating a powerfully emotive listening experience. While for me the sense of the title becomes apparent as you listen, for the performers build up masses of criss-crossing sound which come together and break apart in an agglomerating process, I also wonder if the piece is referencing (agglomerating?) snippets of other works and styles and combining them in odd ways – the opening is certainly very clearly evoking Ligeti – but once again I must leave more seasoned ears than mine to confirm this. I played this piece to my partner last night, and when it finishes she commented that while she doesn’t particularly like such music (her heart remains with Mozart and Mahler!) she thought that it was strong stuff: involving, imaginatively arranged, well structured, and with a sure handling of the instrumentation, pulling forth a wide variety of colours and texture from the limited palette. Or, as she put it, “this person understands how music works” (in the sense that, while anyone with the right education can construct a composition, only a certain kind of ear has an integral ability to make music). My gut instinct tells me that it’s not a great work (in the sense that 'Metastasis' or 'Le Marteau sans Maître' are) but it’s fine, satisfying music by a composer whose work I want to explore further and, in an age where we’re swamped by a unfeasibly large deluge of all kinds of music, I’d definitely listen to it again. But don’t take my (ill-chosen) word(s) for it: here’s an excerpt, along with another, more recent piece by the same composer. Enjoy!

Phil Durrant, Lee Patterson, and Paul Vogel: Buoy

Something that I often find a feature of listening to any kind of contemporary (read: avant-garde) music is what I like to call the Hmmm Factor. It’s when the last few sounds from a CD have dissipated into the oblivion which inevitably claims all human endeavour and, as you sit in your comfy chair with the realisation that there’s nothing more to be revealed, you mentally digest what you’ve just heard and go “hmmm...”. That “hmmm” is an exhalation of doubt, a little sliver of uncertainty which signals that while what you just listened to was a solid effort by sterling lads (and/or lasses), who rustled up a fine, adventurous aural banquet with just the right amount of cumin and coriander, and while it sated the hungry gourmand, there was nevertheless something missing, some indefinable absence, that prevented it from being entirely satisfying. Normally, it is then filed away onto already groaning shelves and entirely forgotten about, only resurfacing when one of the performers appears on a different CD and you’re doing a quick spot of revision. I’m happy to say, however, that Buoy (by improv stalwarts Phil Durrant, Lee Patterson, and Dublin-based Paul Vogel) is not one of those CDs. From the very first track, one is made aware that this music isn’t trying to be; rather, it is. That is to say, it has that genuine touch of poetry, the spark, which draws the receptive listener (such as, dare I say it, myself) back again and again. In fact, if I were approached by a curious but uncertain and slightly suspicious listener who wished to whet their beak in this style of music, I would confidently steer them without a moment’s hesitation toward the pelagic depths of this CD. If they aren’t mad about the Bouy, then perhaps this type of music isn’t for them... [The author recoils from the fusillade of groans, abuse, and rotten veg hurled at him for that awful pun.]
On this recording, Phil Durrant is on ‘self-made software samplers and treatments’, Patterson uses ‘field recordings, amplified objects, and processes’, and Vogel plays clarinet as well as electronics. But one of the most noticeable things about Buoy is how much of a group performance this is. While it contains elements familiar to any aficionado of this style of music – deep rumblings, breathy woodwind squeaks, high-pitched whines and burbles, sussurating electronics, and so forth – there is a wonderful richness of texture produced by the three performers, and their breathtakingly focused and sympathetic interaction raises these pieces to great heights. A single false note – an overly loud or clumsy clarinet note, a too-obvious electronic squiggle – would shatter the mood, and it’s a credit to the musicians that these never occur, not because they were too timid or unimaginative to risk rocking the boat, but because their skill and empathy, their sensitive ears, guided them surely throughout. It’s an enigmatic, unpredictable, subaqueous collection of soundscapes they lead us through, with many moments of great beauty, and never less than mesmerising. I used the phrase ‘poetry’ deliberately, in that this music contains what I would consider to be the hallmarks of that medium: intense concentration, attention to detail, compression of thought and gesture, invention, and the evocation of mood. The album title and cover here are clues as to intent: the word ‘buoy’ conjures up a quiet, lonely, sea-swept place, as does the photograph (a close-up of what looks like horse-hair or the frayed end of a rope), but there is a quiet glimmering mysteriousness which permeates the five tracks; the field recordings evoke natural phenomena, but rarely in a literal way, becoming instead part of a subtly evocative whole which envelops and stimulates the imagination of the listener. I recommend turning out the lights, turning up the volume, and allowing the sounds to carry you away. One certainly hopes that these three gentlemen will come together in the near future to record a sequel...

Other reviews of Buoy can be found here and here, and here's where you can purchase a copy. To conclude, here's an excerpt from a fine performance featuring Lee Patterson (which is a lot more abrasive and dronelike than Buoy).

A few words by way of introduction...

“But what about the noise of crumpling paper which he used to do in order to paint the series of ‘papiers froissés’ or tearing up paper to make ‘papiers déchirées’? Arp was stimulated by the water (sea, lake and flowing waters like rivers), forests.” From a letter by Greta Ströh to John Cage, later used as a title for a piece of music by Cage (The Roaring Silence, David Revill, p. 277)

Ah, the burning shame of ignorance, in not knowing what froissés or déchirées, words which I’m sure are entirely familiar to the elegantly educated, actually mean. (Although, thanks to the interweb, all will be revealed as soon as I finish typing this...) But my ignorance extends in other directions, a vast, turbid sea of unknowing, and particularly in regards to my most beloved of art forms, music. In this blog, I intend to focus primarily on something I know a little bit about―contemporary composition and improvised music , as these interest me the most―and to try and give a mention to Irish practitioners of the same. Over the past twenty-something years I’ve spent quite a lot of my time slouched in front of a set of speakers as strange, unsettling sounds roared or whooshed or bleeped around me, while varying sets of housemates raised eyebrows, and I have a deep-seated urge to write about some of those delightful aural concoctions. However, I lack what one may describe as gravitas in this field; my musical education has been scattershot, preferential, and constrained by both time and budget, so my opinions are based solely on how a particular piece affects me rather than by its relation to others (or, to put it another way, I may praise a concerto to the skies and bestow my eternal gratitude to its composer for its creation, only for a more well-versed soul to point out that it is a pale imitation of Alphonse Beansprout’s magnum opus, Frankenstein’s Bicycle, or whatever (although such information is more than welcome!).) I view it as a kind of education in public (theoretically speaking, of course, as there’s no guarantee anyone will read these meanderings) where I listen to, research, and then write about, pieces of music that interest me, in the hope of encouraging others to seek them out. I chose the above title for my blog because, firstly, I like music produced from such unorthodox sources as crumpled paper; secondly, I am a great admirer of John Cage, who I feel is one of the most important figures in twentieth century art; and thirdly, I imagine I’m going to be crumpling a lot of paper as I struggle to write material for this blog (picture the hoary old cliché of a steel-mesh office bin surrounded by furiously crushed balls of paper, and an unshaven writer reaching angrily for a bottle of rough grain spirits). As to what I’ll be writing about: if the following performance puts steam in your engine, then this blog may interest you; if you reel back from your computer clutching your ears and muttering, “There is no God!”, then perhaps you may find satisfaction elsewhere. Enjoy!