Placement

Tired and ill of late. Auditions for Manhattan School of Music and Oberlin Conservatory are next week and I really need to have my latest chamber piece finished by then. More work on it today. More problems. Each small segment needs placing... each small segment needs placing with some semblance of reason... or at least rhyme. And yet the overall claritus of the piece hovers just out of sight. Lachenmann's "Allegro Sostenuto" has helped and not helped.

So many ideas that need further in depth exploration. Placement and juxtaposition of sounds. Which yields rhythm. Personal rhythm. And at the same time the same old conflict between foreground and background. The question and concerns over musical poetics. A constant to and fro. In and out. With brief moments of calm and understanding at one end, only sustainable for a very short while before one must inhale again.

Listening to a lot still. Helmut Lachenmann's Allegro Sostenuto/Pression/Dal niente/Interieur I and Cornelius Cardew's Chamber Music 1955-1964 both came in this week and have both been listened to once or twice. Most of this weeks listening has revolved around improvised music, though. Jean-Luc Guionnet and Seijiro Murayama's duet Le Bruit De Toit (mentioned last time) is revealing itself to be a very rich album. Especially at increased volume levels. John Butcher's Resonant Spaces solo saxophone album on the Confront label also contains some superb music and will no doubt deserve further mention once I've absorbed its sounds and structures more. Graham Lambkin and Jason Lescalleet's The Breadwinner on erstwhile records has also provided an intimate soundtrack to a few train journeys into NYC this week and is proving to be a favourite, while Cosmos' Tears is a beautifully constructed duet featuring Sachiko M and Ami Yoshida. Definitely some of the most interesting yet challenging music I've heard in a long time.

Most enticing album for this week, however, is by far Kushikushism, a duet between Radu Malfatti and Taku Unami in two parts. It is a beautiful example of the construction of a personal time-less space... rhythm... constructed out of the careful placement of the simplest of musical materials. In this case Unami's trademark rattling of objects and Malfatti's quiet muted trombone bathed in warm ambient noise on the first track, and sine-wave tones and perhaps heavily muted or processed trombone bathed in digital silence on the second. Both tracks are quite busy, containing an almost bubbling quality I would usually expect from an album featuring Franz Hautzinger (Gomberg, A View From the Window, etc.) yet the bubbling here is implied. All in all, wonderfully warm music. Definitely a disc that will be staying on my desk for another week or two. I am looking forward to Malfatti and Unami's second improvised duet recording to be released later this month.



Abstaining from mentioning politics.