Night After Night

Album review: Jürg Frey, ephemeral constructions

Originally published by National Sawdust Log on May 26, 2017

Jürg Frey
ephemeral constructions
Erik Carlson, violin; Jürg Frey, clarinet; Greg Stuart, percussion; University of South Carolina Experimental Music Workshop
Edition Wandelweiser; CD
(U.S. distribution: ErstDist)

The less I say this time, the better – partly because I have so very, very little information available from which to cobble up some authoritative statement on the whys and wherefores of the three recent compositions from 2015 and 2016 by Jürg Frey included on this new CD, and partly because the music doesn't really lend itself to analysis so much as inhabitation.

That being the case, now that you know this disc exists, you're welcome to click the link for Edition Wandelweiser above and just listen to the 15-minute sample available there. Since you're most likely reading this in the U.S., you can open another browser tab for ErstDist, the label's New Jersey-based stateside distributor.

Jürg Frey

Still here? A few facts, then. Frey, born in 1953 in Aarau, Switzerland, is among the more visible and familiar members of the Wandelweiser Collective, a global confederation of composers loosely knit by their shared notions concerning space, silence, duration, timbre, authority, and other related concerns. John Cage is a spiritual godfather to the collective, with Christian Wolff a stimulus closer to hand. Composer Michael Pisaro's 2009 essay "Wandelweiser" remains a crucial guide for those who wish to understand the group and its motivations.

That Frey has begun to emerge as the collective's breakout star probably shouldn't come as a surprise, since a fair amount of his work hews more closely to conventional notions of tonality and structure than does that of colleagues like Pisaro, Antoine Beuger, and Eva-Maria Houben – all of whose works also richly reward exploration. Traditional performing-arts presenters in the U.S. have been characteristically glacial in catching up with Frey and his Wandelweiser fellow travelers. Happily, though, a handful of artists and ensembles have taken the lead in spreading the word, including pianist R. Andrew Lee, violinist Erik Carlson, and, recently, the International Contemporary Ensemble.

Now, here's the debut recording from another burgeoning force working on behalf of this new aesthetic: the University of South Carolina Experimental Music Workshop, whose leader, the percussionist Greg Stuart, is without question among the foremost catalysts for Wandelweiser activity here in the States. Effectively the David Tudor to Pisaro's Cage, and then some, Stuart has been not just an able interpreter but also an eager participant – an engaged performer whose own inventions and interpolations amount to a unique kind of authority.

Active at the University of South Carolina since 2009, Stuart enlisted performers from the South Carolina Honors College, the USC School of Music, and the Columbia, SC, music and arts community for his ensemble. Recordings on Stuart's SoundCloud page, featuring works by Pisaro, Wolff, La Monte Young, and Sarah Hennies, among others, attest to how quickly and astutely Stuart's players picked up on the challenges he laid before them. (Stuart discusses the ensemble and its working process here.)

University of South Carolina Experimental Music Workshop

The disc at hand offers two more examples of the Workshop in action, in Frey's ephemeral constructions (2015-16) and circular music #6 (2015). Those two pieces – the former more than 40 minutes in length, the latter just shy of 24 – frame a much smaller work of not quite five minutes' duration, circular music #7, played by Frey on clarinet, Carlson on violin, and Stuart on percussion.

That trio musters a rich, supple sound for Frey's simple, melancholy lullaby sequence of tones and chords. The music moves slowly and continually, yet never actually progresses. It's a velvety expanse in which to escape, to spend a while in pleasant contemplation, or to allow frayed nerves to mend. (I've employed it for all three of those reasons in just the past week.)

Those three players remain distinct and evident when absorbed into a larger body of players on circular music #6. Here, the effect is less tranquility and reverie than inquisition and subtle, continual change. The composition's form is less evident than in the trio piece due to its longer duration and thicker instrumentation, including numerous varieties of percussive noisemakers. Intentionally or not, the resulting din resembles that of a nature walk, a gently anarchic concatenation of chitters, whispers, rustles, and hoots, such as one might hear during a woodland meander.

Similar terms could be used to describe the sound world of ephemeral constructions, which for its initial long minutes might be mistaken for a percussion-only piece, so prominent are sounds of wooden and metallic impact. Some six minutes into the work, Stuart's vibraphone rises through the din with a two-note pattern played slowly and repeatedly: C-sharp, B. C-sharp, B. C-sharp, B. Carlson's violin emerges, engages, takes over; when Stuart's vibraphone returns, it is reinforced by other instruments, producing rich intervals and chords. Later, the violin will have its turn with anxiously repeated minimal gestures, while percussive sounds rustle and percolate all around.

What formal structure underlies the composition is a mystery that doesn't especially demand to be solved. A quotation from Frey's Sketchbook (2007), printed inside the otherwise characteristically spartan Edition Wandelweiser package, seems perfectly apt:

the persuasive, coercing power immanent to structure must be avoided. structure then becomes fragile and permeable, allowing the ephemeral to unfold its presence, and, in this presence, to evoke a gleam of permanence. a substantial part of my work takes place in this intermediate zone.

As in all forms of minimalism, absorption is its own reward. Allow yourself to grow attuned to the work's tiny noises and seemingly random occurrences for some 18 minutes, and the chords that arrive without warning at minute 19 feel like oversize epiphanies. With ears re-calibrated by those larger gestures, you can't help but notice all the smaller sounds – breaths, rustles, other tactile frictions – hovering just at audibility's limits.

Neither a rigidly bound construct in which the passage of time is palpable, nor a sound-installation concept to which time is extrinsic, ephemeral constructions strikes me as something in between. Frey delineates a bordered parcel of time, more or less, and fills it up, more or less: not with a strict sequence of motifs and progressions, but with fleeting impressions and sensations like those of an amble taken with no particular cause or course.

"[T]here are days in which it is enough to walk through a stony pasture," Frey's liner note offers. Indeed – but if no stony pasture is at hand, ephemeral constructions might suffice equally well.

Album review: Vanessa Rossetto, erased de kooning + rocinante

Vanessa Rossetto (Image: Matthew Revert)

Vanessa Rossetto
erased de kooning + rocinante
Bandcamp; DL only

Originally published by National Sawdust Log, May 5, 2017

Everything that’s erased leaves its trace of its passage behind: a point as familiar to the manuscript recyclers of antiquity for whom the term palimpsest was coined to modern-day digital data-recovery sleuths. We learn via firsthand accounts of concert tapes by John Coltrane and Albert Ayler wiped clean for reuse, and become acquainted with vintage Doctor Who episodes bulk-erased by the BBC through muzzy snapshots of fuzzy TV screens.

Common to those examples is the idea that deletion rarely amounts to a positive thing. But on erased de kooning, one of two recent recordings composer Vanessa Rossetto posted on her Bandcamp site May 4, an act of bulk erasure results in an absorbing new piece surprisingly rich in ghostly associations. An even newer composition issued at the same time, rocinante, is immediately notable not for an act of removal, but for the return after several years of Rossetto’s viola to a position of foregrounded prominence in her work; still, hovering throughout the piece is a sensation that thematic signifiers might be hidden just out of reach.

Rossetto, long active in Austin and now based in New York, entered the public sphere in 2008 with a trio of self-released albums in generic black packages: imperial brick, misafridal, and whoreson in the wilderness, all on her Music Appreciation label. Released more or less simultaneously, the discs provide a tightly compressed view of a stylistic evolution, from intense, tight-focus scrabbling on viola to a broader, more layered, and more nuanced approach to evoking a holistic sound ecology in which her playing was one part, her listening another. (Matthew Revert, an Australian composer-performer, novelist, and graphic artist who has worked closely with Rossetto, lays out her back story with exacting detail and a keen ear in a 2013 article for the web journal Surround.)

On the strength of those discs, and especially for a brilliant 2009 release, dogs in english porcelain, which built on the original trilogy’s foundation, Rossetto generated substantial buzz among followers of electroacoustic improvisation and field recording – a paradox, considering she seldom improvised live onstage, and treated field recordings less as inviolate artifacts than as raw material for cut-ups and assemblages. Rossetto told one interviewer after another that despite her lack of formal musical study (she trained as a painter), she considers herself a composer, one happiest left alone to contemplate and manipulate recordings retrieved from her routine ambling.

Regardless of her lack of academic credentials, Rossetto has proved her compositional acumen repeatedly with each new project she’s released. In particular, three limited-edition vinyl LPs to date on the Kye label – mineral orange (2010), exotic exit (2012), and whole stories (2014) – established her as a sound artist of astounding efficacy: one able to direct the ear from one detail or vector to another as efficiently as a seasoned film director leads the eye, while also situating discrete elements within a teeming soundscape exactingly designed and intimately nuanced.

At any given moment a listener can feel swept up within a vast panorama, or privy to someone else’s personal conversation. Moments later, Rossetto might bring a random noise (or her viola) uncomfortably close; execute a jump cut too sharp for routine perception to navigate; or foreground some bit of noisy detritus that reminds you explicitly: This is a recording. In duo projects issued with Revert, Kevin Parks, and Lee Patterson, she has proved her techniques are amenable to collaboration.

Rossetto’s impetus to create erased de kooning – its title a reference to Robert Rauschenberg’s famous 1953 conceptual art piece Erased de Kooning Drawing – was an invitation from Casey Anderson in 2015 to contribute to the Experimental Music Yearbook, using only past contributions to that annual series as her raw materials. She downloaded all previous submissions back to 2009, recordings by artists such as Christian Wolff, Olivia Block, Taku Sugimoto, Peter Ablinger, Julia Holter, and Blevin Blectum (Bevin Kelly), then manually erased them and worked with what was left. Rossetto explains her approach thusly:

It occurred to me to build the piece out of the interstices – the unperformed parts of pieces and the silences between deliberate acts. … As in any erasure, complete eradication to the point of absolute vacuum is not possible – marks may remain that prove unusually indelible and in yet other spots the hand of the remover may prove too forceful and rend uneven holes in the plane of the paper.

What resulted is an expansive aural terrain littered with tiny scrapes, pings, rumples, and hisses, punctuated liberally with recognizable sounds from musical instruments, electronic implements, and the occasional human voice. The background ambience shifts as often as the foregrounded details, from antiseptic silence to the shush and hum of a voluminous space. The piece feels quietly chaotic, but never merely random, and the continual ebb and flow moves at a pleasingly narcotic pace: a leisurely parade of fleeting sensations, with the emotional gravity of memories misplaced or cast off. It’s surely because of that last quality that the overall impact of erased de kooning is not one of absence, but of presence.

The other newly released project, rocinante, marks a fresh turn in Rossetto’s compositional and performative output. At just over 60 minutes in length, the piece is her most extended creation on record – “also known as ‘long piece,'” her Bandcamp page acknowledges. What’s apparent immediately is that Rossetto’s viola has returned to center stage, foregrounded to an extent unheard since her first few self-released albums, and joined here by a newcomer, the cello. It’s not uncommon to hear two or more stringed implements simultaneously vying for space among the other sound objects she collages into the mix.

As ever, Rossetto uses her string instruments chiefly as noise generators, producing hisses, pops, scrapes, and rumbling beats far more frequently than mellow bowed tones. But the handmade quality of those extramusical sounds gives her music a relatable sensation: a feeling of hands being used, choices being made in real time well before manipulation on a notebook computer’s screen occurs.

Given the album’s title, one might presume a connection to Cervantes and his iconic knight, Don Quixote, rider of the titular steed. That supposition is borne out by a quotation on the Bandcamp page:

“a name, to his thinking, lofty, sonorous, and significant of his condition as a hack before he became what he now was, the first and foremost of all the hacks in the world”

Whether the reference extends to Richard Strauss, in whose symphonic poem Don Quixote the viola and cello also play starring roles, is unclear, though complete coincidence is unlikely. No musical affinity to Strauss is evident, yet there’s no denying this music is Rossetto’s plushest and most sensual, in its way. Again, she creates and sustains a sensation of forward motion without conventional architecture or obvious thematic signposts.

The music moves and morphs at a pace all its own, unfolding with mystery and intensity. A gradual metamorphosis that transpires over a nearly 20-minute central span starting 16 minutes in, wherein a minor, ticklish metallic buzz mixed deep into the background slowly swells to become an insistent and then dominant feature, and then recedes to be overcome by equally urgent wooden tones, is brilliantly handled, and just one example of the long-sighted processes that Rossetto develops over the course of this rich, engrossing piece.

Equally effective is the element of surprise she enacts by shutting down the aforementioned chain of events abruptly and completely just before the 36-minute mark, and then sustaining a minute of silence – a gesture familiar among Wandelweiser composers like Michael Pisaro, whose work might be a useful touchstone in assessing rocinante – before building anew from gently sustained drones.

Whether rocinante marks a new direction for Rossetto or is revealed in time to be a distinguished outlier, it is a marvelous affirmation of her versatility, growing assurance, and capacity for fresh intrigue.