Press

Tehran-based composers Soheil Shirangi and Shervin Abbasi have released an aptly titled haunting new album, Maelstrom. The two draw on influences from European minimalism and traditional Iranian sounds. It’s a diverse but persistently dark collection of works for both solo instruments and small ensembles. In a year of one horror after another, this is indelibly an album for our time. Yet the music here also offers considerable hope and even devious humor.

The first work is Trauma, a Shirangi trio composition played by cellists Ella Bokor and Mircea Marian with accordionist Fernando Mihalache. The strings enter with a syncopated, mutedly shamanic drive that quickly rises to an insistent pedal point. The accordion first serves as a wary chordal anchor while the cellos diverge, return with an increasingly stricken intensity, and then wind out with plaintive washes.

Violinist Mykola Havyuk, clarinetist Yaroslav Zhovnirych, and pianist Nataliya Martynova play Abbasi’s The Rebellion, beginning more hauntingly microtonal, its austere resonance punctuated by simple, forlorn piano incisions. Eerie, circling chromatics from the piano underscore troubled, anthemic phrases. A couple of vigorous flicks under the lid signal a wounded call-and-response: slowly but firmly, a revolution flickers and eventually leaps from the desolation. The obvious comparison is the livelier moments in Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time.

It’s the most distinctly Iranian piece here. By contrast, To Lose Hope, another Abbasi piece featuring clarinetist Mykola Havyuk and a string quartet comprising violinists Marko Komonko and Petro Titiaiev, violist Ustym Zhuk and cellist Denys Lytvynenko, first takes shape as a hazy cavatina, Havyuk’s crystalline leads balanced by brooding cello and shivery vibrato from the rest of the strings. The jauntiness, acerbity, and suspense that follow are unexpectedly welcome. The point seems to be that hope is where you find it.

Afrooch, an Abbasi solo work played by violinist Farmehr Beyglou, requires daunting extended technique, shifting back and forth between ghostly harmonics, moody atmosphere, insistently hammering riffs, shivery crescendos, and a call-and-response that grows from enigmatic to puckish. The ending is too funny to give away.

The closing composition is Shirangi’s solo piano piece, Sahel Abaei’s low murk contrasting with muted inside-the-piano gestures, expanding with spacious minimalist accents and eventually forlorn, Messiaenic bell-tone chords. If this is characteristic of the new music coming out of Iran these days, the world needs to hear more of it.

Doug Haire is an experienced sound artist with 30 years as a recording engineer and producer. He has credits in something like 400 albums and eight albums of his authorship.

He’s a member of Seattle’s Phonographers Union, a collective of sound artists, composers, and recordists who improvise live in real time with unprocessed field recordings.

He founded the Sonarchy radio show in Seattle 22 years back, and has produced hour-long live broadcasts that provide avant-garde musicians with a space to perform, experiment, and develop their ideas.

This album displays a soundscape rich in nuances and atmospheres. Campsites collects field recordings such as the sounds of a train horn, a campfire, a barking dog, while thick layers of drones are the backdrop for this environment on the city’s outskirts. Silence is also an element in this album because, behind those minimalist processed sounds, there is a pristine, pure space on which our listening is focused. For example, on Campsite #16 River Donner und Blitzen, a subtle, heavenly choir hovers in the environment as birdsongs and streams of water complete this bucolic image. The flip side of this album is the haunting atmosphere of Jackblock Campsite and the track that opens the album, Campsite Nocturne #3.

This collection of sound pieces is the work of a very experienced recording engineer, Doug Haire, from Seattle. He has dedicated many years to supporting experimental musicians with the radio show Sonarchy and recording exclusives for it. He is also a member of the Seattle Phonographers Union, a collective working and performing with unprocessed field recordings since 2002. Campsites is his first solo release since 2012’s Removed and Haunted.

I imagine him now retired from session work, sitting by the campfire and capturing the moods. It is incredible how he transmits the atmospheres with his field recordings, later supplied with resonant drones. This reflecting on reflection is executed with true mastery.

The overall calm sounds, aided by the underlying subliminal drones, lead inescapably to a loss of the sense of time.

The seven tracks are all subtle individual works but a coherent whole. None are too lengthy, and all mixing, mastering, and production were done solely by Doug Haire himself.

I’ve found myself sitting suddenly in the last fading light of the day, mentally wholly caught up in the moment, just like a campfire meditation, with engaged senses fully aware of the never-ending surroundings.

We are quite taken with Bile Noire (Arpaviva AVLP 001), a vinyl item housed in a moody black cover on the Arpaviva label. It’s a team-up between Strotter Inst. and Peter Vukmirovic Stevens. Strotter Inst. is Christoph Hess, the Swiss turntablist who can’t put a tonearm wrong as far as we’re concerned, and like most sensible folk, we worship the very belt-drive of his kit. We last heard him on Miszellen, a double LP of fairly staggering proportions for the Hallowground label, which showed him teaming up with notables and big names from the world of art music and underground noise.

Today’s record could be read more as a showcase for the piano of Peter Vukmirovic Stevens, and Strotter Inst. exhibits grace and restraint with his subdued, minimal contributions to the work, almost relegating himself to a background, time-keeping role, but his distinctive imaginative moves still win through. Stevens appears to have achieved certain worldwide renown already with his compositions for orchestras, has picked up a few prizes for his mantelpiece, and still finds time to make colourful abstract and pictorial art. But his piano work here really stirs the fireplace and stokes the mental boilers, mainly by his use of lower-register notes to evoke dark and brooding emotions. Already I feel like we’re in a dank 19th-century salon in some non-existent European country where, due to time warps and inter-dimensional distortions, the course of history has been drastically altered. Everyone lives under the yoke of multiple right-wing regimes, yet people still find time to act the part of the decadent dandy type replete in a velvet cape and top hat. As a matter of fact, such a figure has left his gloves and cane on the piano lid and set down to deliver himself of these six exercises in grimitude and ghastlery.

Translated from German

It is likely this album could only be realized given the range and depth of these artists’ musical experience. The Swiss turntable artist Christoph Hess, aka Strotter Inst., well respected in experimental music circles, joined concert pianist and composer Peter Vukmirovic Stevens to create a truly amazing product. This music is dramatic, organic, and tense. For us, the second piece of the A-side (all the tracks have monstrously long French names) best characterizes their efforts, in which dark-melodious, rolling piano tones and pulsing bass notes are mixed with scratchy-roughened sounds. Because the piano’s tone is easier for the ear to follow, it would be easy to assume the sounds are arranged as foreground and background, but it is not that simple. The pulsing and processed oscillations created by the turntables sound in unison with the piano and combine with the piano keystrokes on the hammers. Ergo: the sound layers combine in a natural and balanced way and create a great musical experience. Terrific!

Coming in from Switzerland [is] BILE NOIRE, a limited to 300 copies vinyl pressing produced by Christoph Hess, a.k.a. Strotter Inst., and pianist Peter Vukmirovic Stevens. Combining Hess’ trademark use of prepared turntables with Vukmirovic Stevens’ approach to his instrument results in a total of six compositions, which can be described best as darkish, score-esque, and dramatic in overall approach, bringing forth a captivating amalgamation of layered, partly stumbling experimental loops and scraping, manipulated sounds as a foundation, and an expressive, moody take on piano noir which reminds us of catastrophic winter thunderstorms and intense, early experimental movies shot in grainy black and white, putting the entire range of human emotion and expression on vintage display. Interestingly, the unprocessed solo piano and the electronic backing interact and complement each other perfectly instead of providing a harsh disturbing contrast of sorts, which makes BILE NOIRE a perfect conceptual addition to the collection for both fans of electronic experimental music and followers of contemporary classical music, but it will also sit well with collectors of scores and other dramatic music.

Composer, pianist, and visual artist Peter Vukmirovic Stevens presents a new album, Panacea, with music written for string quartet. There are three works, Panacea, Stateless, and Inter Nos, written between 2006 and 2016. The album was released by Arpaviva Recordings, an independent music label founded by the composer and harpist Victoria Jordanova in 2002 in Los Angeles. Vukmirovic Stevens, with a great musical background, is a composer committed to the sociological and artistic movements provoked by the political and societal events that permeate our days.

In this album, the American composer has left his mark on the terrifying terrorist attacks in Paris and the political drift in Europe and the United States. And that’s where the title of his latest album comes from. Stevens states that music and art serve as a panacea for the ills that humanity creates. The composer transmits expressive force and inner fire through the musicians who perform his music. Mikhail Shmidt, Blayne Barnes, Mara Gearman, and Paige Stockley are four leading and gifted performers. The three quartets maximize the sounds of the instruments, whether in slow or fast movements. The thematic material, with its very vigorous chromatic themes, seeks to create ideas that live in the composer’s imagination and are realized with great virtuosity by the performers. The result is three crystalline works that bring a lot of light to our ears.

Immerse yourself in the mercilessly driven robotic minimalism, with the lightning flashes of piano runs and the relentlessly flowing cascades of music in which the makeup of each song becomes the blueprint for the album as a whole. It is the most succulent feast for the ears!

I hear the polyphonic texture of various melodic parts, often in different rhythms, while other times I hear cascades of complex, ravishing chords. Jordanova performs with a wide range of sound quality and with the greatest devotion to the music’s profound absence of dramatic rhetoric. She also adds Cage’s ossia vocal part, beautifully performed by Pamela Z.

I rarely get the sense of sheer beauty or spacious spiritual or physical realms when I listen to John Cage’s music. It’s often more of a witty practicality that comes to mind, or an auditive intellectualism with a quirky smile added in the corner of the mouth. But not this soaring beauty. This music is so surprising, as it approaches in some kind of free fall, totally relaxed and yet powerful, like the orbit of the International Space Station as it keeps on falling and falling around the Earth…

Cage’s prophetically titled Postcard from Heaven, a mesmerizing, roughly 40-minute 1982 composition scored for 20 harpists, receives its world premiere recording on this new disc from Arpaviva. Jordanova’s approach has given the work new life, and the work does sound like a postcard from heaven written by John Cage.

The heaven connection, with visions of spaced harpists playing without a coffee break for eternity, is half tongue-in-cheek. But only half. Victoria Jordanova does the harp honors, oscillating between a solo setting and rippling overdubs of 20 harps. Pamela Z supplies sustained and delayed sung tones in what is a strangely cool and cooling listening experience.

I guess I always thought of the harp as a delicate instrument suited for Debussy and played by pretty long-haired women. I had no idea it could be souped-up, amplified, and multi-tracked, producing a blow-your-socks-off new sound, indeed a whole new realm of sound. Victoria Jordanova, originally from Yugoslavia, lives in America now, and we are richer for it, as she has single-handedly revised the script for harp and harp music. As a performer, composer, curator, and producer of her own CD label, Jordanova is breaking new ground not only with the harp but with performance, improvisation, and concert programming to boot.

Jordanova uses a variety of harps and swings their lofty properties through technologies of her choice, always shaping new realms of audio, never playing it safe, never resorting to clichés or down-home formulas or principles. She never lets tradition wear her down. On the contrary, she shakes all those gluey, sticky memories off. This is a rare quality among contemporary and avant-garde artists, who oftentimes are the most traditional ones, sticking to and canonizing an avant-gardism that was in swing a few decades earlier, in the 1960s or 70s.