Pisaro / Nishikaze in Hackney: A Subjective Report

Programme: Michael Pisaro – Ricefall / July Mountain; Nishikaze – Piano in Person I
Performers: Daniel Bennett, Seth Cooke, Lawrence Dunn, Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, Jane Dickson, Dominic Lash, David Stent, Sarah Hughes, Stephen Cornford, Patrick Farmer, Angharad Davies; Tim Parkinson: piano (Nishikaze)
Location: The Round Chapel, Hackney, London, 19.10.2013

This was a kind of second showing for a concert originally put on in Oxford last year as part of the ‘Significant Landscapes’ conference / festival / event series curated by Patrick Farmer; re-located to a bigger venue (the Round Chapel in Hackney); minus some original participants (Pisaro himself absent; ditto Stefan Thut) and plus others; and with a slightly-changed programme. (I’m going to write up my notes on that original event soon, most likely; I have them in front of me, on this desk, to which they’ve been transferred from the various cupboards they’ve been in for nearly a year now.) I was a little ill when I went to see this; I was a little tired; this isn’t interesting to anyone. But this is a blog entry, personal detail within reportage will be endearing and help you to place yourself in the position of a listener in the audience, if you weren’t a listener in the audience, or you will be able to compare your experiences and violently agree or disagree if you were, etc. As I write this, the rain outside is beautiful and calming, it accompanies the thud of fingers on keys like a nice ornamentation, the world outside dancing on the edge of cultural description, thus framed but acting or perceived as ‘framing.’ Enough! I think there is even a rumbling of thunder. And now a flash of lightning. And a man is walking down the road, grim-faced, soaked with the rain. I wrote this two days ago.

Back in the chapel, the field recordings in Michael Pisaro’s ‘July Mountain’ were played LOUD. These are the final lines of the Wallace Stevens poem from which it draws its title: “The way, when we climb a mountain // Vermont throws itself together.” Vermont here is thrown together, arranged, rather than ‘throwing itself’ together, arranging itself; constructed, or re-constructed at least, rather than transparently presented or ‘accessed’, an important distinction to make. In the field recordings – which might as well be from anywhere, and perhaps were, rather than from Vermont itself, playing with that specificity of a real or imagined access to place through sound, sources mixed and re-located across the ocean and through speakers and musical layering – this world is the human world – aeroplanes, and, as far as I remember, occasional children’s voices; or, the noise of the human world and of the ‘natural world’ bleed into each other so that distinctions between them don’t matter. The first entry of the piano, those four-handed chords, is what I remember from the performance in Oxford last year. The placing, its perfect weighting, and waiting. The sine tones, vibraphone bowed drones, the slowly swirling white noise of two rows of musicians rubbing snare drums, the way that latter set of noises in particular builds during the first few minutes, from one musician to many, preparing the way for the piano, mirroring the way the piece as a whole builds, not so much to climax, but with a real sense of incremental growth and swell, hewn solid and inexorable.

Indeed, in relation to that characterisation, one of my fellow audience members afterwards described the piece as having a certain ‘monumentality’ to it, which didn’t endear it to that particular audience member. What they were getting at, I think, though this might in fact seem like quite a different or even opposed characterisation, is that Pisaro’s pieces can seem almost too ‘easy’; he’s so good at what he does and structurally these pieces work so well, the image – by which I mean the ‘sound picture’, to mix the visual metaphors –they build so accessible and right (Stevens’ “things said well”), that distrust might be a natural and perhaps useful reaction to that kind of skill: what am I being drawn into, what vision or version of the world or of perception? (I’m thinking also, in particular, of some of the pieces in the ‘Fields Have Ears’ series). They are so easily ‘beautiful’, full, patient, calm, and hardly ‘austere.’ But then, ‘Ricefall’ was far from this, in its performance set-up much more obviously in the Fluxus-area of Wandelweiser which, in my experience, generally tends to characterise let’s say half of the bills at these concerts. It’s a nice spectacle, twenty minutes or so of rice being dropped on pretty collections of leaves and slates and metallic pieces of percussion, plates and twigs, plastic bags, &c. Bruno Guastalla catches my eye with the lovely impish delicacy of his ‘playing’ (the score stipulates releasing certain amounts of rice each minute, I believe, but the exact mode of release is left unspecified, which of course adds in that performative dimension, which is and is not related to the actual quality of sound. Angharad Davies’ way of ‘playing’ rice could be likened, in its use of periodicity, to her violin improvisations, according to one eagle-eared listener). Guastalla releases his rice with such careful and yet capricious attention that I don’t think you can actually hear it land, though there’s a large pile at his feet fairly quickly. There’s something at once completely controlled about it – he’s decided how to interpret the piece, even if only a few seconds before, and does that interpretation with intense single-mindedness – and almost puzzled, which is the right way, or at least the most interesting way, of interpreting something like this, for me. Me, I tend to be too literal-minded, which is exactly not what these pieces demand, though neither are they excuses for a kind of epater les bourgeois self-conscious wackiness within some spurious frameworks: they’re something like artistic problems or provocations which have to be negotiated with some skill, much as a musician will face various challenges in interpreting any piece of composed music. What’s important about them, or what I find characteristically interesting in watching performances of them, is the collective dimension to such interpretation, which isn’t so much a working together as a working alongside, if that makes sense. So, for instance, Guastalla approaches these things aslant, like the way, in other contexts, he plays his cello, as if his physical relation to that instrument was one of difficulty and fracture rather than an easy manipulation. Patrick Farmer enjoys dropping his rice from a great height. Dominic Lash is the spirit of calmness, a complete calm efficiency of interpretation. All these approaches are equally ‘valid’, and the delight of a piece like this is watching that aspect of interpretation so obviously and yet unobtrusively provided for and foregrounded. I mean, in that sense, it’s not that different to the pleasures and struggles of Richter or Glenn Gould.

The moments when a particular percussion instrument, a singing bowl or what have you, would starts its metallic tinkle, that sound from an object actually designed to produce musically-appealing sound, were very pleasant. I didn’t close my eyes and thus follow the ebbs and swells and flows and slows of the sounds as I could have, though it was possible to notice that fluctuating kind of territory, both suggested and left open by the score, but very much of a piece with Pisaro’s methods. Too, his deployment of group elements, numerous different ‘lines’ or parts (lines isn’t really the right metaphor, I don’t think, though recall his use of an Oswald Eggers drawing of entwining lined / paths, perhaps) to create a gently fluctuating whole within a fairly strictly defined and unchanging general area. This is what gives his pieces their sense of inexorability, monumentality, what have you, but also their playfulness, openness, &c. The arrangement of twigs, slates, etc, was ‘sculptural’. I enjoyed the tidying up and hoovering afterwards, in the space, afterwards, almost as much. I mean, I enjoyed, and was perhaps also slightly puzzled and confused by, the whole set-up, watching from the upper-floor seating in the gallery, the musicians on ‘stage’, separate below; as if the musicians were the in-group we peaked in on, or we were the group judging as the gods or critics that high, or neither of these things. It was cold in the church, particularly in the piano piece in the middle, which was Makiko Nishikaze’s ‘Piano in Person I’, played by Tim Parkinson. The piano may have been the original piano from when the church was built. It had wooden pedals. The piece didn’t offer the conceptual framework that the Pisaro pieces did, so it was harder, demanded a more intensive listening, perhaps. Or for whatever reason, I couldn’t get ‘into’ it so much, it felt long or too long, without the pauses or space I craved from it. Not that there were pauses in the Pisaro, but a greater patience. Or perhaps the patience that was lacking was mine. Dominic Lash had his eyes closed, so did a lot of people, but there were was also some seat-shifting and shuffling, none of which manifested itself in the Pisaro. Nishikaze’s piece felt as if it had come from a different tradition, one less comfortable with the ease and skill of an, I don’t know, post avant-garde framework – which as a formulation is something I don’t really like or doesn’t quite get at what I mean to suggest, which is something like that afore-mentioned ease I find in Pisaro’s music, not an ease which substitutes for musical thought and engagement with history and tradition, its following or its breaking, but which is not fraught in its relation to them, whose statement doesn’t feel the need for that kind of quasi-didactic break. But then, equally, I’ve been romanticizing Darmstadt in my head, and out loud, a little, recently. So perhaps in that sense Nishikaze offered a more useful resistance to listening, a sense of stringency.

By which I mean, there’s nothing more ‘avant-garde’, in the clichéd sense of that term, if you were to describe to someone in the kitchen the next morning, than saying, ‘I went to a cold church and watched musicians drop rice on objects and on the floor, the piece was called Rice Fall’; or, that piece where the field recordings were almost as loud as the fifteen or however many instrumentalists performing alongside them. But somehow ‘July Mountain’ in particular seemed to me the most accessible piece on earth, hence, perhaps, the sense of suspicion noted above. Is the monumental accessible? Not really, or not in the traditional sense, which is where all these terms are getting mixed up, as am I, to try to get at what exactly this kind of subjective gut-reaction is. There was a good audience, the most I’ve seen for any Wandelweiser event. Richard Pinnell’s announcements from the balcony were not those of a preacher, the event didn’t feel institutionalized in that sense. I was pleased, really, that people came, the Cafe Oto marketing and all that, however much I’ve enjoyed being one of two or however many audience members at other events in the past. I don’t think it changed the atmosphere that much. Everyone was concentrated and respectful, better than in some of the previous events I’ve seen, in fact, and the environmental sounds were the swooshing of buses and so on. Someone outside let out a yell after the first of one particular set of alternating chords in the Nishikaze, placed well. Some people looked alarmed. Some people were drinking cans of Red Stripe, but this made them, if anything, even more devout.

“Get Thee to a Nunnery”: Michael Pisaro's ‘Mind is Moving’ at The Nunnery (Bow Arts Centre), London, 12/02/11

Jennifer Allum (violin), Rebecca Dixon (cello), Dominic Lash (double bass), Henri Växby (guitar), Jamie Coleman (trumpet), Tim Parkinson (voice).



Michael Pisaro’s star has been rising recently – at least, his work has become a frequent subject of discussion within improv circles, and there’s been an increase in the frequency with which his works are performed (albeit in small and sparsely-attended venues). What this means in relation to the usual connotations of ‘rising stars’ is harder to judge; and, indeed, one of the main points of interest with Pisaro, and other composers and performers associated with the Wandelweiser group, is the fact that they are hard to place within pre-determined narratives and positions. Thus, Radu Malfatti comes from a background playing ‘high-energy’ free jazz, while Pisaro assumes the role of ‘academic composer’ (he teaches at CalArts); but it doesn’t seem strange to discuss their works in the same sentence. Of course, this closeness has always existed (AMM, Musica Elettronica Viva and Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza come to mind), contra the journalistic method of building up and stratifying divisions which are not nearly as important to the practitioners of the music themselves as to critics and ‘taste-makers’. Nonetheless, there is a definite sense that something new is afoot, given the way that Malfatti, Pisaro et al straddle clear-cut lines between ‘modern classical composition’ and ‘free improvisation’, finding common aesthetic ground within both camps.

The ‘Mind is Moving’ series is actually a fairly early work, dating from 1996, and it’s interesting to come to it, in a new ensemble ‘arrangement’, on the back of the ‘hype’ of the past couple of years. At the same time, it’s hard to disentangle serious critical consideration from what might seem almost petty concerns relating to the physical circumstances of attending a continuous three-hour concert performance on a British winter’s evening.

Performances like these come to seem like endurance tests, not just because of the extreme length, but because of the details of the music itself, which, rather than ‘moving forward’, alternates between non-developmental drones, staccato plucks and bursts, and lengthy silences, or near-silences. Furthermore, the fact that what we were actually witnessing was the simultaneous performance of several separate solo works added to the ‘severity’ of the aesthetic: just as a particularly gorgeous swelling concord between several different instruments was reached, one voice would suddenly drop out, introducing an abrupt change in texture. This was not music that one could easily relax into, as can be the case with more ‘blissed-out’ drone material, but neither was it an exuberant, chaotic Fluxus happening. Despite the softness and the quietness, the simultaneity was something jagged and uncompromising, to which the listener had to adjust themselves –to move their minds to the movement of the music. Once this happens, once that shift occurs and everything clicks into place, it’s amazing – but it may take a slightly uncomfortable half-hour or more for that to happen.

Yesterday’s performance, as I experienced it, fell into something like three sections, one for each hour. The first contained more ‘ensemble’ playing – overlapping drones in concord and gentle discord, the preponderance of stringed instruments giving something of the feel of La Monte Young’s early Trio for Strings. The second saw the piece start to unravel, to spread and splay out, to become more sparse – and at the same time, the audience began to grow more fidgety, people moving about and leaving or arriving, the ritual of creaking wooden floorboards and the shuffling retrieval of bags from under seats coming to take on the feel, almost, of a kind of slow-motion dance, an integral part of the piece. Ross Lambert’s uncorking of the lid of his thermos flask, and subsequent pouring of small portions of steaming coffee, seemed deliberate, even staged, as if the music was there to accompany a kind of updated, low-key tea ceremony. In some ways this was welcome, imbuing the audience with a sense of participation, heightening the sense of occasion and the social/ ritualistic function of the music; but it was also the section I enjoyed the least, finding it hard to get into the lengthening silences, irritation at the way these silences were filled with the distant echo of voices and various other creaks and thuds, visual disjunct between the sounds I was hearing and the garish, Pop-Arty exhibition pieces on the walls and floor (a pink canvas with silver lettering that read ‘my subconscious drove me’; a giant free-standing cut-out decorated with the Stars and Stripes), and, most importantly (perhaps leading to all of the above), physical discomfort from sitting for hours in a hard plastic chair as the room got steadily colder. This stage is probably inevitable when one is faced with a concert ‘marathon’ (I’ve no idea how audience and performers coped with the 12-hour Wandelweiser show up in Glasgow last month) – and it was, arguably, the necessary preamble to the final section on the night, filled with long, long silences in which the audience finally breathed in unison with the performers, even the traffic outside dying away to just a murmur. Eyes closed; bass plucks giving a body to various drones, only to echo out again, leaving the initial sound modified, yet the same; guitar strings maintaining and sustaining their sounds as they were struck with a vibrating HB pencil; a cello tone held for a beautiful age, harmonics ringing and singing and mourning and keening; Jamie Coleman’s trumpet now muted, lending a plaintive jazz inflection (through single notes and timbre rather than through any specifically jazz phrases); rougher violin bow scrape; spoken words, sounded single and separate, sometimes coalescing into a story or poem, or a suggestion of such – names – hints at phrases – ‘historicism’, ‘angel’, ‘Louis’ – often audible only as acoustic presence, as a half-heard signifier without the signified; vocality as only semi-linguistic expression, semantic in a musical sense.

Applause followed quickly on the end of the piece, and everyone had to hurry out of the building (some people probably wanted to get away as soon as they could in any case); one almost felt that it would have been more appropriate simply to end in silence and drift away more quietly, rather than snapping out of that mood which the room had shared during that final hour or so. I’ve no idea how the event would come out on a recording (I noticed a Zoom tucked away behind a chair, so presumably some sort of permanent document does exist); to be honest, I probably wouldn’t have much patience listening back on a home stereo, but it felt important to make the step up from the hour-long live Wandelweiser performances I’d heard previously, to one of three times the length.



That’s the main body of the report out of the way, I suppose, but there are still a few more questions, raised by the concert, which I’d like to consider before concluding. In his liner notes to the CD release of ‘Mind is Moving I’ (as played by Pisaro himself on guitar), Jürg Frey notes that, apart from the ‘regular’ guitar notes themselves, "in this music other things quite simply turn up: like the occasional whistling or soft scraping of the strings; not effects, but pure matters of course. Perhaps there is here the faintest reminiscence of the image of a folk singer, who whistles along with his guitar playing, and uses the noises to clarify the rhythm." For me, that kind of idiomatic register wasn’t really present in the realisation of the work that I heard yesterday, and what struck me about the whistling was the fact that it was part of the written score: the notation of accident, or, if not precisely of accident, of material that might normally be considered ‘incidental’ to the ‘proper musical substance’, the ‘meat’ of a piece. One might say that there are two levels to the score: first, the notated material, which, though it will vary according to the musicians’ control in playing – for example, how well they can sustain a held forty-second tone on trumpet – remains broadly the same, set up, as it is, within certain, fairly strict parameters; and secondly, the material that arises from the physical circumstances of the performance location. This latter element may only emerge at certain, relatively brief moments (and can be edited out entirely during studio recordings); nonetheless, it can prove important. During yesterday’s performance, for example, there were plenty of low volume sections in which the score actually took a back seat to the environment accidentals around it. Some of the very quiet sounds that peppered the near-silent portions of the collective realisation (short, pp or ppp single notes) were barely louder than the ‘incidental’ sounds which invariably fill such silences in live performances of Wandelweiser material (muffled traffic roar, people’s chairs and clothes creaking and rustling, their stomachs rumbling, their throats clearing), and one might argue that the (notated) whistling had, at times, less of a presence than audience member Eddie Prévost’s rhythmic rubbing-together of his hands to keep them warm. Prévost is, of course, a musician, and perhaps this hand-rubbing (which occurred several times throughout the concert) was a kind of cheeky musical contribution, smuggled into the space on the sly. After all, the lesson we’ve learned from Cage’s 4’33” is that all the material, sonic and otherwise, that is present within the performing space, is part of that particular interpretation of the piece. Of course, there are ‘undesirables’ which one might want to filter out (the excessive coughing that marks concerts of classical music during any moment of quiet, for example) – and yet, perhaps, the attitude towards this has remained somewhat uncritical. For every moment of coincidental magic (rain on a resonant roof, a strategically-placed police siren) there are numerous other longueurs, in which the typical sounds of an urban environment come to seem clichés of the music, despite the fact that they all come from ‘outside’ the control of the performers.

Frey, once more, seems to disagree: "Many pieces created today are written for specific places or opportunities (whether for the concert hall or a special performance), and then fulfill the function intended for them in that place. However, in a piece like mind is moving (I) the prevailing impression is that the piece itself must first create the site where it can sound[…]The piece[…]creates, all by itself, over the course of its long resounding, its own site: a place where it can Jive." Maybe this is true when referring to a recording, but it hardly seems realistic when one considers the typical circumstances of a live performance – and, indeed, even the circumstances of listening back to a recording (where does one listen? in a comfortable arm-chair with noise-reducing headphones? on a walkman in a crowded street? in the background while surfing the internet?). There is no such thing as the ‘pure’ work, only something that exists in the world, which it modifies and is modified by. Perhaps, then, it would make more sense to come to a synthesis of the two positions: what occurs is not exactly the creation of a new site (a bloody-minded imposition on a previously-existing space), nor is it a situation in which the music is placed helplessly at the whims of environmental accident. Instead, it is a play, a dialogue, an argument or collaboration between the space and the music that takes place within it. And while I’m a little uncomfortable with the way in which experimental work like this gets sequestered away into the pristine, cloistered space of the white-walled art-gallery and arts venue, I must admit that the Nunnery proved very much conducive to such spatial exploration.

Michael Pisaro - Fields Have Ears

Label: Another Timbre
Release Date: November 2010
Tracklist: Fields Have Ears 1; Fade; Fields Have Ears 4
Personnel: Philip Thomas: piano (all tracks); on ‘Fields Have Ears 4’, with Patrick Farmer: natural objects; Sarah Hughes: zither; Dominic Lash: double bass + members of the Edges Ensemble – Julian Brooks: laptop; Stephen Chase: conical blow horn; Richard Glover: slide whistle; Johnny Herbert: spring drum; Ben Isaacs: trumpet; Joseph Kudirka: cymbal; Bob Lockwood: melodica; Scott McLaughlin: cello; Liz Nicholas: frog guero; Hannah Sherry: clarinet

This was the first disc of the ‘Silence and After’ series to which I listened, and it proved so compelling that I chose not to play any of the others until I’d really dug (into) it, acclimatised myself to it, let it form a part of my listening habits for the next few weeks at least. Perhaps I didn’t pay it as much close attention as I’d convinced myself I had, for I actually still find it quite hard to write about; but perhaps, also, the fact that this music can resist analysis after being lived with for a certain period tells you more than any lengthy critical spiel would have.

In any case, what we have here are three compositions by Pisaro (I’m assuming that the first two, at least, are fully notated, though the final, ensemble piece, would seem to allow more space for a certain amount of improvisation, within certain, fairly strict parameters, especially given that it’s credited as a ‘realisation’ of the original work). ‘Fields Have Ears 1’ is for piano and tape (a fairly sparse field recording which features birds, the occasional distant rumble of a passing plane, and the hiss of the recording device). One might say that the tape functions in much the same way that silence does on the other two pieces – i.e. as the actual substance of much of the piece, often seeming to take precedence over any notes that are played. (I’m reminded of Pisaro’s comments in the liner notes to last year’s Terry Jennings/John Cage release, ‘Lost Daylight’, along the lines that even the sounds in Jennings’ piano pieces have silences in them.) What piano we do hear reminds me, a little, of the way that Jennings’ work emerges from European serialism and the La Monte Young/ Cageian turn to Oriental philosophy with what one might call a softer side – being unafraid to use consonant, ‘pretty’-sounding chords. As I noted in a previous review of the Pisaro/Taku Sugimoto duo album on erstwhile, this is a risky policy to adopt – the shock of the pretty in an avant-garde context can wear off into mere gloopiness if not done exactly right – but the note combinations Pisaro asks for on these works are actually less up-front in their prettiness than Jennings’, particularly given the way that they’re strung out between such long silences.

‘Fade’, a work that is by now ten years old, is more immediately stark: the pianist plays a repeated (pedall’d) note, slowly, before pausing and playing a repetition of a different note, pausing again, playing another note, and so on. There’s a kind of lag here that’s implied in the title – not in the sense of “echoes, dying, dying, dying”, but as something vaguer, a slight blurring at the edges, repetition of the note not so much emphasising it as enclosing it in a kind of haze (a consciousness emerging from the use of delay effects that’s been enabled by electronics). I’d concur with Yuko Zama, who writes that, “in Pisaro’s piano pieces, the composer and performer’s personal voices are not on the centre stage” [1]; but this does not make the piece in any way ‘mechanical’, ‘cold’, ‘impersonal’, etc: rather, we approach an egolessness that is at the heart of much post-AMM ideology, and that has something akin to the communal approach which western classical music forgot about for a couple of centuries, but which the rest of the world managed to retain and partially teach us back once we began to realise our mistake. I’m not saying that Pisaro’s music really has make in common with any of these communal musics – in terms of sound it’s very much part of a particular western lineage (the piano being the ultimate symbol of western classical music, even) – but it does approach similar insights from a different angle, particularly on this disc’s third track.

‘Fields Have Ears 4’, the most recent piece, expands things right out, to include an ensemble of fourteen players (in which Thomas’ piano is the most prominent and recognisable sound), but it manages the feat of making the large group sound incredibly delicate and small. Here we have exhalations, indentations, modifications of silence; slight change, but no ‘development’ as such. And yet something is changed; as the ensemble musically breathe together, as they repeat the process of unison sounds followed by silences, those sounds and those silences start to change, to shift. Whilst one is first conscious of Thomas’ chiming chords – a kind of early signal at the start of the sounding sections – and can just about pick out a clarinet from the quiet cloud of players, one gradually comes to recognise other elements in the texture; in particular, at the prickling edge of stereo picture (preventing things from becoming too smoothly ‘pure’), the rustle/crackle of Patrick Farmer’s natural objects. How a large ensemble controls itself to such quietude is quite astonishing, and lends the piece something which a small group playing at the same level could not have achieved – and something which is more than just a trick or an example of human dexterity.

In both ‘Fade’ and ‘Fields Have Ears 4’, one might visualise the sounds as having physical presence – sculpturally or architecturally, as objects that hang in space – sound as such being material in space. Let’s say, somewhat fancifully, that silence functions like the air between the columns of a colonnade; or perhaps it would be more apposite to reverse the metaphor, so that the sounds are the air, the silences the actual structural that intersects and defines it. Then again, let’s just ditch the analogy altogether, for the relationship between sound and silence is more symbiotic than it allows. Sound modifies silence modifies sound (and the subsequent sound/silence of life after you listen). That’s the great legacy of 4’33”, as explored in Kyle Gann’s recent book ‘No Such Thing as Silence’ – a listening awareness expanded beyond the conventionally musical to include one’s environment as a whole (which is an expansion outward but also an expansion inward, into the ‘minute particulars’ of a particular moment or location or space – “the / flight back/ to where / we are” [2]; “the original experience of now and here and this; […] not […] to look at a different world, but to look at this same world differently.”[3]) Thus Pisaro’s use field recordings – listening back to the world and incorporating it into the music, not so much in a ‘chance’ manner, but with structural intent. If the aim is not to introduce natural sounds for aleatory effect, neither is it to mimetically replicate anything as a kind of hyper-realist version of programme music, a couple of stages beyond Respighi’s or Hovhaness’ decorative incorporation of bird- and whale-song into otherwise fairly conventional orchestral works. [4] In point of fact, the sounds we hear on ‘Fields Have Ears 1’ are not pure field recording – there are a couple of unobtrusive sine tones in there, I believe, though they take up a smaller part of the sonic picture than the tape hiss which is up-front throughout (and yet doesn’t give a lo-fi impression at all, perhaps because Thomas’ piano playing is so lovingly recorded). The danger, nonetheless, is still that one will be tempted to say ‘oh, nice bird song, that’s pretty’ and leave the music on the level of a BBC sounds effects cassette tape with some added piano chords here and there.

Further, one might argue that the use of field recordings is an established technique for Pisaro now, and is perhaps even in danger of becoming a tad hackneyed at times (I wasn’t too keen on the ocean waves that appeared in the third piece of his duo recording with Taku Sugimoto). On the evidence we have here, though, I don’t think that at all; I find it impossible not to admire the care of shaping, refining, honing this aesthetic of silence in a way that extends beyond initial theoretical generalisations and into the fabric of the work’s construction and execution. Perhaps it’s the compositional framework that imposes a necessary rigour on what could become unfocussed, random, or meandering in improv contexts when everyone’s having an off-day – though that said, Sugimoto’s turn to ultra-ultra minimalism in his recent composed work doesn’t, for me, have the same rigour in its translation to disc (live, it may be wonderful, the creation of a specific kind of shared experience). I don’t think I could pin-point exactly why this is, but, somehow, the recordings of Pisaro’s pieces that I’ve heard do work as discs, as albums separated from their live moment of creation; they do still function as compelling experiences.

‘Fields Have Ears,’ then (the album as a whole), possesses a spareness which is not emptiness, and a real clarity – each note is weighted and considered and placed, each pause judged, each element considered. In a way, one can’t distinguish too easily between whole and parts because it’s not developmental (apart from that it occurs in time; as music, it is necessarily linear on the most basic level). Close focus is, then, on the moment, though the music is generous enough to allow for moments of inattention too, occasional drifts in concentration, without severely harming one’s ability to pick up the thread again when one zones back in. That lack of distinction between episodes, that lack of build and climax might seem like mere flatness to some, but it’s actually pretty hard to achieve, especially on a long, large-ensemble piece like ‘Fields Have Ears 4’; a state that cannot be conjured without real dedication, on the part of both composer and performers, to the particular aesthetics which enable and prompt it.

Notes

[1] Yuko Zama, review of ‘Fields Have Ears’ (http://d.hatena.ne.jp/yukoz/20101220)

[2] J.H. Prynne, ‘Airport Poem: Ethics of Survival’, in ‘Poems’ (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2005 (1969))

[3] John Osborne, ‘Black Mountain and Projective Verse’, in ‘A Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry’ (ed. Neil Roberts) (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003 (2001))

[4] Nor is it to reproduce natural patterns or rhythms in a stricter sense (the ‘breathing’ effect of ‘Fields Have Ears 4’ is simply my subjective interpretation, and one could easily listen to the piece without thinking of it as breathing-like at all. That said, it is capable of making one conscious of one’s own bodily rhythms, asserting themselves just at those moments when one is trying to still oneself, to hold one’s breath, to listen closest (I could feel my ear pulsing against my headphones at the quietest points in the music).

Michael Pisaro/ Taku Sugimoto - 2 Seconds / B Minor / Wave

Label: Erstwhile
Release Date: November 2010
Tracklist: 2 Seconds/ B Minor / Wave
Musicians: Michael Pisaro: composition, guitar, field recordings; Taku Sugimoto: composition, guitar, misc.

I’m torn about this one, for reasons I’ll go into later: but to start off with, I’ll admit that, certainly, it’s interesting and valid and an important contribution to the ongoing debate about and evolution of the music. It’s simpler (as in, less full of musical events) than the two recent Toshimaru Nakamura duos with acoustic guitarists (‘Crepuscular Rays’ with Havard Volden and ‘Semi-Impressionism’ with Tetuzi Akiyama), and more obviously transparent; indeed, it lays its materials out so clearly that it could almost be accused of being an entirely conceptual work – Pisaro’s and Sugimoto’s contributions were recorded separately, after all. That said, the separate recording technique has become common enough recently to justify it being called a legitimate technical resource, rather than a case of one-off experimentation: the MIMEO album ‘sight’ from a few years back is perhaps the most famous example (though it’s actually a slightly different case, as the larger ensemble gives it more of an aleatoric element – the probability of there being concurrences and agreements between the separate recordings becomes lower once the number of participants starts to spread). With duo recordings, however– ones as sparse as this one, anyway – it’s much easier to get some sort of concurrence, if not active ‘dialogue’ in the EFI sense: indeed, if one was played Sachiko M/ Ami Yoshida’s collaboration as Cosmos (recorded live, with both musicians in the same room) and the Nakamura/ Yoshida collaboration ‘Soba to Bara’ (in which both musicians’ contributions were recorded separately), one would be hard pressed to say which one featured the performers in the same space. The new approach to duo playing fostered by the influential ‘lowercase’ scenes in Japan, Berlin, London is one in which sonic proximity means sharing the same space, rather than direct imitation or facile ‘conversational’ interplay; each player pursues their own particular direction, following the consequences of one idea or texture or type of sound in a way that overlaps with, rather than directly parallels, the activity of their partner. (A fine recent example would be Angharad Davies and Axel Dorner’s ‘AD’). Given this, the separate recording technique fits perfectly; and, given also the way that recent developments of post-Cageian theory and practice have blurred the lines between composition and improvisation (as documented on the new ‘Silence and After’ series on Another Timbre), one can argue that the music is as much conceptual as it is musical, that theory and practice, sound and pre-planned framework/manner of execution are too closely tied to be usefully or easily disentangled.

This does not mean, though, that one cannot judge it by musical standards: indeed, they are the primary means of measurement, the yardstick by which to make one’s mind up. The criticism which has developed (mainly on blogs and online fora ) alongside the new methods (well, OK, by now they’re not that new, as Mattin would no doubt argue) does, in fact, stress personal subjective judgement just as much as any theoretical or systematic analytical system: one is more likely to get a story about the circumstances in which the record was listened to, minute details of the sounds of passing cars, neighbours’ noises, etc, than one is to get a treatise of aesthetic jargon. It’s an interesting intersection indeed, where pursuing theoretical goals with great rigour, embracing deliberate limitation and an almost monastic intensity of focus, leads to the creation of a music in which such simple and ‘old-fashioned’ criteria as ‘I like this sound’ and ‘that is a beautiful chord’ become surprisingly important. That’s not to say that there is no critical rigour involved, and most committed listeners to and writers about this music would be able to have a long and considered debate about whether something works artistically or not – it’s not just a simple ‘I’m partial to this’. Still, all this builds up to the statement with which I began the review: I find myself in two minds about the merits of the disc because both my personal sense of enjoyment (probably not the right word) and my critical, evaluative sense raise problems for me when listening to it.

Firstly, let’s consider the conceptual (compositional) framework which has been used to construct the three pieces. All three last twenty minutes exactly; all bring together two separate compositions/performers based on a particular idea. ‘2 Seconds’ is a unit of pulse; ‘B Minor’ a key; ‘Wave’ was left more open, with each musician free to make their own interpretation of that word. The opening track finds Pisaro using layers of sine waves, looped to create beats which fit in with rhythmically with Sugimoto’s own short, electronic beeps (a guitar tuner?) and striking of what sounds like two wooden objects (claves?). The sine tones build up to create rich chords that are sometimes Sachiko-M-stark (though not quite as tinnitus-inducingly high-pitched – there’s a significant low-end rumble which occasionally caused my headphones to vibrate), sometimes gorgeously, spacily rich (this ‘beautiful’ aspect to sine tones is one that’s not been explored that much – the only example that springs to mind is the work of the clarinet/electronics duo Los Glissandinos). Some of the tones are held to create the chord, but the more abrupt, dial-tone like elements ensure a kind of clipped-feel round the edges; the piece is at once comforting in its rhythmical regularity, and somewhat forbiddingly robotic (like a kind of soft industrial music). Occasionally, we hear sounds from (I presume) Sugimoto’s recording which allow ‘real-world’, non-electronic sounds into proceedings: occasionally we hear the squeak of someone shifting their weight on a leather chair, and at one point what sounds like an electric drill is briefly switched on. Given these fragmented glimpses, one supposes that Sugimoto’s contribution had a visual, theatrical/ritualistic quality to it which is lost on the recording, suggesting other dimensions to the piece that belie its apparently fixed and rigid quality, opening out beyond the recording to different spaces, times, contexts. Ultimately, though I do admire the restraint of the concept, I can’t quite fully enjoy the track as a whole: at times I admire the bloody-mindedness of the clockwork electronic beep and the sections of layered sine-tones, at others I feel unable to fully pull myself into the soundworld, stepping out of that immersion into which I had briefly been drawn.

My fault? Perhaps. ‘B Minor’ is next, and evinces the same sort of rigour in terms of the gestures each musician allows himself; this time, though, what is played is deliberately pretty, imparting things with a Loren Connors-style minimalism. Of course, we remember this from the classic Sugimoto of ‘Opposite’, and we think too of his recent recordings of simple, haiku-like melodies, rendered with a sparse and often beguiling, hesitant delicacy in tandem with vocalist Moe Kamura. You can have too much of a good thing, though, and, while this might have been absolutely gorgeous if restricted to three or five minutes (as were the pieces on ‘Opposite’, and as are the pieces on ‘Saritote II’), it does pall somewhat over the full twenty. Both men are on electric guitars: Sugimoto plays the harmony (in B Minor, of course) – slowly-paced, equally-placed chord sequences – Pisaro, the melody– sustained handfuls of notes that mesh with and accentuate the chords, rather than back-grounding them. It is lovely, yes, but…And then I think: to what absurd, acerbic levels of ‘beauty’ have I become accustomed which would lead me to think that this music, perhaps palpably ugly or just plain boring to some people who have no idea of onkyo or taomud or wandelweiser, is overly pretty? But we enter a difficult area when we consider beauty as the generation of prettiness, delicacy, sweet tinkling textures: and, while Marion Brown’s contribution to Harold Budd’s ‘Bismali 'Rrahman 'Rrahim’ ensures that that track remains one of my all-time favourites, the rest of that Budd record, sans Brown, goes too far into gloop and sickliness. Or once again, I know people whose musical views I totally respect, and whom one would hardly call un-critical New Agers, and yet I just cannot share their enthusiasm for Laraaji’s ‘Day of Radiance,’ the third in Brian Eno’s ambient series. It’s the same here – I’m not sure what the optimum number of minutes for the track would have been, but somewhere, things step over an invisible (l)edge and that kind of simple beauty is not quite enough.

Onto the final track, anyway, in which Sugimoto interprets ‘waves’ to mean ‘(sound)wave’ – a sustained (e-bowed?) drone – while Pisaro chooses a field recording of ocean waves breaking (or it may be an electronically-generated sound), which enters and drops out of the texture at regular intervals. For me, this is somewhat spoiled by Pisaro’s contribution, which doesn’t seem as integrated as were the elements that made up the other two pieces. It sits on top of the overall musical flow, rather than being fully integrated – it feels like an add-on, rather than an interesting juxtaposition. And it also works against the rigour of the drone, rendering it almost New-Agey, like an avant-garde version of one of those ‘Sounds of the Sea’ easy-listening albums you find in British garden centres. Perhaps this is the inevitable consequence of the aleatoric way in which the music was put together, but I’m not sure that’s necessarily true: as the other tracks, and other separately recorded improv collaborations attest, it’s perfectly possible to create something cohesive and symbiotic using this method. Maybe it’s a kind of reminder, a jolt that prevents us getting too comfortable, that lets us know the element of risk and failure we had forgotten about in our easy immersion into beauty and prettiness. Here one thinks of Boulez distinguishing between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ chance operations (in the 1957 essay ‘Alea’ ), and wonders ‘have I become as tetchy as that’? On the other hand, I just don’t feel that the piece works, whatever the methods behind its construction.

Overall, then, there are elements about each piece I like, both conceptually and musically. Of the three, I think ‘2 Seconds’ probably works best over the entire twenty minutes; ‘B Minor’ is more immediately pretty/ beautiful, but somewhat outstays its welcome; and ‘Waves’ is (perhaps deliberately) less cohesive (or at least, more slight), which, for me, makes it less successful musically. Summarising in this way, I’m aware of how subjective, in an almost petty manner, these judgements sound; and I’m grateful to this recording for making me want to examine my own critical approach as much as I examine the album itself. Whether it ‘works’ or not, it is, as I argued at the beginning, an important document, a springboard for debate, and a musical experience with some genuinely lovely moments; very much worth investigation if you haven’t heard it already.