11 Anthony TanSusurrus
Anthony Tan
gengseng records GS004 (anthonytan.bandcamp.com/album/susurrus)

How does one listen to music that is not meant to be listened to? This question may seem rhetorical, if not absurd, but it is one that is presented to us when faced with the genre of ambient music. To many, ambient music is equivalent to elevator music, easy listening pop or soft jazz that pads the other ambient sounds of shopping malls, elevators and airports. In fact, the concept of ambient music was first used by Brian Eno in his 1978 album Ambient 1: Music for Airports and has since grown to encompass a range of electroacoustic compositions.

According to Wikipedia, ambient music “is a genre of music that emphasizes tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm.” Anthony Tan’s Susurrus embodies this description very well, augmenting fragmented pianistic passages with real-time electronics. This is atmospheric music at its finest, and is simultaneously foreboding and calm, never resolving, but also never developing the tension that necessarily needs a resolution.

Both pieces on this recording, endlessnessnessness and sublime subliminal sublimate are constant paradoxes, the net result being equal to the effort put in by the listener: focusing on the small scale reveals minute repetitions and rhythmic patterns, while listening to the larger forms provides a rather vague overview of works that forgo conventional structures in favour of constantly shifting acoustic events. 

If this review appears inconclusive, that is because ambient music, much like the minimalist works of Glass, Reich and others, is so highly subjective and the experience of it so dependent on the individual. I encourage everyone to explore Tan and Susurrus, whether one is familiar with this genre or not, and explore how you listen to and experience music that is not meant to be listened to.

10 No Hay BandaI Had a Dream About This Place
No Hay Banda
No Hay Discos NHD 002 (nohaybanda.ca)

Love of language but incapacity in more than two meant I had to look up a translation of this disc title, and guess what? No Hay Banda means “there is no band.” Their two-disc release from No Hay Discos is titled I Had a Dream About This Place

No Hay Banda is made up of five instrumentalists and a soprano (apparently they exist as individuals) from Montreal. Their debut recording features four works, and you’re on your own in terms of liner notes. No Hay Discos chose instead to provide poems in French and English respectively, by Françoise Major and Donato Mancini. I suppose they are responses to the music, but I dare not attempt further parsing. Mancini’s text is also featured, often indistinctly in Andrea Young’s A Moment or Two of Panic, which at 32 minutes is more like several moments of ennui and angst. Anthony Tan’s half-hour is curiously titled An Overall Augmented Sense of Well-Being. I only get the augmented part. Also included are the somewhat briefer Rubber Houses by Sabrina Schroeder and Mauricio Pauly’s The Difference is the Buildings Between Us. A large letter “O” goes rogue on the playfully designed CD jacket, displaced from titles and composers’ names. That adds some sorely needed fun, but maybe it’s intended as a serious meditation on the difference between an oval and a circle, as suggested by the granite-shaded cover art. 

There’s an average of 25 somewhat static minutes per cut. Whew. No hay tiempo. As the saying goes, less is sometimes more, but the reverse can also be true. Were we a civilization where meditation was taught from the cradle, perhaps this would be the music we all craved. Or rather preferred, since in that society there’d be no craving? Perhaps we wouldn’t be headed for environmental collapse. Perhaps the length of these pieces would evoke a kind of joy, like what one feels at the prospect of a free summer afternoon or a hot bath on a cold night. I admit to none of these responses. Instead, I become astoundingly furious as I listen to the patient clouds of sound drift out of my stereo. 

I’ve performed music by some of this compositional cadre, not these four but others of a similar school. Some folks like it. It takes great focus to do well, as the players do here.  And even so, there will be those who, like me, would like their two hours back.

12 Eren GumrukcuogluEren Gümrükçüoğlu – Pareidolia
Conrad Tao; JACK Quartet; Mivos Quartet; Ensemble Giallo; Deviant Septet
New Focus Recordings FCR343 (newfocusrecordings.com)

Two suppositions: music is only music to the extent that it elicits recognition and response, and not all music (not all art) is good for one. Consider these as you read why I recommend this disc. Think catharsis. Composer Eren Gümrükçüoğlu makes brilliant use of acoustic and electronic media, with strong collaborators including the excellent JACK Quartet. His ideas, once you settle into the terrain, make sense. There is pitch and sound contoured into melody, and there is rhythm, lots of it. 

The opening track is frankly scary. Pandemonium comes to us via Milton in Paradise Lost. Not a good place, to say the least. A demonic gathering place ain’t peaceful, it’s a harrowing funhouse!

 I found myself beating time to the title track, Pareidolia, even during the intervals where metre and rhythm seem absent; rather they are partially submerged in silences that allow only some of the contours to show. When “time” is introduced explicitly, at various points in the piece (at nearly 24 minutes, by far the longest single track), the material is taut and jazzy, the silences filled, the pulse revealed. Track four, Ordinary Things, pits a small wind band with bass and percussion against fragments from speeches made by Recep Erdoğan, composed as mimicry, a satiric chorus riffing alongside the autocrat’s overblown rhetoric, forming a kind of sonic haze around the vocals. Mesmerizing. 

Those step-dancing squirrels in your attic crawl space have spotted a canary, who calls out from various places as they scutter about chasing the hapless bird. That describes the spatial and rhythmic fun of the final track, Asansör Asìmptotu

Kudos to all the performers and especially to the composer.

Listen to 'Eren Gümrükçüoğlu – Pareidolia' Now in the Listening Room

13 Guy Barash KilldeerGuy Barash – Killdeer
Guy Barash; Nick Flynn
New Focus Recordings FCR355 (newfocusrecordings.com)

The marriage of text and music, like other pairings, can be problematic. This is especially true in the spoken word subgenre, as is featured on Killdeer. The poetry of Nick Flynn haunts its way through “structured improvisation” conceived by Guy Barash, with Kathleen Supové on piano, Frank London on a very threadbare trumpet and Eyal Maoz filling in on guitar. Barash handles the electronic manipulations, and the product winds its way into ever darker places. Flynn, let it be known, has seen the darkness stare back at him, and his text invites you to look into the same mirror. Clearly recited, prosaic, brooding, even angry, the text does not appear in the booklet aside from two brief excerpts. When you hear the thoughts uttered in track seven, Poem to be Whispered by the Bedside of a Sleeping Child, maybe you’ll be glad. I was.

This makes one grateful for the music. London’s insinuating whispers and cries match the mood, a pale shadow of the shadowy poetry, while Supové’s powerful sparks draw our ears away from the poet’s voice towards some kind of brightness.  

Still, this is essentially a textual work, fascinating and disturbing. I will listen again, because I know there’s redemption of a kind proffered by Flynn. The text takes most of my attention, and second listening might change that or might not. The text is why I hesitate, and yet recognize: these are powerful poems. Killdeer meditates on death, and on the demons that would have us wish it on someone else. The matter is dark, the music affecting.

Listen to 'Guy Barash – Killdeer' Now in the Listening Room

14 Filipe Tellez EvocationsFelipe Téllez – Evocations
Canadian Studio Symphony
Centrediscs CMCCD 30922 (centrediscs.ca)

Featuring the talents of Ron Cohen Mann on oboe d’amore, violinist Lynn Kuo and the Canadian Studio Symphony, the newly released album Evocations comprises new works by Colombian-Canadian composer, Felipe Téllez. Led by Lorenzo Guggenheim, the Canadian Studio Symphony was founded in 2022 for the sole purpose of performing new and engaging repertoire, making this a perfect pairing.

Originally written in 2014 and revised in 2022, the Suite Concertante for Oboe d’Amore is a five-movement suite of dances in Baroque style. In keeping with the period, Téllez uses harpsichord and oboe d’amore but mixes them with modern ideas like extensive key modulations and orchestral colours with clarinets and more prominent low brass. The technical capabilities and full range of tonal colours of the oboe d’amore are imaginatively explored, showcasing the warm tone and brilliant virtuosity of Cohen Mann. 

Lovers at the Altar and Impromptu are small pieces for string orchestra used to bridge the Baroque style of the first piece with the more Romantic writing of Corita and Romanza. Corita is an orchestration of a guitar piece composed by Téllez’s mentor and counterpoint teacher in Colombia, Manuel Cubides Greiffenstein. 

Romanza for solo violin and orchestra reveals Kuo’s beautiful, expansive phrasing and expressive musicality. With something for every musical taste, Evocations is sure to satisfy.

Listen to 'Felipe Téllez – Evocations' Now in the Listening Room

15 Valentin Silvestrov BermanValentin Silvestrov
Boris Berman
Le Palais des Degustateurs PDD030 (lepalaisdesdegustateurs-shop.com/boutique)

In March 2022, just days after Russia’s invasion, Ukraine’s pre-eminent composer, Valentin Silvestrov (b.1937) left his native Kyiv for Berlin. Three months later, Boris Berman, following in-person consultations with Silvestrov, recorded this two-CD set spanning 60 years of Silvestrov’s piano music.

Triade (1962) and Elegy (1967) reflect what the young Silvestrov called “lyrical dodecaphony,” to my ears Webern crossed with Debussy. Sonata 2 (1975) juxtaposes serialism, aleatorism and late-Romantic chromaticism, including extended passages of pensive lyricism. The five-movement Kitsch-Music (1977) contains allusions to Schumann, Chopin and Brahms, all to be played, wrote Silvestrov, “as if from afar.” It’s indeed slightly “kitschy” – precious with prettiness and sentimentality, lovely nonetheless. The three movements of Sonata 3 (1979) are slow, inward-looking and disturbingly beautiful, their unsettled tonality suggesting to me an aimless, solitary stroll through a dark, deserted cityscape.

Three 21st -century works were recorded with the piano lid closed, Silvestrov desiring a soft, distant sonority. Postludium (2005) is a slow, bittersweet processional. Five Pieces, Op.306 (2021) – three Pastorals, Serenade and Waltz – are all gentle and sweetly dreamy. Heartfelt simplicity imbues the Three Pieces (March 2022, Berlin), Silvestrov’s musical response to the invasion. The sorrowful Elegy is followed by Chaconne, described by Silvestrov as “accepting death with dignity.” The final Pastoral ends in a mood of serenity, perhaps even hope.

Doubtlessly, these performances by Berman (b. Moscow 1948), head of Yale University’s piano department, pleased Silvestrov. They certainly pleased me.

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