#greyfade

Composed by Catherine Lamb Performed by Ghost Ensemble

Margaret Lancaster: flute Sky Macklay: oboe Ben Richter: accordion Lucia Stavros: harp Chris Nappi: hammered dulcimer Martine Thomas: viola Tyler J Borden: cello James Ilgenfritz: contrabass Gregory Chudzik: contrabass

Recorded at The Bunker Studio, Brooklyn, New York, NY

Interius/Exterius (2022) is a large-scale piece in which Lamb deals with the spatiality of sounds. As the title suggests, the juxtaposition of internal and external sounds is a primary guiding principle. Here these are defined as sounds working their way to the center of the ensemble grouping and outward to its periphery. Amid sustained winds and strings, the percussive attacks of harp and dulcimer provide signposts for ascertaining this deployment.

Lamb has cited Deep Listening (1986), awork by Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) recorded in an empty cistern, as an influence. Deep Listening also refers to Oliveros’s practice that became an academic subdiscipline, complete with a program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Interius/Exterius was recorded at Bunker Studio in Brooklyn, not in a cistern, but its production by Matt Sargent and Joseph Branciforte affords the piece a spacious character. This abets the listener’s ascertainment of the movement throughout the ensemble of sonic material. Interius/Exterius would be a great piece to mix for surround sound. As is so often the case, a live hearing would be revelatory.

Lamb has spoken about her recent struggles with interiority and exteriority as a composer and as a person. While one hopes she can reconcile these elements, the ambiguity imparted by Interius/Exterius serves as a fascinating metaphor for the gradual growth that can be found in such lived experiences.

The longest piece on New Primes, “Irregular,” deals with dissonant overtones shaping a richly evolving tapestry of verticals. It demonstrates that drone doesn’t necessarily equate to stasis, and in “Irregular” a fluid shift of overtones rife with dissonance provides a counterweight to conventional thinking. “Proth” is excited with pulsations, an exercise in coruscating rhythms. 

Low bass thrums as “Pierpont” begins. The richness of the bass is diverting enough, but a lot is going on above, once again led by a pulsating tone and dissonant intervals. “Cullen” begins with a welter of mid-register dissonance that gradually straightens out into octaves only to have another wave of dissonance overwhelm it. A polyrhythm is articulated by pulsation - 3:2. The practice of throwing a dissonat smear into the midst of things and then resolving it to a perfect interval is the concept at play. 

New Primes closes with “Euclid,” its second longest piece at 7’36.” A single, pulsing Eb makes a sly entrance: it will appear throughout in various guises. Polyrhythms abound in the piece and all three waveforms are present, providing a variety of timbres. Just intervals are played out in duets. Here and there there is a splash of white noise against the prevailing pitch content. The work closes with a slow fade on the single, pulsing Eb, as before in the fourth octave. One could easily imagine Davis doing long form drone pieces, but so much is packed into these one-movement works that further duration isn’t necessary. Listen closely: there’s much to hear. 

Much of that debut inhabited a dream space, a lush area of semi-somnolent exchange that it would be misleading, even incomplete, to call a dialogue. This new venture continues the journey but with a few large-scale formal elements included to shock the system. Amidst the drone and sonic wash, some stuttering aphorisms have been inserted, such as the fragmented “10.17.13.” Yes, the drones are still present, but they’ve been relegated to a background level, a higher register subservient to the bleeps, dull thuds and click-and-pop ur-glitch typifying the music’s fuzzy and bumpy trajectory. A technoid rhythm emerges, a spring-loaded fragment of fractured beat makes the music lope rather than engaging in the spring that should be its birthright. All fades in an immaculately lopsided reiteration, a deliberately misshapen figure eight.

 These teeny vignettes can chill or heat, depending on the mode of listening. They eschew the modal frameworks the duo so often establish in favor of punch, grind and antiseptic lather, like the increasingly layered “10.14.4.” A miniature engine drives it, a crystalline electronic motor somehow present but remote, Bleckmann’s voice almost courtly in its contrapuntal vowel repetitions. As surprising as the cross-section I, it offers nothing in preparation for the hard edges and jack-in-the-box mutations of “8.11.” That three-minute marvel may be the disc’s standout piece, so completely does it sum up all that makes the listening experience such an unpredictable treat. The miniatures complement and offset those vast tracts of space and sound in tandem familiar to anyone following these veterans’ work. Even here, there’s no shortage of timbral novelty. Are those strings on “7.21” or just a vocal manifestation? Throughout it all, Bleckmann’s voice (he is so obviously a master of overtone manipulation!) samples and holds any electronic concerns underpinning it. The music moves in concentric waves, rings of tone and mosaics of rhythm imbuing each moment with luminosity, masking a dizzying array of sounds below the frigid surfaces. If my descriptors are contradictory, so is the music, at once fiery and frozen in the alien climate it creates as, ultimately, time stands still.

Otto is a founding member of the justly celebrated JACK quartet, those purveyors of “new music”’s staggering diversity, bringing their power and precision to everything from Helmut Lachenmann’s pointillistic tone colors to Cenk Ergün’s arm-and-hammer repetitions. It’s doubtful that any other group could be as convincing as they in this dreamily confrontational composition. Otto, a violinist whose music making is also informed by deep mathematical study, offers his piece Rag’sma in two versions on a vinyl slab and a third available as digital download. Briefly, because anything beyond will demonstrate my lack of aural comprehension, the piece is composed for three string quartets, the third being optional. If the third is employed, it is performed live over the other two, which are pre-recorded. The work is written in just intonation, which involves what we think of as microtones but which are really intervals tuned purely, according to ratios. The harmonic basis of the piece is a rajisma, an extremely tiny interval imperceptible to most ears but which, given the quartets’ motion as the music progresses, introduces increasing harmonic complexities.

As you don’t have to run changes to dig Coltrane’s Ascension or expound on overtone when thrilling to Tony Conrad and John Cale’s gorgeously distorted collaborations, the mathematics guiding Rag’sma serves as a single gateway into what is a cosmically awesome experience. There is a feeling, a palpable sensation unlike any other, that comes with a purely tuned interval; it transcends any more familiar sense of cadence or resolution. The various confluences of those purities in juxtaposition lead to internal rhythms which are most readily apparent at a point of relative harmonic stability, as at 3:24 of each version, where my stubbornly Eurocentric ears insist on hearing a dominant chord. It’s much more than that, and depending on whether you’re listening to the two album versions or the composite third, a different set of relationships will surface. A similar point of repose occurs at 7:53, but these are only points on a complex curve of tension and release. Like Eliane Radigue or Randy Gibson, Otto composes in shifting sonic planes, each tone a reflection and expansion of those surrounding and shaping it. Each moment is an amalgamation and a non-conventional point of departure leading nowhere except toward another iteration blurring the already tenuous boundaries between tone, timbre and rhythm. As the texture expands and contracts, all notions of externality and internality become irrelevant. The restless beauty of a journey takes hold and propels the listening experience that it would be folly to label drone, still acknowledging that the requisite kernel of truth applies. As with other sounds that ebb and flow on a huge canvas, simply surrendering to the magic proffers best results.