In different ways Hanno Leichtmann and Carme López summon the liturgical stillness of the pipe organ or even the clangorous hum of carillon bells, calling to mind recent albums by Miaux, who played the organ at St. Catherine’s Church in Hoogstraten, and Charlemagne Palestine the self-styled ‘avant-garde Quasimodo’, who hunkered down under the high ceilings of his home studio in Belgium for an ode to his ‘divinities’ in all of their motley plushness.
In fact Hanno Leichtmann – the Berlin-based producer and curator hitherto best known for his electronic music, through collaborations with Jan Jelinek and Valerio Tricoli and the deep house stylings of his Vulva String Quartett – tries his hand at the Villa Aurora Organ in Los Angeles, which was played routinely by the house owner Marta Feuchtwanger, Bruno Walther, Ernst Toch and Hanns Eisler before falling into disrepair, with the villa gaining a new lease of life as an artistic residence before the organ was fully restored in 2010. A product of the silent era which was built by the Artcraft Organ Company of Santa Monica in 1928-29, the Villa Aurora Organ consists of a pipe organ with an echo chamber, plus a wall-mounted marimba and a two-octave set of tubular bells, with Leichtmann managing to temper some of its theatrical flair in the name of minimalist repetition, strains of exotica and the spiritual heft of devotional music.
Meanwhile on her debut album Quintela, the composer Carme López wrings out all of the possibilities which inhere within the Galician bagpipe. Often overshadowed by the great Highland bagpipe, which has achieved a hegemony over hootenannies, the gaita galega has a conical chanter and a bass drone with a second octave and has seized life beyond the traditional repertoire through the playing of Carlos Núñez, who has performed alongside Ry Cooder and Sinead O’Connor, the multi-instrumentalist and educator Cristina Pato, a member of the Silkroad Ensemble which was established in 1998 by Yo-Yo Ma and continues to operate under the auspices of its new artistic director Rhiannon Giddens, and Susana Seivane who extends a family legacy while imbuing her bagpipe with the strains of folk-rock.
López on the other hand turns her gaita inside out, often managing to bend and tame the harsher resonances of her instrument for liturgical refrains, slowly sustained drones and the plummier depths, from the prologue ‘Cando a pena me mata, a alegría dame alento’ whose winding uplift is redolent of the pipe organ to the baroque epilogue ‘Inflorescencia’ where stardust and short spurts from her chanter give way to a buzzsaw drone and a forking melody which play out in ominous counterpoint, even more so as the song cradles to a halt. Elsewhere on Quintela, the first of four movements ‘I. QÚE? A Betty Chaos’ opens with the odd faltering breath and the static sound of air passing through the hide bag, taking on a slight winnowing quality before breaking out into a brackish drone, a shanty which might look out over the Cantabrian Sea or the Atlantic before a final gust of horns, as López casts about indiscriminately in search of a place to anchor.
With dedications to the family hounds and her grandparents, the second movement offers a more sustained drone whose electrical throbs and staggered overtones sound like a wobble board in slow motion, while the third movement proves more mellow. And on ‘IV: CACHELOS. A César de Farbán’ the composer – a performer, teacher and researcher of traditional oral music from Galicia, who for this project cites Éliane Radigue and Pauline Oliveros among her influences – outlines a pulsing drone with pebble percussion, a sonic improvisation made by the knocking together of her gaita’s reeds as Quintela slips beyond the shore.
