Originally from Chicago and now based in Los Angeles, the interdisciplinary artist Marta Tiesenga is something of a polymath, whose practise includes musical performance and composition, printmaking, pen and ink drawing and album art, their interests zig-zagging between collage, maps, puzzles and asemic writing while they hold a bachelor’s degree from the Eastman School of Music in saxophone performance and master of fine arts degrees in experimental sound practises and experimental animation from the California Institute of the Arts.
As a composer, they draw analogies between cartography and the performative possibilities of musical notation, in their own words realising ‘theoretical terrains’ through expanded notation systems, like the symbolic map of Ano Syros which they devised and arranged as they observed the town from an old Jesuit monastery during a summer residency, or their Ísland project which is a collection of still and animated graphic scores inspired by the topography and geological phenomena – glaciers and geysers, volcanos, lava fields and wide treeless fjords, hot springs, black pebble beaches and so on – of different regions of Iceland.
As a collaborator they are a member of Wild Up, whose transformative and recuperative interpretations of the work of the minimalist composer Julius Eastman have received Grammy recognition, and have accompanied Marina Allen and Fievel is Glauque, while their penchant for improvisation saw them hunker down with Patrick Shiroishi underneath a Monterey Park hot pot restaurant for a suite of winnowing duets for the soprano saxophone, with their Full Spectrum album empty vessels described as evoking ‘both the leviathan cistern meditations of Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening Band and Catherine Christer Hennix’s extended raga drones’.
Billed as their first official solo release, Heavy Earth follows hard on the heels of Eutectics, whose short spurts of rhythmic, writhing and ultimately incandescent saxophone landed back in January on Astral Editions, an imprint of the ‘heavy free jazz’ bulwark Astral Spirits. Hopping over to the ‘all sorts’ label and lifestyle gurus at Leaving Records for their latest outpouring, on Heavy Earth the artist takes a different tack with two long sides of steeped atmospheric music on pump organ and saxophone plus field recordings with layered electronics.
‘Vík / Wyoming’ starts off as a smoky vamp based around a few loping chords, moody and pensive on pulleys and wire as shapes shift if not quite behind the scenes then somehow obscured or sublimated from clear view, like translucent clouds which wisp and puff and take geometric forms then slip once more into shifty indeterminacy. The natural landscapes which therefore serve as both background and foreground by contrast gain in bulk and immediacy, become hulking masses as straining, gossamer strings, bowing bass and the throbbing hum of Tiesenga’s saxophone focus our view on the middle distance.
The piece is a composite of two sources, the first a reconstruction of the full orchestral work ‘Vík’ which Tiesenga composed as an animated graphic score during their masters studies, inspired by Vík í Mýrdal, a remote coastal village which serves as the southernmost community in all of Iceland, with its famous ash-covered black sand beach, anthropomorphised troll-like basalt sea stacks and columnar cliffs which play home to fulmars, kittiwakes and puffin colonies, the site lying directly downstream of the Mýrdalsjökull glacier which sits atop the Katla volcano, dormant for too long now whose glacial flows in the case of an eruption are expected to inundate everything bar the village’s hilltop church.
The orchestral ‘Vík’ was premiered by the CalArts New Century Players and their conductor Nicholas Deyoe back in 2017. For ‘Vík / Wyoming’ the composer layers recordings of that performance and its dress rehearsals with environmental field recordings made in the town of Shoshoni, Wyoming in 2020, adding saxophone to the composite which comes described as a ‘psychogeographic collage of two vast, seemingly disparate landscapes’.
Known for its Rocky Mountains and High Plains, it is the flats and barbed fences of Wyoming which feature on the album cover of Heavy Earth, as an insert framed by a reverse of the image and a heaving black mass which may be clouds or foliage. Submerged and then momentarily shimmering, Tiesenga’s saxophone lines hint at movement, transitional blurs no more than a squiggle in obstinate space. For its sense of desolation and foreboding mixed with natural wonder, the track is redolent too of other landscapes, like the concept of satoyama which is native to Japan, the borderland between arable flatlands and the mountainous foothills whose billowing forests and sloping ascents become sites of furtive yet spritely mystery.
The second side of Heavy Earth chugs along to the sound of a nineteenth-century Waterloo Organ Company pump organ, before loosing its moorings and breaking out into an open-ended drone, hovering in the aether, a quavering and palpable bulge which defies gravity while threatening to plummet to the earth or else expand and envelop its surrounds. Portrayed as a meditation on a near-drowning experience, ‘Transubstance’ might equally gulp the listener whole, but in Tiesenga’s rendering the mass of water has been hoisted deftly skyward to hang as an encompassing, eerie and automated mist.
The only respite is the variegated sound of the pump organ’s foot pedals being pressed in turn, which musically serves as a kind of backbeat and thematically proves an almost uncanny reminder of human activity amid the otherwise impervious, all-consuming buzz and thrum. In the face of a near-death experience it also serves as a witless rejoinder, like a machinist in the middle of a vast cleaning or a typewriter tapping away in an ancillary room. It makes for an apocalyptic kind of music which could sit happily on a Twin Peaks or Neon Genesis Evangelion soundtrack, before the final third of ‘Transubstance’ settles into more of an oscillating rhythm as the clouds reconverge.
