The experimental composer Olivia Block’s new piece for Portraits GRM is based upon field recordings which were collected in the San Ignacio Lagoon, a UNESCO world heritage site which is located in the Mexican state of Baja California Sur. The lagoon serves as a winter sanctuary for the eastern Pacific grey whale, and though their methods and intents might be very different by entering into this kind of habitat Block evokes to my mind the sodden menace and rippling sleekness of the Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement album Killer Whale Atmospheres which took for its setting Puget Sound and Alaska, while her specific use of otoacoustic emissions evokes the auditory distortion products of Maryanne Amacher, as she strives on Breach to capture suggestively ‘the subjective soundscape of whales caught up in the noise of the Anthropocene’.
An influential member of the experimental music scene in Chicago ever since the release of her debut solo effort Pure Gaze at the tail end of the nineties, Block’s oeuvre ranges from chamber music and larger orchestral works to unusually intimate takes on musique concrĆØte, solo piano explorations and site specific works for the pipe organ. Often she blends acoustic and electronic practices, whether filtering or manipulating chamber divertissements and organ drones through found objects, sheathes of white noise or extensive processes of digital editing or weaving them into sound collages alongside field recordings, sine tones and other forms of ambient synthesis. Several of her more recent works have focused on the natural world, with the installation Four Channels from 2017 making use of oyster habitat structures while The Mountains Pass which was released on Black Truffle just last year reached out to the endangered wolves and herds of elk who roam across northern parts of New Mexico, as Block set her keenly expressive voice and lapping keys over Jon Mueller’s freeform percussion.
The murky opening to Breach is soon permeated by sonar, our own vociferous sound waves which might cause mass stranding events as well as behavioural changes even as they mirror in purpose the clicks and whistles by which whales and other mammals locate themselves in space. While whales use echolocation to navigate, forage or hunt for prey, Block brings those sonar into a high-pitched and sometimes harrowing chorus which shrilly permeates our inner ear, before introducing the sound of sloshing waves as though some raft or vessel was skirting circuitously the water’s edge.
Synthetic bird calls begin to chirp overhead, with those avian simulations soon multiplying and cleaving the sky as though a contemporary director like say Alex Garland was busily remaking the Alfred Hitchcock classic, switching the setting from a fraught Bodega Bay. Then after about ten minutes and fifty seconds of the fifteen-minute composition Block unveils through staticky distortions what sounds like a mutated concert hall performance or mangled organ grinder, a queasy song which begets buzzing drones and as if by a process of artificial intelligence, a childlike lament for a balloon as it wheezes and runs out of air, before those sloshing waves return to tide us all over.
Breach is one of a slate of four new releases on Portraits GRM, the label founded by Peter Rehberg which now serves as a collaboration between the pioneering Paris recording studio, the composer FranƧois J. Bonnet otherwise known as Kassel Jaeger and FĆ©licia Atkinson’s own Shelter Press. Basho by the London artist Beatrice Dillon – named not after the famed haiku poet but a core concept in the philosophy of KitarÅ Nishida, who sought to elide the distinction between subject and object instead positing consciousness as a field of ‘absolute nothingness’ where all thoughts and desires and experiences take place – sounds like an incipient piece of dub techno, only the constituent parts always remain at arm’s length. Through its various entanglements and oscillations and resolutions the piece briefly comes to resemble gamelan music before Dillon scales everything back again, showcasing her core elements until Basho finds home or nothingness or some kind of zen through grimacing yet comfortingly familiar vocoder-like wisps and shreds.
Meanwhile the duo of Michelle Helene Mackenzie and Stefan Maier draw their inspiration from the Sanzhi Pod City or UFO houses of northern Taiwan, whose construction began in 1978 modelled after the Futuro houses of Matti Suuronen yet halted just a couple of years later owing to financial issues and a spate of inauspicious deaths. It was said that a Chinese dragon sculpture had been destroyed to make way for the construction or that the site existed atop an old Dutch burial ground, with some believing the whole site to be haunted as the houses remained abandoned for thirty years before being mostly demolished in 2010.
In this wasteland insect life flourished, with Mackenzie and Maier taking their title from the five species of orchid mantis which proliferated in vast numbers among the ruins. Their twenty-five-minute composition foregrounds an electroacoustic patchwork of rattling chimes and gargling or running water, chirping crickets and padded footsteps. Permeating the recording, those chimes shift shape to become more like gongs as the atmosphere of Orchid Mantis croaks and tilts, growing ever more foreboding until a disorienting array of sines and drones slices through the heart of the mix.
A lull at fifteen minutes gives way to a kind of adagio for strings where the natural elements of their composition strain to emerge from within a more classical template, an aviary of mostly decorous birds offset by a few more rasping croaks and stridulations whose organic tapestry is halted in the dying moments by what sounds like the ring of a cash register, which continues to chime as a dull grinding noise emanates from a room in the back.
Finally on Still Forms the Japanese composer Hideki Umezawa sounds like he is humping a piano or celeste through winding corridors or dragging those instruments in plunking fashion down flights of stairs. In fact he is tangling with Baschet sound structures, the range of musical sculptures created by the brothers Bernard and FranƧois Baschet across the second half of the twentieth century.
Often created out of folded metal sheets, probably their most famous instrument is the Cristal Baschet whose fifty-six chromatically tuned glass rods must be gently rubbed by moist fingertips, a practice utilised by Kassel Jaeger to eerie and shimmering effect on albums like Face Time and Shifted in Dreams. And across these Still Forms the composer Umezawa shares in the same kind of limpidity, as his piece is characterised by watery plunks and sustained reverberations. After about seven minutes Still Forms starts to pulse and throb like a science fiction movie soundtrack, then swiftly fades out to silence, returning with a more bristling expansive sound not unlikeĀ the Orchid Mantis of Mackenzie and Maier before Umezawa finds a meditative thread amidst all of that plunking and humping.
