On the opening song ‘Stella Maris’ from his debut long play, the artist and composer Allan Gilbert Balon offers a cloistered procession of organ and voice which feels both evocative and utterly self-contained. The music of the piece bears comparison with the sustained notes and partial tones of works for organ and carillon by Charlemagne Palestine, but where the self-styled ‘avant-garde Quasimodo’ has hewed towards the secular through the celebration of his soft divinities, his cherished pile upon pile of plush toys, here Balon retains a more liturgical air, where it seems possible to trace every dust sprite as it arches and circles a vault or filters out from nave to transept.
His limpid vocal harmonies might suggest early Sigur Rós or the seventies choral works of Daniel Lentz, who was recently the subject of the stunning retrospective Lips on Unseen Worlds, with his compositions for the San Andreas Fault incorporating whistles and wine glasses, kalimbas and harps which jangle together like the knocking of sea shells and froth and splash in iridescent cascades. There is a glimpse of the sunlight and the ocean on ‘Stella Maris’ while the delayed chimes and phantoms of the final moments add a more nocturnal aspect to the track, even as Balon steadily constructs his own private sanctuary.
Whether named for the Virgin Mary or Cormac McCarthy’s final novel, ‘Stella Maris’ which is translated from the Latin as ‘Our Lady, Star of the Sea’ serves as a tantalising opening feature. The Magnesia Suite links Balon with Sean McCann’s abstract and sometimes ravishing Recital Program, with the composer – a pianist who winds together percussion and reeds, organ, voice and tape recordings over the course of the album – gaining recognition for his site-specific installation mantra of things as they are sometimes which was performed at MoMA PS1 at the beginning of 2022, while Balon also co-runs a ‘variable geometry press’ called XYÄ edition which is geared in its own words ‘towards writing, sound phenomenon and inner engineering technologies’.
Embarking on another voyage, Sarah Davachi drones out at sea on ‘Possente Spirto’ from The Head as Form’d in the Crier’s Choir, her upcoming collection for solo performers and chamber ensembles. The title of the piece alludes to the ‘Possente spirto, e formidabil nume’ of the opera L’Orfeo by Claudio Monteverdi, an aria which captures the moment when the bard Orpheus strives to convince the ferryman Charon to allow him to pass into Hades, from where he hopes to recover his wife Eurydice, who has died and gone into the underworld after being bitten by a snake.
In this rendering, which is regarded as one of the high water marks of the late Renaissance and early Baroque period, the elaborate yet heartfelt aria lulls Charon to sleep and Orpheus crosses the Styx, with Davachi’s piece capturing the wash and spume and the staggered descent of the journey, written for sustaining continuo and duos of string and brass, with Davachi performing on Mellotron and synthesizer with tape delay while Andrew McIntosh plays viola and Mattie Barbier adds plaintive appeals on the trombone.
Armed with Clippy EM272 stereo microphones and undisclosed instrumentation, the South Korean sound artist Suk Hong elides the boundaries and ellipses between the performed and overheard on his new album Pedigree for the Otoroku label. Reedy synthesizers, pipe organ drones, oscillating sine tones and percussive static rippled through by a late burst of mallets seem to merge steadily with the litany of sounds which he captured as he walked and commuted around Seoul, with his microphones all the while hanging from his backpack.
These found sounds might include the bustle and yell of street food vendors, sputtered coughing, snorting animals, office workers on their own daily commutes, conversations snatched only in passing or the applause which emanates from an impromptu performance space or concert hall, subway announcements, people snoring and the tinkling of keys from a piano bar. In short Pedigree gathers up all of the bustle of the modern city, from its psychological tics to its biological processes, and from its novelties and throwaways to the sense especially in a metropolis like Seoul of an all-encompassing mechanist hum.
Yet such is the intensity of focus and so indiscriminate are the sounds relayed by Suk Hong that Pedigree, which becomes more curious with every listen, takes on a patient and meditative quality, embodying both a sense of anxiety and its sheer release. Suk Hong says that the album is ‘about what’s been passed down, the pedigree of our people, hastily constructed to pick up the phase of the west’, adding that the beauty which he finds in his city’s streets inhabits both the good and bad sides of Seoul, which become inseparable. Adding to the air of refined disquiet, the cover image for the album focuses on a mural and table setting from the Sariwŏn Hotel in North Korea.
Pat Thomas also embraces the buzz and thrum of city life on ‘Step 4’ from This is Trick Step, which is due out in the fall on 577 Records. The searching and sometimes recondite pianist whose palette of improvisational jazz stretches from hard bop and Latinate forms to Middle Eastern and North African influences, as he leads groups inspired by the music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik and Paul Bley and mixes percussive tone clusters with pieces for electroacoustic instrumentation, here summons up images of flying cars and tube transportation at the heart of an electronic album which he describes as ‘an alternative universe where J Dilla and Morton Feldman collaborate’.
Fresh from his work with Wild Up, the acclaimed bass-baritone singer Davóne Tines updates the repertoire of the iconic concert artist and civil rights activist Paul Robeson, to whom Tines has been brusquely compared ever since his youth. In the company of John Bitoy on the piano and Khari Lucas on percussion, the singer begins with a sardonic version of ‘The House I Live In’ which scans a snuffed-out torch of liberty and raises instead a stained rag so as to remind the United States of America of its ‘bloody primal sin’.
The pianist Elaine Rombola Aveni and violist Amelia Hollander Ames as RAHA Duo release Swirl, a collection of contemporary chamber works by composers with strong ties to Boston. ‘Unearthed from the neolithic tar which eventually swathes all history’, the venerable indie Drag City dredges up a Peel Session from the late nineties by Aerial M, the mysterious David Pajo monicker, whose timely brand of slowcore has never sounded more honeyed and lacquered than on the plangent and wandering ‘Vivea’.
And on the closing piece from her impending album All Of the Colours Are Singing, the guitarist Jessica Ackerley offers a ‘Conclusion: In Four Micro Parts’ which carries the spiky and angular post-hardcore of Shellac plus the smudged bass lines and strained or incandescent strings of her background in free jazz, with a late turn to more pastoral contemporary classical airs and one final lapsed shimmy as she is joined by Walter Stinson on a mean upright bass and Concetta Abbate on the viola, while Aaron Edgcomb pummels and funnels away from behind the drum set.
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Allan Gilbert Balon – ‘Stella Maris’
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Sarah Davachi – ‘Possente Spirto’
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DAVÓNE TINES & THE TRUTH – ‘THE HOUSE I LIVE IN’
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RAHA Duo – ‘Marti Epstein: Swirl’
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Jessica Ackerley – ‘Conclusion: In Four Micro Parts’
