My first acquaintance with Zeena Parkins came through her series of collaborations with Bjƶrk, on the seasonal Vespertine where her harp arrangements provided a certain piquancy even as they nuzzled alongside the sometimes bristling and sometimes confectionary array of sweeping strings, tumbling keys and music box melodies, creeping choirs and crunching microbeats, then on the Drawing Restraint 9 soundtrack where she played astride the folk singer Will Oldham and Mayumi Miyata on the shÅ, but perhaps most of all on the song ‘Generous Palmstroke’ which appeared as a ‘Hidden Place’ B-side and in a live rendition on the Family Tree box set, as the limpid pools of her instrument adorned one of the Icelandic singer’s most naked compositions to date.
Yet as her career stretches into its fifth decade the esteemed composer and prolific collaborator can still flit seamlessly between popular forms and the avant-garde, with her own projects threading the needle between free jazz and the offshoots of contemporary classical music plus more conceptually arch divertissements, as some of her latest efforts include a couple of trio albums with Mette Rasmussen and Ryan Sawyer as Glass Triangle while with the percussionist William Winant, electronic musician James Fei, cellist Maggie Parkins and the TILT Brass Sextet led by Chris McIntyre she lavished detail on a longtime passion, across a series of pieces whose graphic scores were based upon images of lace.
Parkins makes extensive use of foley sounds and field recordings, object preparations and electronic processing but there is always something distinctive about the rhythms and pregnant pauses of her harp. On her first ever piece of recorded music, she teamed up with the former Henry Cow members Chris Cutler, Lindsay Cooper and Dagmar Krause as News from Babel for a record which responded to the literary critic George Steiner’s influential book After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation while earlier this year with Ikue Mori as Phantom Orchard, she explored the brief life and literary oeuvre of Izumi Suzuki, the Japanese science fiction author whose work has been hailed as a forerunner of cyberpunk. Now on the deep dive Dam Against the Spring Tide she unveils two multi-part compositions inspired by the discoveries she made while combing through Walter Benjamin’s archives in Berlin.
The new album arrives as part of the latest batch on Relative Pitch Records, alongside the birdcalls and horizontal chases of Evan Parker and Matthew Wright as Trance Map on Horizons Held Close, the arabesques of the bassoonist Karen Borca whose Entwined marks her first album as a leader, as she winds through the skittering and militaristic lines of Paul Murphy on the drums, and Carne Vale by the trio of Ben Bennett on percussion, Michael Foster on saxophones and Jacob Wick on his languorous trumpet, a snake pit or Saharan desertscape of timbral excursions, sandy with some tumbling forays back at the woodshop.
The five pieces of ‘Past Turned Space’ which open Dam Against the Spring Tide find Brett Carson on piano and organ and the percussionist Winant on vibraphone, crotales and harmonica harbouring deftly a series of vignettes, as their piano clusters and sometimes clangorous mallet percussions batten down the hatches for a brief appearance by Joan La Barbara while Parkins jams her elbows into the piano and adds more intimate moments through a few select field recordings. Benjamin’s archives contain a wealth of images and artefacts in addition to commentaries, fragments and other written material, with coloured symbols and other signa serving to illuminate his literary principals as well as his hopes and dreams, but the composition ‘Past Turned Space’ focuses keenly on the philosopher and cultural critic’s memories of his childhood, which are ripe with a fondness for and lingering emotional attachment to material things.
The second half of Dam Against the Spring Tide is more staggered and varied, as Parkins sets the layered strings of her harp against the keyboard preparations of Magda Mayas, to stunning effect on the opening piece ‘Berlin Bedroom: Renwick St. Jan.14.2024’ where electronic processing makes for a wiry and jagged back end. Mayas plays piano and clavinet while Matthew Ostrowski and Sebastian Roux handle the processing and effects, while on ‘Stefan’s List & Color Code Score No. 290’ it is the voice of Christian Kesten which relays a litany of things from Luftballons and BĆ¼cher to Kaisers over Tony Buck’s percussive spurts and muted whistles and bells.
The cadenced and high-pitched oscillations of ‘Matching Tones’ offer a kind of stilted harmony or spectral respite before ‘J’ai Plus de Souvenirs Que’ pitches the splotches of Laurent Bruttin’s clarinet and slinky staircase strings between feisty drum rolls and cagey sines. The piece becomes more loaded and less conversational through the portentous sounds of car engines and train whistles then sashays towards its conclusion. And in a final bid to echo audibly the codes and puzzles, the scribbles and erasures of Benjamin’s notes the piece ‘Erasure Score’ offers a grab bag of sounds from horror movie theatrics to fatal exceptions and from muffled yet thudding kicks to the odd wobbling reed, with Kesten recapitulating his procession of items in the wake of some squelching electronics as an hour of Zeena Parkins at her most quizzical draws to a close. Schƶn Kartoffeln!
