Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
New Focus Recordings recently released a new album from experimental chamber group Ensemble Dal Niente showcasing music by relative newcomer Igor Santos side-by-side with recent works by long-established composer Carola Bauckholt and the legendary George Lewis.
An Original Voice
Igor Santos’ portrait RE for sampler and ensemble merges “found” recorded sounds with a live instrumental ensemble. More importantly, it merges ambient atmospherics with accented instrumental and electronic gestures and processed vocal sounds, all in a continuous yet gently head-spinning flow. That is, until the sixth minute, when a series of blares introduce an intelligible reading of a quote from philosopher Paulo Freire, spoken over the faint crackle of a much-loved vinyl record.
Quibbling strings take over, soon joined by other instruments, in a new section that begins with discrete mini-motifs and evolves into a dark, spacious kaleidoscope of arhythmic counterpoint. The music settles into graceful cycles which build in volume and complexity until percussive rhythms surge into the foreground.
Vocal fragments, forcefully plucked strings, struck objects and sampled sounds fade into a quiet repeating cycle, setting up an expectation that perhaps the piece is going to fade on this. But it is in turn abruptly interrupted by harsh buzzes. The opening ambience slides back in, topped with a dissonant whistling effect. And so we end roughly where we began? No – yet another expectation is cut short.
One way of describing the language Santos crafts here is as a highly imaginative musical pidgin. A visual analogue might be as a matrix that upon viewing from a distance resolves into an image both recognizable and entirely new. Any way you look at it, it’s an original and interesting creation.
Faces in the Crowd
Ensemble Dal Niente has worked with the eminent composer George Lewis since around 2012. The album features the group’s realization of his piece Flux. The title is appropriate since, in Lewis’ words, the music displays “a relentlessly high-contrast sensibility; even quiet, contemplative passages never really come to rest.”
Through 11 minutes we hear naturalistic, often animalistic sounds created by the instrumental ensemble without electronics or samples. The instrumentation includes electric guitar, piano, and two percussionists along with the brass, woodwinds, and strings. Recurring sound motifs percolate throughout, flowing and crashing into one another, sometimes aligning to make cogent if enigmatic statements, other times undercutting each other via stress, timing, or color.
And speaking of color, a painting by Jeff Donaldson called JamPact/JelliTite (for Jamila) inspired the work. A close look at the image explains why. Lurking amid abstract shapes and jagged sunburst patterns you spy faces and figures and musical instruments. Lewis renders this idea in music: Amid the seemingly disordered waves of sound, organic humanity emerges, sighing, crying, squealing, laughing and celebrating.
Drums on the Beach
The final piece, Pacific Time, comes from Carola Bauckholt, another composer the ensemble has collaborated with for years. Here the musicians double on jaycalls, “pipe-like instruments that we played by blowing while covering or uncovering the openings with our hands.” The musicians create from these a conversation of hisses meant to evoke the white noise you might hear on the Pacific coast.
This yields to quietly dissonant harmonics from the standard instruments, including acoustically produced, electronic-like hums. Later there’s a stretch of toneless, watery percussion sounds made from wooden boxes, which give way to a perky little dance – but just as the rhythm gets going, disruptive percussion interrupts. Creative combinations of tonal instruments – string, bassoon, and so on – then coalesce into a fresh rhythm in 5/4 time. But that too sinks away into a hash of twitters and plucks.
Late in the piece the musicians double on German folk instruments called waldteufels. This percussion device is comprised of a small friction drum hanging by a string from a wooden stick. The sound derives from friction along the drum’s membrane rather than by striking it. The result here sounds old-school-mechanical, like something out of a woodworking shop, until the 17th minute when a chorus of the little drums coalesces into a profound buzz. Two minutes later the piece wraps up with a brief return to hissing, this time frenetic and ending suddenly.
To be honest, I had trouble grasping what the composer is trying to convey here. How are the different sound sources and sections meant to relate to one another? If they’re not, does that in itself mean something, something specific to these instruments and sounds? It’s always interesting to hear unfamiliar instruments, and I appreciate the ensemble’s skillful performances on the “regular” ones. But as a whole, a message or meaning eludes me.
Of course, your mileage may vary. And you can’t help but admire the skill, energy, and boldness of Ensemble Dal Niente in collaborating on and performing all three of these daring works.
portrait RE/Flux/Pacific Time is out now on New Focus Recordings and available at Bandcamp.
