Music Review: Ken Ueno – ‘Wavelengths,’ a Percussion Collection

The program for Wavelengths, the new album from composer Ken Ueno, makes it clear that percussion is the collection’s main focus. The title track, which opens the album, indeed centers on an instrument that in an orchestral setting lives in the percussion section.

But jazz aficionados know that the vibraphone can be a brilliant lead melodic and harmonic instrument.

A Focus on Percussion

“Wavelengths,” from 2019, is scored specifically for Karen Yu and her vintage vibraphone, along with three small speakers placed on the instrument. The speakers emit sine waves that differ microtonally from the vibraphone’s notes, creating interference patterns and difference tones.

The result: 12 minutes of contemplative sonorities that rely on those evolving harmonic or non-harmonic relationships to create musical meaning.

An Idea Lab

Another, very different track also features Karen Yu, this time with her percussion ensemble The Up:Strike Project. “…a.m…” dates from 2002, early in Ueno’s career. The composer describes it as “a kind of laboratory for ideas that have since become core to my artistic practice: the integration of microtonality, the transformation of noise into pitched material, and the search for new instrumental possibilities.”

For this piece Ueno created distinctive tubular instruments and repurposed a digital alarm clock to produce white noise. He fused these with standard percussion to create a long exploration of rhythmic and timbral possibilities.

Muted construction noise from outside my window accompanied my first listen – and did not sound out of place. And I mean that in a good way. (Listening to nontraditional music while in a New York City apartment has its own joys and perils.)

I suspect Ueno wouldn’t mind this. In fact, he describes the following piece as an “example of collaborative serendipity through travel and engagement with other artists.” “I am the uncle who sees past lives” started as a sound installation by a duo called ADRUNNOGNT, created from field recordings from a Thai jungle. The present piece is an interplay between vocal plosives, breath sounds, and obscure verbalizing with birdsong and ambient natural sounds – in Ueno’s words, “the jungle, technology, the human voice, and the surrounding world” – manipulated to create a hybrid natural-artificial sound environment.

Beginning in an ambient mode, the piece develops in intensity. Insistent wave patterns help fuel a creeping, more-or-less wordless angst.

In this way Ueno expands the album’s emotional palette in parallel with its sonic one.

For me, the intriguing 20-minute “I am the uncle…” is five minutes too long – the electronic/acoustic hum-and-wobble sequence of the second half hasn’t got enough to say to fill as much time as it occupies. When the ambient background environment returns in the final minute, it’s a relief.

Running Interference

The Up:Strike Project is back for the final piece, the meta-consciously titled “Phase Patterns of Likeness Slightly Off.” Like “I am the uncle…” this is a recent work. Scored for four vibraphones, it, like “Wavelengths,” takes advantage of Yu’s vibraphone’s ability to vary its motor speeds. (This reminded me of a recent Composer Portraits concert featuring Yarn/Wire performing the music of Andrew McIntosh, where similar effects were heard.)

Central to this piece are the beats that result from clashing microtones. (Anyone who has ever tuned a guitar or bass by ear knows this phenomenon.) But like “Wavelengths,” and unlike “I am the uncle…,” it’s pleasantly thoughtful. It evoked in me a kind of bemused meditation on the strangely human output of a very metallic instrument.

Physiovalence

Perhaps the music was resonating with the metallic elements in my body. Ueno defines a term I’d never heard before, “physiovalence,” as “the sympathetic resonance between performed sound and the listener’s body, the transmission of viscerality as both physical and emotional fact.” One could extend that idea to all musical experience: As long as there is a musician (or recording) and a listener, there is real physical interplay between the the sound and the auditor’s biology.

Ueno’s oeuvre reminds us of this acutely. That’s one of the merits of percussion, and of Ueno’s music on this album. By stressing the physical it hugs us close in a different way than does the emotion-focused music we mostly hear and groove to in our daily lives of living and hearing.

My advice: Read the composer’s liner notes on the individual pieces, listen to the music, and skip, or save for later, Robert Kirzinger’s precise but rather overblown and technical liner note essay. Ken Ueno’s own notes cast enough light.

Wavelengths is out now on New Focus Recordings and available at Bandcamp.