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A Seventh Persimmon Tape Drift Records TD-12 CD-R £6.99 Major three-part minimalist work from Simon Wickham-Smith, long-term musical partner of Richard Youngs. Inspired by his studies of LaMonte Young, David Behrman’s On The Other Ocean and the Chinese brush painting of Mu Qi, Simon describes the piece as “like an ocean perhaps, where the waves crash and crash, but still there’s essentially no change.” The first section features piano and modulated tape hiss and makes harmonic reference to Behrman’s On The Other Ocean with a very delicate, barely progressing melody subsumed in a sea of soft alien chatter. The second track consists of a reading by a friend of a poem based around Mu Qi’s Six Persimmons, though the voice is so completely deconstructed as with previous vocal experiments, that it’s hard to locate any particular sound source. The final section is a beautiful treatment of a simple piece scored for piano and child’s accordion. A fantastic release from Simon and one beautifully amplifies his core obsessions. |
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DIY Canons Pogus 21036-2 2xCD £14.99 Fantastic series of DIY canons based on concepts first elucidated by modern composer Larry Polansky in his Four Voice Canons series. Wickham-Smith (Tibetanist/ex-monk/juggler/Richard Youngs collaborator) describes Polansky's Four Voice Canon #13 as “a kind of open source meta canon score”. Polansky distributed this score to various composers and made it available at talks and on the web and a number of composers took up his tools and created their own canons using a wild assortment of source material. For this beautiful double CD set Wickham-Smith has gathered a selection of the most beautifully whacked interpretations, with players like Philip Corner, Kyoko Kobayashi, Mike Winter, Steven M Miller, Drew Krause and Wickham-Smith himself. Source/voice material includes phones, ringtones, flutes, clarinet, Barbie phone, cats… “The pieces on this CD are all based on the ideas in Larry Polansky's four voice canons, a series of pieces he began in 1975. These canons are usually “mensuration canons”, which means that the tempi of successive voices is proportional to their start times, so that the voices end together. They also use simple ideas of moving through a list of permutations, and applying the elements of those permutations to various musical parameters. A set of Polansky's canons was produced on Cold Blue Records as four voice canons (CB0011).” - from Wickham-Smith's notes. A great weird/avant/psychedelic/sound art series, with a booklet including notes from all of the contributors. Recommended. |
