REVIEW (020-030)

REVIEWS (020-030)

> reviews on the earlier releases (001-019)

Jürg Frey - lieues d'ombres (Reinier van Houdt) (elsewhere 020-3)

John Eyles's review in All About Jazz (12/1/2022)
Dionys Della Luce's review in Inactuelles Musiques Singulières (11/23/2022)
Michele Palozzo's review in esoteros (11/2/2022)
Ben Harper's review in Boring Like A Drill (10/20/2022)

Germaine Sijstermans - Betula (elsewhere 023-2)

John Eyles's review in All About Jazz (9/22/2022)
Bill Meyer's review in Dusted Magazine (9/21/2022)
Keith Prosk's review in harmonic series 1/19 (8/1/2022)
Ben Harper's review in Boring Like A Drill (8/11/2022)

Quentin Tolimieri - Monochromes (elsewhere 022-3)

Alex Tripp's review in endaural (10/10/2022)
Dionys Della Luce's review in Inactuelles Musiques Singulières (7/18/2022)
John Eyles' review in All About Jazz (7/6/2022)
Marc Medwin's review in Dusted Magazine (6/23/2022)
Roger Batty's review in Musique Machine (8/8/2022)
Frank Meadows' review in Downtown Music Gallery Newsletter (6/24/2022)
Eyal Hareuveni's review in Salt Peanuts (6/8/2022)
Michele Palozzo's review in Esoteros (6/2/2022)
Peter Margasak's Best Contemporary Classical on Bandcamp: May 2022 (5/31/2022)
Keith Prosk's review in harmonic series 1/16 (5/1/2022)
Gil Sansón's review in Tone Glow (4/23/2022)

Reinier van Houdt - drift nowhere past / the adventure of sleep (elsewhere 021-1, 021-2)

Delphine Dora's review in Revue & Corrigée website (9/21/2022)
John Eyles' review in All About Jazz (7/8/2022)
Bill Meyer's review in MAGNET Magazine (6/16/2022)
Bruce Lee Gallanter's review in Downtown Music Gallery Newsletter (6/24/2022)
Marc Medwin's review in Dusted Magazine (5/12/2022)
Dionys Della Luce's review in Inactuelles Musiques Singulières (4/6/2022)
Michele Palozzo's review in Esoteros (4/22/2022)

Jürg Frey - lieues d'ombres (Reinier van Houdt) (elsewhere 020-3) by John Eyles in All About Jazz (12/1/2022)

Anyone familiar with the Elsewhere label (or Edition Wandelweiser or Another Timbre...) will have frequently encountered Swiss composer and clarinetist Jürg Frey. In addition, those who regularly listen to Elsewhere will have heard much of Dutch pianist Reinier van Houdt. Between them, Frey and van Houdt have now appeared on six of Elsewhere's twenty-three albums to date. Of those six, L'air, L'instant—deux pianos (2020) is the only previous album to feature the pair on the same album, with van Houdt plus fellow pianist Dante Boon playing two-piano versions of two Frey compositions. Now, on the three-disc album Lieues d'Ombres, van Houdt alone plays versions of seven Frey pieces, two of which are multi-part compositions. Incidentally, Elsewhere's last five releases have now included three double-disc and two triple-disc albums; this label does not do things by halves.

Frey has been quoted as saying, "If I were a pianist, I would play my music like Reinier would play it," so this album may be as near as we get to hearing Frey play his own compositions. Lieues d'Ombres comprises Frey compositions dating back as far as "Sam Lazaro Bros" from 1984 up to "Three Piano Pieces" from 2017-18, the latter being the only previously unreleased work. The album was recorded at The Muziekcentrum van de Omroep (MCO) in Hilversum in The Netherlands, from 16th to 18th July 2021, with the composer present. The order of the tracks on the three discs was determined by Frey. At forty-and-a-half-minutes, the opening track "La Présence, les silences" is the longest piece, while "Les tréfonds inexplorés des signes (28)" is the shortest at ninety-nine-seconds; the album's total playing time is three hours and seven minutes. Despite such different composition dates and durations, across the album's twenty tracks there is a remarkable consistency of style and mood.

If one did not know that Frey was a member of Wandelweiser—with many of his scores featuring in its score catalogue, dating back to 1984, "Sam Lazaro Brothers" being the first—the music on this album makes it all too obvious. Without it sounding affected or formulaic, piece after piece of Frey's allows plenty of space between notes so that listeners can savour them as they gradually fade away to silence. Throughout, van Houdt gets under the skin of each piece, making it breath and come alive. Just as, say, John Tilbury and Philip Thomas are recognised as definitive interpreters of Morton Feldman's piano music, so van Houdt must now be recognised as the interpreter of Frey's piano works. As Frey himself has said, "It's marvellous, a wonderful reading of the scores that so clearly realizes my intentions. And I feel so strongly how my music is connected with my being," In a nutshell, Lieues d'Ombres deserves to be considered a strong contender for one of the year's best. Whether or not it receives such an accolade, this album will be listened to and admired for many years to come. An absolute gem.

Jürg Frey - lieues d'ombres (Reinier van Houdt) (elsewhere 020-3) by Dionys Della Luce in Inactuelles Musiques Singulières (11/23/2022)

Le Temps ouvert...

Piano : Reinier van Houdt

   Le groupe Wandelweiser me poursuit. Je l'avais présenté brièvement pour célébrer la sortie de pièces pour piano d'Anastasis Philippakopoulos, autre membre de ce groupe qui considère la pièce 4'33 de John Cage comme fondatrice de nouvelles voies musicales, groupe auquel appartient le compositeur suisse Jürg Frey, né en 1953, fondateur du Forum musical de Lenzburg. Clarinettiste de formation académique, et non pianiste, il poursuit une carrière d'instrumentiste. Lieues d'ombres, triple cd, réunit sept compositions écrites entre 1984 et 2016. Il s'agit de la deuxième collaboration, sur le même label, entre le compositeur suisse et le pianiste et compositeur néerlandais Reinier van Houdt.

   Ayant donné ces quelques renseignements, je m'interroge. QUI ? Qui écoutera l'intégralité de ces plus de trois heures de musique ? Qui se donnera ce luxe incroyable ? Prendre le temps d'écouter vraiment la musique de Jürg Frey, toutes affaires cessantes, car on ne saurait l'écouter autrement, il me semble, en tranches ou courts extraits. Bien sûr, les mélomanes habitués aux longues symphonies (rarement de plus d'une heure, toutefois...), les amateurs de concerts fleuves, des grandes pièces minimalistes, ce qui fait encore peu de monde. Peu importe, me direz-vous. Vous avez raison. Je me suis lancé dans ce recueil pianistique, souvent obligé de m'interrompre, il faut le reconnaître. Alors je suis très intimidé par les notes magnifiques d'un autre musicien membre de Wandelweiser, Michael Pisaro-Liu, compositeur américain dont le très beau Barricades mérite vraiment le détour. Il écrit notamment ceci : « J'ai passé des centaines d'heures à écouter la musique de Jürg Frey. Je connais autant certaines de ses pièces que les miennes ou celles de n'importe qui d'autre. » Je suis d'avance écrasé, non ? Chroniqueur scrupuleux je suis, sans doute, mais me voilà loin du compte pour mes écoutes et... moins compétent du point de vue techniques musicales. Tant pis. Je rends compte comme je peux, à mon niveau d'auditeur attentif.
D'abord on ne sait pas où l'on va. On est perdu. La première pièce, "La Présence, les Silences" dure quarante minutes. Des blocs de quelques notes nettement séparées, parfois répétées, avec du silence autour, entre. Puis on discerne une mélodie, je suis d'accord avec Michael Pisaro-Liu, qui dit que c'est la révélation majeure dans ce recueil. Oui, une mélodie à une autre échelle qu'une chanson de trois ou quatre minutes, une mélodie distendue, élargie, qu'on n'entend qu'avec le recul, en prenant de la distance, comme on doit le faire pour des inscriptions visibles seulement en altitude. C'est cela, prendre de l'altitude, prendre conscience de la courbure du Temps. C'est pourquoi j'ai choisi le titre « Le Temps ouvert...». Le titre est venu en premier, il s'est imposé à moi. Cette musique nous libère de la prison temporelle, descelle* les intervalles qui constituent le temps. J'entends d'ailleurs les répétitions d'une même note, jusqu'à 52, comme une manière d'ouvrir le temps, de nous forcer doucement à entendre derrière l'apparente similitude la différence entre chaque appui sur la touche, à entendre venir ce qu'il y a derrière et qui déjà l'informe. Chaque note s'enveloppe de son halo d'harmoniques propres et sans en avoir l'air nage sur place dans le fleuve immobile sans rive, devenu cosmique. Chaque note a le temps d'affirmer sa Présence, parce que le Temps ne coule plus, se manifeste simplement dans sa radieuse immanence. Il faut dire que l'interprétation de Reinier van Houdt est, comme d'habitude, prodigieuse d'intelligence sensible. On arrive à certains moments de cette longue pièce à une douceur abyssale, dans laquelle on se laisse aller avec volupté. Car ne croyez pas cette musique froide. Elle vit, dans les surfaces, dans les profondeurs, dans les interstices, ne cesse de rayonner d'un bonheur calme dans l'oubli splendide de l'après.

   La mélodie est plus directement audible dans "San Lazaro Bros", pièce sublimement élégiaque, dont le titre porte prosaïquement le nom de la marque du cahier de musique dans lequel elle a été écrite en 1984 (c'est la première composition publiée de Frey). Contrairement à la précédente, elle est constituée d'une suite d'harmonies enchaînées, progressant comme mue par un appel. En plus des légers froissements des mains ou manches sur le clavier, on entend de temps à autre un infime déraillement de la note. Ces discrets signes de présence (humaine, matérielle) ne font qu'accentuer la dimension mystique de cette ascension potentiellement infinie.
   Le titre éponyme est une vaste lande envahie par des ombres silencieuses qui cernent chaque note, la parent d'un brouillard irréel. Ce qui reste d'un paysage en train de disparaître, une noyade au ralenti, ou plutôt la modeste persistance d'une présence, blottie, mais refusant l'anéantissement comme on peut l'entendre dans l'affirmation sonore, la fermeté de frappe des notes en fin de composition, juste avant l'abandon ?
   "Extended Circular Music 9" tourne autour d'une mélodie dans une série d'infimes variations. La notion de « même » s'effrite devant cette obstination, de nature amoureuse, qui reprend et éclaire l'objet aimé pour en scruter la diversité secrète, invisible aux yeux pressés. La mélodie livre ainsi peu à peu des arrière-plans étonnants, elle cède sous les coups d'une note répétée, au point de renaître autre, transfigurée, et de prendre sans qu'on s'y soit le moins du monde attendu une allure sublime, assez éloignée de sa première tournure. On entend alors un chant mystérieux qui monte tranquillement vers les cieux intérieurs. Émouvant et magnifique de pureté fragile.

   Les trois pièces pour piano (dix-huit minutes environ à elles trois) transforment les notes en autant d'amers pour naviguer dans le silence. Des amers peu élevés, espacés, esquissent en pointillés une côte fantôme, aux lumières ouatées ou rarement un peu plus vives. Seule la pièce deux utilise quelques graves, d'ailleurs amortis, pour accentuer le relief. Tout se maintient comme par miracle à fleur de silence.
    "Les Tréfonds inexplorés des signes" (numéros 24 à 35) appartiennent à une série plus vaste, les premiers numéros étant pour saxophone ou clarinette et deux guitares électriques et datés des années 2007 - 2008. Ces petites pièces pour piano solo durent de moins de deux minutes à près de huit, et constituent une série de méditations sur un nombre limité de notes, parfois répétées. Posées sur un lit de silence, elles s'offrent dans leur nudité résonnante, humbles et belles, comme autant d'invitations à écouter leurs « tréfonds inexplorés ». Elles nous appellent, cloches et sirènes à la fois tant elles ensorcellent l'auditeur attentif par leur charme discret. Mine de rien, ne contiennent-elles pas en elles, loin et pourtant si proche, l'essence du son qui ne se respire qu'avec l'oreille lavée de toute souillure ? Au fil du cycle, le ton devient plus grave. La dernière égrène métronomiquement soixante-cinq fois des notes très proches, répétées chacune plusieurs fois avant de céder la place à une voisine, puis les notes s'espacent, mangées de silence, se font plus intenses, troubles, troublantes...

   Le titre "Pianiste, alone (2)" (2013, la première pièce portant ce titre remontant à 1998 - 2004), peut s'entendre comme une allusion à la situation du pianiste, seul avec la partition qu'il doit interpréter. La musique de Jürg Frey est rien moins que difficile à jouer. Toute tentation de briller, de montrer son talent, sa technique, doit être écartée. Le pianiste doit faire corps avec la composition, en respecter les silences, mieux, en faire entendre l'infinie richesse derrière l'apparente pauvreté du matériau. Il y faut une ascèse, que j'entends chez Reinier Van Houdt chaque fois que je le "rencontre" : en tant qu'interprète, dans Lettres et Replis de Bruno Duplant, en tant que compositeur, dans le double album drift nowhere past / the adventure of sleep. Il faut s'effacer, et dans le même temps, par la profondeur de l'attention, le respect du toucher, sa délicatesse constante, exprimer ce qui ne se manifeste pas de prime abord, qui attend l'interprète, toujours au bord du gouffre, au bord de la trahison, mais aussi au bord de l'incroyable beauté de la musique de Jürg Frey. Le pianiste se tient sur le fil, tel un funambule aveugle, il avance avec d'infinies précautions, à l'écoute de ce qui monte et le ravit, comment pourrait-il jouer un tel dénuement sinon ? De son rapt initial dépend le ravissement second de l'auditeur...Cette composition faillée de silences et de séries de notes répétées propose des exercices spirituels comme autant de chemins vers l'extase, faits de tâtonnements, de reprises, d'inquiétudes, de courtes jubilations, de soudaines illuminations négatives - ces surgissements de graves profonds en basse continue, d'espoirs renaissants. La prise de son permet d'entendre, je l'ai déjà signalé, les infimes frottements qui sont les respirations intérieures du piano, et le rendent vivant : l'interprète a disparu pour se confondre avec le piano, il est le piano, pianiste, seul...
   Je n'ai pas parlé de la couverture, dessinée par le compositeur : l'observer, c'est une préparation à sa musique...
   Une anthologie exceptionnelle. Du dépouillement et de la rareté de ces lieues d'ombres surgit une beauté constante, fragile et doucement rayonnante.

Jürg Frey - lieues d'ombres (Reinier van Houdt) (elsewhere 020-3) by Michele Palozzo in Esoteros (11/2/2022)

It is a treacherous challenge, but one that I am always compelled to take up: because there’s everything to say about Jürg Frey’s work, and yet nothing: it harbours the profound mystery of sound, its insidious and nonetheless transparent power, crystalline as the notes that the Swiss composer traces on the score with the same accomplished fatality, no doubt, as his spiritual father Feldman.
But the most arduous challenge always falls to the performer, charged with the task of rescuing the score from the fate of a wisp, an exercise in absence whose sparse impressions echo hollowly, like punctuation removed from their discourse and left suspended, cryptically, in the languor of a blank sheet of paper.

This new piano poetics, too, demands like any other its own ‘Benedetti Michelangeli’, intended as the embodiment of the ineffable essence it emanates so profusely and yet is so difficult to grasp and poignantly convey to the ear of others. And we can certainly say, without doing anyone an injustice or fearing sacrilege, that Jürg Frey’s music – but more generally the sensibilities gathered under the Wandelweiser aegis – has found him.
The constancy and dedication demonstrated over the years by Dutch performer Reinier van Houdt have made him an emblem of that “vertical” virtuosity without which reductionist aesthetics would perhaps have no reason to exist. The ultimate key lies in touch, in the specific weight that each note must assume in order not to yield helplessly to the flow of time, tracing an invisible furrow that, even once closed up by silence, seems to continue to vibrate.

It is therefore an entirely different kind of technical deployment, diametrically opposed to the canon of bravura established by the classical era, and which has everything to do with the materiality (and immateriality) of pure sound, with what is minimally tangible in its transitory manifestation. Van Houdt has long dealt with the most radical and innovative declinations of this anomalous “return to order”, and although the first testimony on record arrived only in recent times – with a collection of pieces for two pianos alongside Dante Boon (l’air, l’instant – deux pianos, 2020) –, his artistic bond with Jürg Frey goes back many years, and now finds an ideal compendium in the triple CD published, once again, by the cult label Elsewhere. To be regarded both as an end-of-study essay and a sort of joint manifesto, lieues d’ombres (from the 2009 piece of the same name, part of ‘Essay pour un paysage’) is, to date, the most important and extensive document consecrated to a pair of absolute protagonists of new chamber music.

It is not by chance, nor out of mere literary whimsy, that almost all of the pieces compiled here relate to shadows, silence, metaphysical forms and concepts, that is to say, to that which in nature is elusive or, indeed, is not given at all. And although in the more than three hours of this non-chronological journey, one can clearly discern the different degrees of refinement and crystallisation of Frey’s poetics, the absolute coherence of his gaze on the unevident reality of things is never lost.
Although it avoids indulging in overtly romantic melismas, paradoxically his music is enshrouded in mild splendour by means of an objectifying approach, endowing each note with a quality comparable to the sunlight shining over a bare wall, a phenomenon that in itself presupposes shifting zones of shadow; it is entirely up to the listener to perceive it as a comfortable refuge or, conversely, a niche of disquiet.

Wherever thematic connotations or precise narrative developments are absent, the focus shifts necessarily and entirely to sound, that is, the primordial fulcrum finally returns to be such. The imaginative suggestion is merely the viaticum, or even the ex-post result, of a practice that with patient determination immerses itself in the acoustic element and establishes a complete symbiosis with it: and if this is true for the spareness of Frey’s writing, all the more so for Van Houdt’s interpretation, to whom is entrusted the uneasy rendering of extremely rarefied expressive instances, as well as deployed over a long duration.

Consider the initial suite “la présence, les silences” (2013/15), or the twelve segments for solo piano belonging to the vast cycle “Les tréfonds inexplorés des signes” (2007/9): the measure of the gesture, even if repeated, is so exact as to open up a prismatic perspective on the sonic event; the cadenced chimes may thus sink heavily until they knock on the underlying wood, or seem as if coming from an incorporeal entity, propagate until spontaneous decay or be interrupted with delicate firmness when raising the pedal, whose rustling, like a breath, discreetly accompanies the entire recording. The chiaroscuro is subtle, but the shapes it crosses never remain the same.
And it is again the action on the pedal that induces one of the most singular acoustic effects, found for example in the “three piano pieces” (2017/18): only by getting used to the dimness of these interstices will it be possible to recognise the “half notes” that for a brief instant appear alongside the sharpness of the white keys, as if the damping of these failed to occur and their pulsing thus dispelled an immediate extinction.

The stylistic gap that separates the pieces of his maturity from “Sam Lazaro Bros” (1984), number one in the catalogue of works registered with Wandelweiser Editions, is unmistakable: a hymn to the irrepressible melancholy of the minor key, ringed in every possible form within a virtually endless sequence. A vein that also re-emerges, in alternating phases, in all the following production: eloquent, in this sense, is the solo turned alone in the final piece of the collection (“pianist, alone (2)”, 2013), the epitome of a music that neither pursues nor pretends to trace the emotional state, but with humility and abnegation, step by step, takes on its semblance.

Through the supreme medium of Reinier van Houdt, Jürg Frey’s piano works speak of and to a world that has lost its meaning without evoking its tragedy, drawing us towards itself with the pace of a song dissolved in time, subdued but densely present in the brief course of its existence. We thus come to the end – necessarily putative, never really final – of these notes and lines, only to admit that, perhaps, nothing has been said. And namely everything.

Jürg Frey - lieues d'ombres (Reinier van Houdt) (elsewhere 020-3) by Ben Harper in Boring Like A Drill (10/20/2022)

Recordings of new music are scarce; multiple recordings of it are scarcer still. Jürg Frey has ascended to this rarefied plane, with several highly talented and sympathetic pianists having committed interpretations of his solo music to disc and/or download. Reinier van Houdt has returned to piano playing after several releases of his own, atmospheric compositions, with a three-hour selection of Frey’s piano pieces. Lieues d’ombres is a kind of companion piece to his similarly-sized set of Michael Pisaro’s music, the earth and the sky. The seven Frey pieces date from between 2007 and 2018, with the exception of the very early Sam Lazaro Bros, from 1984. It’s an instructive inclusion; a beguiling piece of simple textures in which melody keeps reverting into chorale. Over the next twenty years he refined his language to the point that risked becoming notorious for immobility and silence, before allowing that feeling for melody to re-emerge under greater self-discipline. van Houdt imbues the piece with quietness and clarity, which becomes a signature of his interpretations throughout. From the remaining pieces, I’ve managed to hear other recordings of La présence, les silences (Dante Boon on Another Timbre), Lieues d’ombres and Extended Circular Music 9 (Philip Thomas, also on Another Timbre), Les tréfonds inexplorés des signes (24-35) (R. Andrew Lee on Irritable Hedgehog) and Pianist, alone (2) (both Thomas and Lee). This means I get to play at being critic and make comparisons. Well, they’re all very fine and the differences are in nuance, with each being part of varying collections of Frey’s works. I’ve previously likened La présence, les silences to a late romantic work, taking musical traits from tradition – continuity, harmony, teleology – and transforming them into something familiar but not yet known. In van Houdt’s performance, it begins almost inaudibly, risking sounding ethereal by eschewing any hint of rhetoric as the piece slowly rises and falls over its 40-minute span. Lee foregrounds the starkness of Frey’s materials, drawing out the inertia of the compositions when they lapse into repetitions or stasis. Thomas adds a hint of deliberation at each step, grounding the longer passages in a sense of inevitability. With slightly more distant and reverberant sound, van Houdt seems to float over these details to present a wider overall picture, giving a bird’s-eye view of recurring phrases and motives that shape each piece, with less direct experience of the terrain at ground level. If you’re not familiar with Frey’s piano work, this set’s a good orientation point.

Quentin Tolimieri - Monochromes (elsewhere 022-3) by Alex Tripp in endaural (10/10/2022)

This one will trick you a little bit at the start if you're only glancing at it, you might think this is just some regular slow piano, something pretty that you don't have to worry about. But that's a lie. The second track will immediately clarify your situation, that each track is going to lock on to a specific part of the piano with the unbroken focus of a horror movie villain, and then drive away at what's in sight for anywhere between 5 and 35 minutes. Tolimieri's target for destruction appears to be the listener's unified perception of his instrument. It feels most obvious with material like the second track, it's non-stop rapid twinkling, and so it didn't take long for my mind to pull apart the hammer impacts from the string vibrations, and witness them elevate beyond their typically supportive role and become their own thing. But even on the slower tracks that read more melodically, I still get a sense of everything I'm hearing being pulled apart from itself. I'm particularly astounded by 'Monochrome 8', which sounds like what would happen if you asked a computer to do a complex fractal zoom on a timestretched piano note. There's some truly spectacular experiences to be had with this one.

Germaine Sijstermans - Betula (elsewhere 023-2) by John Eyles in All About Jazz (9/22/2022)

Given that past albums on the Elsewhere label have already featured such Wandelweiser favourites as Dante Boon, Jürg Frey, Anastassis Philippakopoulos, Michael Pisaro-Liu, Stefan Thut and Guy Vandromme, it was no surprise when the label released Betula, the debut album from Dutch composer and clarinetist Germaine Sijstermans. Her track "M" had already appeared on the album Amsterdam . Berlin . Moscow (Edition Wandelweiser, 2021), which was curated by Boon who also contributed two pieces alongside those by Sijstermans, Seamus Cater, Rishin Singh, Gabi Losoncy, Kirill Shirokov and Samuel Vriezen.

Recorded at Roepaen, Ottersum, in Holland, in early September 2019, Betula is a double album, with a running time of a- hundred-and-three minutes, comprising six pieces composed by Sijstermans between 2017 and 2019, one piece "A Song" opening and closing the album in subtly different versions. All the music is played by six musicians who had worked closely together since the start of this project—Sijstermans on clarinet, Singh on trombone, Antoine Beuger on flute, Johnny Chang on viola, Fredrik Rasten on guitar plus ebow, and Leo Svirsky on accordion.

All of those instruments can produce sustained notes and do so throughout the album. Despite there being six musicians, most of the time only one is playing apart from during transitions when two overlap. In addition, there are occasional brief pauses between instruments. This uncluttered methodology means the compositions are true to the Wandelweiser practice that the beginning, middle and end of each note can be clearly heard and savoured. Although the musicians are mainly heard individually, having six very different sounds gives the soundscape variety and keeps it fresh.

Significantly, the album title, Betula, translates as 'birch tree' while two of the track titles, "Jasminum" and "Lavendula," are the names of plants, jasmine and lavender; those two tracks are extended pieces which together account for over half of the album and are its heart. The botanical titling serves to emphasise the slow, gentle evolution of this music, with every step along the way contributing to the end result, beautiful music. Although debut albums often lead to the conclusion that the artist or composer shows promise, in Sijstermans' case that is not so; she is already the finished article and, on this evidence, has a bright future ahead of her. - John Eyles

Germaine Sijstermans - Betula (elsewhere 023-2) by Bill Meyer in Dusted Magazine (9/21/2022)

The cover of Germaine Sijstermans’ Betula includes an image of small rocks suspended from a ceiling by taut cords. Sijstermans is an installation artist as well as a composer and clarinetist, and the photograph is a close-up from one of her pieces. If you go to her website, you’ll see that the lines and things she strings across rooms serve mostly to make you aware of the dimensions and contours of the spaces they bisect.

One could say the same thing about her music. The album opens with slowly arcing pitches played by violist Johnny Chang, which shiver in close proximity to long tones played on flute by Antoine Beuger and clarinet by the composer. Each draw of the bow or woodwind-magnified breath could be a line in one of Sijstermans’ installations. Their sounds draw attention away from the sounds themselves, and invite an awareness of what surrounds them. The space doesn’t seem empty; rather, it is suffused with gentle vibration, like autumn leaves bouncing orange back at the sun. Given that Betula translates as Birch, this is probably a very intentional result.
The opening piece, “a song” (2018), last just 8.11, which on this double CD makes it a small plate. The next piece, “Jasminum” (2019), is more of a main course. Over the course of nearly 31 minutes, the entire ensemble, which also includes trombonist Rishin Singh, guitarist Fredrik Rasten, and accordionist Leo Svirsky, makes itself felt, but only occasionally all at once. Often, a quietly plucked harmonic or held tone will intensify another, more loudly played sound, functioning like one of those suspended stones. At other points, one seems to flower out of another, like the advancing branches of ivy climbing up a wall.

This music is played with such quiet assurance that the developmental process merits acknowledgement. Sijstermans developed the album’s contents over the course of a residency at Intro In Situ, in Maastricht, Netherlands. The five musicians who accompany her played the pieces during work-in-progress presentations, cultivating a relationship to each other and to the music as organically as ecosystem. - Bill Meyer

Reinier van Houdt 'drift nowhere past / the adventure of sleep' (elsewhere 021-1&2) by Delphine Dora on the Revue & Corrigée website

Pour le confinement, le label Earstwhile avait créé une série AMPLIFY 2020, pendant online du festival du même nom. Jon Abbey, patron du label Earstwhile, et les artistes sonores Vanessa Rossetto et Matthew Revert avaient demandé à une centaine de musiciens de l’Internationale expérimentale à contribuer à cette série, dont on peut retrouver l’intégralité des enregistrements gratuits sur Bandcamp. Parmi ces contributions, on trouvait notamment des participations passionnantes comme : Judith Hamman, James Rushford, Clara de Asis, Greg Kelley, Kate Carr, Jérôme Noetinger, Sachiko M, Crys Cole, Vanessa Rossetto, Moniek Darge, Jason Lescalleet, Ryoko Akama etc. On trouvait aussi le compositeur/pianiste Reinier van Houdt, basé à Rotterdam, qui avait créé pour cette série 11 pièces…

Pianiste virtuose ayant étudié le piano à la Liszt-Academy de Budapest et au Conservatoire royal de La Haye, Reinier Van Houdt s’est construit un répertoire inhabituel grâce à des collaborations avec des compositeurs (Annea Lockwood, Alvin Curran, John Cage, Alvin Lucier, Francisco Lopez, Giacinto Scelsi, Luc Ferrari, Peter Ablinger, Alessandro Bosetti) et des musiciens atypiques (David Tibet de Current 93, Nick Cave, John Zorn). En plus d’être pianiste virtuose, il se fait l’explorateur fasciné du hors-champ sonore : de la physicalité d’objets divers, des bruits aux sons environnementaux, de la mémoire, du temps et de l’espace. Drift Nowhere Past/The Adventure Of Sleep est un diptyque sorti récemment en double CD sur Elsewhere, label de musique minimaliste et contemporaine mené par Yuko Zama, également rattachée aux labels Erstwhile et Gravity Wave. Une citation de Franz Kafka a servi de devise silencieuse à la composition de ces musiques : « Tu n’as pas besoin de quitter ta chambre. Reste assis à ta table et écoute. N’écoute même pas, attends simplement, sois tranquille, immobile et solitaire. Le monde s’offrira librement à toi pour être démasqué, il n’a pas le choix, il se roulera en extase à tes pieds ».

Drift Nowhere Past regroupe chacune des six pièces qui avaient été enregistrées le 22 de chaque mois pour la série Amplify 2020. Ces morceaux sont conçus comme une sorte de journal intime sonore, Van Houdt ayant composé ces pièces à partir de ce qu’il a joué, écouté, enregistré, rejoué, lu, regardé, entendu ou imaginé pendant ces journées spécifiques du confinement. Le piano donneles notes en ouverture, accompagné d’un chantonnement et d’une voix féminine, puis dérive progressivement vers les espaces de son imaginaire : voix issues de scènes de films, on croit reconnaître celle de Jeanne Moreau, ou un film de Robert Bresson ; sons de cordes jouées à l’archet s’étirant dans un infini du temps, synthétiseurs, toutes sortes de sonorités d’une inventivité où des filigranes de souvenirs remontent à la surface. Sur « Friction Sleep Maze », un son électronique abstrait, puis un déferlement de notes provenant d’un inconnu, servent de cadre où le piano de Reinier se confond avec des notes industrielles puis avec la voix de Marguerite Duras, extrait de son film Le Camion qui s’immisce dans la bande-son. La fiction s’incorpore à notre réalité, à notre mémoire. Dans « Horizon Without Traveller », on reconnaît un extrait de « She Was A Visitor » de Robert Ashley (tiré de Automatic Writing) ; le poids de l’influence se fond dans la toile, puis l’espace intérieur se déplie, nous amenant vers un horizon impalpable, où l’environnement réel de Reinier van Houdt et les sons provenant de films ou d’archives, qu’il réinjecte dans l’enregistrement, se confondent, formant un tout indissociable. Sur « Skies Waves Trails », des terres plus arides, ou plus industrielles, des magmas sonores telluriques forment des vagues, sentiers arides frôlant l’abstraction cosmique, textures granulaires et continuum de sons naturels et dits artificiels. Un piano atonal séparé de silences qui rappelle le jeu de John Tilbury pour Feldman, et des sons électroniques hétéroclites viennent tantôt perturber l’équilibre général sur « Bardo For Cor ». Dans « Mystery Of Erasure », une progression qui part du silence et de l’imperceptible, puis des sons de cloche, une mélopée à la Chopin, pour arriver à une apothéose d’amas de sons industriels qui viennent se télescoper en hors-champ. Des mots en anglais en scansion se dédoublent, jusqu’au basculement dans un vaste maelstrom, magma à son paroxysme d’intensité, empilement de couches sonores qui rappelle les collages sonores surréalistes de Nurse With Wound – le son du gouffre, plongée cauchemardesque dans un grand trou noir où tout est abîme. Puis l’apaisement du début revient dans la boucle, ces quelques notes qui nous ramènent au silence, temps déplié.

Pour The Adventure Of Sleep, dont la composition s’étend sur une période de six mois, van Houdt a souhaité se concentrer sur des situations qui se répètent chaque jour. Dans « A Stitch In Time », c’est le temps qui passe, pressé par le crépitement de l’horloge qui nous rappelle ce moment du réveil : « ton réveil sonne/ tu refermes les yeux/ ce n’est pas un geste prémédité mais un geste que tu évites de faire/ ton sommeil a été paisible ». Tandis que sur « Parallel Spaces », c’est le moment du sommeil qui est évoqué, avec cette voix tirée du film Un homme qui dort : « l’oubli s’infiltre dans ta mémoire/ les fissures du plafond dessinent un labyrinthe/ la chaleur dans ta chambre comme dans une fournaise/ ce réveil qui n’a pas sonné/ tu t’étends, tu te laisses glisser, tu plonges dans le sommeil ». Et puis une mélodie à la cithare et quelques notes de clochettes sur un enregistrement microtonal, matière qui se referme, la bande-son se confondant à nos espaces intérieurs, le temps qui s’étire au fur et à mesure, où l’on ne discerne plus vraiment ce qui relève du dedans ou du dehors. Le réel confine à l’abstraction, évocateur de ces espaces flottants dans le creux de nos songes les plus abstraits. «-Void- », surface électronique minimale et infime évoquant la nuit, l’imperceptible des fréquences et des sons fantomatiques, au bord du silence, nous ramène dans des terres abstraites jadis explorées par Akira Rabelais. C’est l’horizon de la nuit aux confins du vide qui est convoqué, quelques notes éparses de piano se répondent puis une voix narre : « Il fait nuit/ tu fermes les yeux et tu les ouvres… le temps passe/ tu sommeilles/ tout est vague/ ta respiration est un algorithme… et les filaments explosent et se multiplient ». L’électronique reprend le dessus : effusion de bruit blanc et de sons venus de nulle part. Un monolithe venant de l’inconnu, cornes de brumes, son de l’aube réinventé, blocs de sons obscurcis – apothéose dramatique, dérive secrète vers l’horizon de l’imperceptible où l’on imagine un navire qui s’échoue, évoquant le Fog Tropes d’Ingram Marshall ou bien les tableaux de tempêtes de William Turner. Sensation d’être perdu dans le brouillard du son, dans la brume… Par son caractère mêlant intimisme et collage sonore, ce disque peut évoquer sous certains aspects la bande-son du film Œil oignon du réalisateur Michel Zumpf, longue dérive sonore et visuelle : même sophistication, éloge de la beauté, goût pour le classicisme, collages et amour des sons, des voix et des espaces insoupçonnés du flux de conscience. Il s’inscrit aussi à la suite du travail hantologique d’Akira Rabelais sur CXVI, le travail de montage et les voix parlées distanciées peuvent rappeler l’univers sonore de Dominique Petitgand, qui nous a appris à écouter autrement le réel, ou encore Salmon Run de Graham Lambkin, où sons du quotidien et étrangeté venaient à s’entremêler pour former un tout indissociable. Une œuvre passionnante, dont on n’a pas fini d’explorer les richesses et les recoins infinis. Un disque sur le temps, la mémoire, ces espaces imaginaires de l’intime, et l’image-temps de Gilles Deleuze. - Delphine DORA

Germaine Sijstermans - Betula (elsewhere 023-2) by Keith Prosk in harmonic series 1/19 (8/1/2022)

Antoine Beuger, Johnny Chang, Fredrik Rasten, Germaine Sijstermans, Rishin Singh, and Leo Svirsky play seven Sijstermans compositions for concert flute, viola, guitar & ebow, clarinet, trombone, and accordion on the 102’ Betula.

Soft soundings slowly unfurl for sustained durations, individually and aggregately. Limited sound shapes and textures lend a sense of similitude across compositions but for their shifting structures. As if each is just a different perspective of the same environment. Half of the recorded time inhabits two pieces as sensual as their aromatic titles. “Jasminum” sounding curved lines like vines in varied densities impressing the depths of its bushy mass whose outward bound apogees bloom beatings. And the staggered spirited soundings of “Lavendula” like its longer stalks in strands swaying in winds. Cultivating a botanical or environmental feel, the longer silences of “untitled” become a clear mind against efficient soundings’ moments of clarity like the smooth monochrome of a clear sky behind the texture of the treeline. The undulating harmonics of others extending that of the trombone in “call, there” seem to model a voice floating in the wind. And “M” carries forward the chord of guitar and accordion through a collectivity of monophony from the rest. So though the sound shapes and textures might appear limited they flower through a moving togetherness and harmony. And the two songs show how players might choose to buoy each other up, the simple melody of each soloist complemented in turns by others. More than sound the interaction of people is the material. - Keith Prosk

Germaine Sijstermans - Betula (elsewhere 023-2) by Ben Harper in Boring Like A Drill (8/11 & 15/2022)

I’ve been catching up on some large releases on Elsewhere this year. Most recent is a double-decker by composer/clarinetist Germaine Sijstermans. Betula is a collection of ensemble pieces that emerged from her recent performance practice with a close group of fellow musicians. This kind of practice can lead to development into elaboration or refinement into purity; Sijstermans has taken the latter path.

The ensemble, recorded here over a few days in September 2019, is an all-star band of performer/composers who take a like-minded approach: besides Sijstermans’ clarinet there is Antoine Beuger on flute, Rishin Singh on trombone, Johnny Chang on viola, Fredrik Rasten on guitar and Leo Svirsky on accordion. On the seven pieces ranging from seven to thirty-one minutes in length, “the six musicians’ sounds overlap with each other while slowly moving forward in parallel.” On the first listen, everything seemed so refined and pure that each piece sounded the bloody same. On the second hearing, it all opened up and each piece took on a distinct character, with a marked difference in timbre and coloration, even when the instruments stayed the same. What’s most surprising about this change was not that it happened but that it took place so quickly. I want to go into more detail about Betula but this will have to wait until next time. (August 11)

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Getting back to Germaine Sijstermans’ Betula: each of the compositions is written for a small minimum of pitched instruments, mostly without getting too fussy about type or number. Only one seems to specify that the instruments should sustain. All the instruments used here, can (Rasten plays guitar with an ebow). The musicans here produce a tour de force of ensemble playing, making each of Sijstermans’ intensely focused studies on small variations reveal a unique character while never deviating from a central principle. They embody stillness at its most alert, alive to incipient motion, when so much of this style of playing heard elsewhere can seem merely inert. (August 15)

Quentin Tolimieri 'Monochromes' (elsewhere 022-3) by Roger Batty in Musique Machine (8/8/2022)

Monochromes is a piano-based release that managers to bring together felt-if- at times angular beauty, with creative often textured playing. It’s a three-CD set, which presents us with fifteen tracks that wonderfully and most effectively move between the emotional and inventive.

The release comes presented in a six-panel mini gatefold- this features on its front cover three hazed/ blurred photos set against a black backdrop with minimal white texts. Inside, along with the three discs we a four-page inlay, which discusses the pieces and the concepts behind them. The release can be purchased directly from Elsewhere Music here- which I highly recommend, as all small labels need our support, and this is a pretty damn great release.

Quentin Tolimieri is a Berlin-based composer and pianist. He has seemingly been active since around the year 2016- with to date three full-length albums, and three collaborative albums to his name. The fifteen tracks featured here date from between 2017 and 2021.

The album’s first CD opens with the forlornly spaced and gentle reverb bound “Monochromes 1” where Mr Tolimieri traces out a fragile series of notes, which both hint at sweet music box melody and sly angularity. As we move on through the first disc we come to constantly tolling and bounding chug of “Monochromes 3” which finds taut lows mixing with hammering mids. Playing out the first disc we the have felt-yet-tight noted tinkling of “Monochromes 6” which managers to feel both starkly emotional, yet at times angularly busy.

Moving onto the second CD, we have the fixing bounding tension of “Monochrome 8” which keeps sets on its taught-yet-compelling repetition for nearing thirty-six minutes. We have the lulling note cascade and glum flurries of “Monochrome 9”. With this second disc playing out with the ethnic plucking ‘n’ cascading prepared piano wonderful-ness of “Monochrome 10”.

On the final disc, we move from the sparse-yet-felt high-pitched darts of “Monochrome 11”. There’s the chiming and ringing stark-ness meets plodding melody of “Monochrome 12”. With the disc and the album playing out with eerier pluck, knock, and hauntedly dart of “Monochrome 15”.

It's rare you find a piano-based album that is both emotionally impactful, yet at the same time inventive and creative but that is exactly what Monochromes is. Simply put one of the most impactful, rewarding, and re-playable piano-based albums I’ve heard in a very long time. Without a doubt one of 2022’s highlights, and to be future classic of felt-yet-creative playing. (Roger Batty)

Quentin Tolimieri - Monochromes (elsewhere 022-3) by Dionys Della Luce in Inactuelles Musiques Singulières (7/18/2022)

(English translation via DeepL)
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Monochromes... the word evokes certain twentieth-century paintings, such as Yves Klein's blue monochromes, but also older practices such as grisailles and sanguines, all of which were already based on monochrome. The composer Michael Pisaro-Liu (see his beautiful Barricades disc), who signs the text accompanying the disc, thought of the paintings of the American Marcia Halif (1929 - 2018) around the time he met Quentin Tolimieri, then a student at the California Institute of the Arts (known as CalArts). The idea is to restrict the palette to one color, one tone, not to impoverish the instrument, but rather to explore its unknown potentialities, left aside by academic habits such as the tempered scale which divides the octave into equal chromatic intervals or keys. Quentin Tolimieri's Monochromes explore microtones, minute nuances, the effects of repetitions and reverberations, variations in timbre, volume, speed... Despite their complexity, and although composed, they are not notated.

     The presentation insists on the fact that these are not strictly speaking studies, insofar as the aim is not didactic. My listening to these three discs leads me to think that it is rather an attempt to reveal the pianos contained under the piano that we know, of almost systematic rediscovery, each monochrome concentrating on a sector, an aspect of the piano. Let us say clearly that they are addressed to the lovers of the instrument, to those who take the time to listen to it: each piece lasts between seven minutes, for the shortest, and more than thirty-five, for the longest. This way of immersing oneself in the sound material, to the point of vertigo, makes these monochromes true spiritual exercises, in the mystical sense rather than just religious. As each exercise develops, it is a question of forgetting the world, of plunging into pure music, stripped of its ordinary seductions. Quentin Tolimieri's aesthetic presents certain characteristics of minimalism, but by playing them differently, in the duration, the excess, the insistence, so much so that when listening to it, one is very far from most minimalist composers, except perhaps from La Monte Young. One thinks of John Cage, Giacinto Scelsi, or Morton Feldman, for a way of delivering the music to the unforeseen, of listening to the most tenuous sound, of weaving webs of time that allow an exit from ordinary time. For the long hammering of identical or similar notes, one also thinks of the strumming of the ancient carillonneur Charlemagne Palestine. These comparisons are only indicative, and do not in any way claim to reduce the extraordinary experience that Tolimieri offers us. It would be necessary to evoke the universe of Jürgen Frey, for example. An experience that presupposes a complete disconnection: no ringing phone, no appointment obsessing your mind, no task to accomplish. This record can only be listened to with no further delay. Nothing is more urgent than listening to the Coming...

   As each monochrome follows an idea, a principle of exploration, I refer the listening adventurers, my brothers and sisters, to Michael Pisaro-Liu's notes for the more technical aspects of each. His listening guide is invaluable. The first monochrome has an angelic, slow softness at the edge of silence, like a shy prelude. The second consists of a shower of high notes in changing patterns. Already this tinkling plunges us far into the piano, cleansing us of all worries by opening our ears to the micro accidents, to the tiny variations that make the trickle shimmer. A single repeated note, a low B, with gradual changes of timbre, is enough for the fascinating monochrome three, whose fluctuations are impressive. It is a relentless attack, the flushing out of a hidden beauty with a hammer (of piano...). A prodigious first absolute, far from almost all the piano literature, with the exception of La Monte Young, who has already attempted this radical austerity without, however, introducing those continuous changes of timbre that make us fall on the other side, into the bubbling cauldron of swirling harmonics. The monochrome four makes us think of a gold digger striking rocks. He is in the amazement of his search, strikes as hard as he can, and the rocks answer him with quiet, much lower notes. Little by little, the rhythm slows down, the researcher listens, waits, the answers seem more distant. Would the monochrome five be the expected answer? A mysterious low chord is slowly repeated, with an echo of a held note played with a bow. Piano with sumptuous resonances, you invite us to an infinite descent into your underground for an ecstatic contemplation. This magnificent first disc ends with the monochrome six, so Feldamian in appearance, pierced by three silences. How to hear it without shivering? It is the lost road that we were looking for so much, luminous, of an erratic splendor, beyond all in its sovereign slowness, its unforeseen deviations.

   The second disc opens with the curious monochrome seven, so crystalline that one thinks at first of a toy piano or a harpsichord. The dull strike of the hammers accompanies the translucent notes of its modest mattness. It is an invitation to listen, an incitement to abandon oneself to listening, to be on the lookout for tiny wonders. This is followed by the torrential Monochrome Eight of more than thirty-five minutes: an uninterrupted succession of tremolos with minimal variations. The intense flow produces a drone, a carpet of drones in which the resonances are embedded. An attempt at submersion by prolonged immersion! Either you give up, overwhelmed by the apparent monotony and the unbearable length for your hurried life, or you let yourself be carried until you vibrate in your turn in these harmonic entrails. We are here at the heart of the minimalist aesthetic according to which "The less is more", a principle taken up in the early nineties by the Wandelweiser Collective who affirmed that the longer you want to write a piece, the less material you need. As you listen, you become more and more sensitive to a bubbling of the sound paste, crossed by surging streaks, micro waves. The piano has become a cathedral, the den of a sound forge of enormous and confounding beauty. One must go to the end of this experience, because the last ten minutes unleash a titanic, earth-shattering chime of descending bass!

   How light the new monochrome seems in contrast to its repeated single chord and its trail of small variations, a short meditation somewhat dazzled by its own sometimes frantic gyration. Each note questions the silence in the sublime coda. The monochrome ten sounds like gamelan or a prepared piano piece, percussive, metallic and wooded by the dampening. The rapid typing provokes a euphoric sensation, that of the incessant flight of drunken birds.

   Here we are at the last record, I feel like writing the last book. Monochrome Eleven sketches a slow melody, takes it up again, considers it dreamily, sinks voluptuously with it into the low registers of the keyboard, into the depths of a thickening mystery. The second longest piece, at almost twenty-four minutes, the monochrome twelve offers a new test with its high E repeated very quickly. The strong and regular striking, beyond its hypnotic effect, leads the listener to concentrate on the internal contrasts, between the high note, the metallic mattness of the striking and the thud of the hammers. One then realizes with surprise that the sound configuration does not cease to change, sometimes the high notes dominate, sometimes the strike itself or the hammers taking the upper hand, then that a striated scrambling is superimposed on the basic components, as if the piano were generating a synthesizer! At about seventeen minutes, a new sound level is superimposed on this fantastic layering, the struck note seems to mutate, someone else is playing inside, so much so that the accumulated harmonics produce distortions. To hear these unpredictable, unnoticeable wonders, you will have to go through the first seventeen minutes, because if you take the piece there, you don't notice anything particular. Curiously, I suddenly heard the helicopters in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse now, the panting of the blades...

   A note repeated slowly, resonant, then prolonged by a second more serious in a movement of pendulum, that of a clock out of time: the thirteenth monochrome is an ecstatic walk in the fields of the secret beauty, flowering of new harmonic colors with the addition of the following notes.

   What is this deaf ride? The monochrome fourteen muffles the notes, delivering us to the mechanism of the instrument. A new threshold: mourning the known sound of the notes, which we can only hear in the background, in limbo, waiting for the Judgement! From time to time, when the mute is attenuated, the frisky sound of the notes comes closer, quickly covered by the frenetic striking spirit which likes to castigate the arrogance of the known music. It is also about that, indirectly, since Tolimieri does not pursue a didactic aim: to accustom us to other unknown pianos, those that the conventional piano stifles, represses or ignores in the name of a narrow conception of music. The final assault is given by the monochrome fifteen, for prepared piano and resonant "normal" notes: a soothed duet, on equal terms, a clear obscurity of constantly reborn sprays,

In the course of these fifteen monochromes, Quentin Tolimieri uncovers, like a seeker of truth, the unknown or unrecognized treasures of the piano, broadening and gathering the sound perspectives of the instrument to the point of making it an infinite instrument. With him, we accomplish an initiatory journey, each step of which, though perhaps trying at the beginning, opens a vibrant path into absolute beauty. - Dionys Della Luce

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(original French review)

La Voie Négative du piano

   Monochromes... le mot évoque certaines peintures du vingtième siècle, comme les monochromes bleus d'Yves Klein, mais aussi des pratiques plus anciennes comme les grisailles, les sanguines, qui toutes relevaient déjà du monochrome. Le compositeur Michael Pisaro-Liu (voir son si beau disque Barricades), qui signe le texte d'accompagnement du disque, pense aux peintures de l'américaine Marcia Halif (1929 - 2018) à peu près au moment où il a rencontré Quentin Tolimieri, étudiant alors à l'Institut des Arts de Californie (California Institute of the Arts, connu sous le sigle Cal Arts). L'idée est celle d'une palette restreinte à une couleur, un ton, non pour appauvrir l'instrument, mais au contraire pour en explorer les potentialités inconnues, laissées de côté par les habitudes académiques comme celle de la gamme tempérée qui divise l'octave en intervalles chromatiques égaux ou les clés. Les monochromes de Quentin Tolimieri explorent les micro tonalités, les infimes nuances, les effets des répétitions et des réverbérations, les variations de timbre, de volume, de vitesse... En dépit de leur complexité, et bien que composés, ils ne sont pas notés.

     La présentation insiste sur le fait qu'il ne s'agit pas à proprement parler d'études, dans la mesure où la visée n'est pas didactique. Mes écoutes de ces trois disques m'amènent à penser qu'il s'agit plutôt d'une tentative de révélation des pianos contenus sous le piano que l'on connait, de redécouverte presque systématique, chaque monochrome se concentrant sur un secteur, un aspect du piano. Disons clairement qu'ils s'adressent aux amoureux de l'instrument, à ceux qui prennent le temps de l'écouter : chaque pièce dure entre plus de sept minutes, pour la plus courte, et plus de trente-cinq, pour la plus longue. Cette manière de s'immerger dans la matière sonore, jusqu'au vertige, fait de ces monochromes de véritables exercices spirituels, au sens mystique plus que seulement religieux. Au fur et à mesure du développement de chaque exercice, c'est de l'oubli du monde qu'il s'agit, de la plongée dans la musique pure, dépouillée de ses séductions ordinaires. L'esthétique de Quentin Tolimieri présente certaines caractéristiques du minimalisme, mais en les faisant jouer autrement, dans la durée, l'excès, l'insistance, si bien qu'à l'écoute, on est très loin de la plupart des compositeurs minimalistes, sauf peut-être de LaMonte Young. On pense à John Cage, Giacinto Scelsi, ou Morton Feldman, pour une manière de livrer la musique à l'imprévu, d'écouter le son le plus ténu, d'ourdir des trames de temps qui permettent une sortie du temps ordinaire. Pour le long martèlement de notes identiques ou proches, on pense aussi au strumming de l'ancien carillonneur Charlemagne Palestine. Ces rapprochements ne sont qu'indicatifs, ne prétendent aucunement réduire l'expérience extraordinaire que nous propose Tolimieri. Il faudrait encore évoquer l'univers de Jürgen Frey, par exemple. Une expérience qui présuppose une déconnexion complète : ni sonnerie de téléphone, ni rendez-vous obsédant votre esprit, ni tâche à accomplir. Ce disque ne peut s'écouter que toutes affaires cessantes. Plus rien n'est urgent, que d'écouter la Venue...

   Comme chaque monochrome suit une idée, un principe d'exploration, je renvoie les aventuriers de l'écoute, mes frères et mes sœurs, aux notes de Michael Pisaro-Liu pour les aspects plus techniques de chacun d'eux. Son guide d'écoute est précieux. Le premier monochrome est d'une angélique et lente douceur au bord du silence, comme un prélude timide. Le second consiste en une pluie de notes aiguës selon des motifs changeants. Déjà ce tintinnabulement nous plonge loin dans le piano, nous lave de tout souci en ouvrant notre oreille aux micro accidents, aux infimes variations qui font chatoyer le ruissellement. Une seule note répétée, un si grave, avec des changements graduels de timbre, suffit au fascinant monochrome trois, dont les fluctuations sont impressionnantes. C'est une attaque inlassable, le débusquement d'une beauté cachée à coups de marteau (de piano...). Premier absolu prodigieux, loin de presque toute la littérature pour piano, à l'exception de LaMonte Young qui a déjà tenté cette austérité radicale sans toutefois introduire ces changements continus de timbre qui nous font basculer de l'autre côté, dans le chaudron bouillonnant des harmoniques tournoyantes. Le monochrome quatre fait songer à un chercheur d'or qui frappe sur des rochers. Il est dans la stupéfaction de sa recherche, frappe le plus fort qu'il peut, et les rochers lui répondent par des notes calmes, bien plus basses. Peu à peu, le rythme se ralentit, le chercheur écoute, attend, les réponses paraissent plus lointaines. Le monochrome cinq serait-il la réponse attendue ? Un mystérieux accord grave se répète lentement, avec en écho une note tenue jouée à l'archet. Piano aux résonances fastueuses, tu nous convies à une descente infinie dans tes souterrains pour une contemplation extatique. Ce magnifique premier disque se termine avec le monochrome six, tellement feldamien d'allure, troué de trois silences. Comment l'entendre sans frissonner ? C'est la route perdue qu'on cherchait tant, lumineuse, d'une erratique splendeur, au-delà de tout dans sa souveraine lenteur, ses écarts imprévus.

   Le second disque s'ouvre avec le curieux monochrome sept, si cristallin qu'on pense d'abord à un piano jouet ou un clavecin. La frappe sourde des marteaux accompagne les notes translucides de sa modeste matité. C'est une mise en oreille, une incitation à l'abandon de l'écoute, à l'affût des merveilles minuscules. Suit le torrentueux monochrome huit de plus de trente-cinq minutes : une succession ininterrompue de tremolos aux variations minimes. Le flux intense produit un bourdon, un tapis de drones dans lequel s'enchâssent les résonances. Tentative de submersion par immersion prolongée ! De deux choses l'une : ou vous abandonnez, terrassé par la monotonie apparente et la longueur insupportable pour votre vie pressée, ou vous vous laissez porter jusqu'à vibrer à votre tour dans ces entrailles harmoniques. Nous sommes ici au cœur de l'esthétique minimaliste selon laquelle « Le moins est le mieux » (The less is more), principe repris au début des années quatre-vingt dix par le Collectif Wandelweiser qui affirmait que plus vous voulez écrire une longue pièce, moins il vous fallait de matériaux. En cours d'écoute, vous devenez de plus en plus sensible à un bouillonnement de la pâte sonore, traversée de stries surgissantes, de micro vagues. Le piano est devenu une cathédrale, l'antre d'une forgerie sonore d'une énorme beauté confondante. Il faut aller au bout de cette expérience, car les dix dernières minutes déchaînent un carillonnement de graves descendants proprement titanesque, terrassant !

   Comme le monochrome neuf paraît léger par contraste avec son accord unique répété et sa traîne de petites variations, courte méditation un peu éblouie par sa propre giration parfois affolée. Chaque note interroge le silence dans la sublime coda. Le monochrome dix sonne comme du gamelan ou une pièce pour piano préparée, percussive, métallique et boisée par les amortis. La frappe rapide provoque une sensation euphorisante, celle d'un envol incessant d'oiseaux ivres.

   Nous voici au dernier disque, j'ai envie d'écrire au dernier livre. Le monochrome onze esquisse une mélodie lente, la reprend, la considère rêveusement, s'enfonce voluptueusement avec elle dans les graves du clavier, dans les profondeurs d'un mystère qui s'épaissit. Deuxième pièce la plus longue avec presque vingt-quatre minutes, le monochrome douze propose une nouvelle épreuve avec son mi aigu répété très vite. La frappe forte et régulière, au-delà de son effet hypnotique, conduit l'auditeur à se concentrer sur les contrastes internes, entre l'aigu de la note, la matité métallique de la frappe et le bruit sourd des marteaux. On s'aperçoit alors avec surprise que la configuration sonore ne cesse de changer, tantôt les aigus dominants, tantôt la frappe elle-même ou les marteaux prenant le dessus, puis que se superpose aux composantes de base un brouillage strié, comme si le piano engendrait un synthétiseur ! Vers dix-sept minutes se superpose dirait-on un nouvel étage sonore de ce feuilletage fantastique, la note frappée semble muter, quelqu'un d'autre joue à l'intérieur tant les harmoniques accumulées produisent des distorsions. Pour entendre ces merveilles imprévisibles, non notables, il aura fallu passer par les dix-sept première minutes, car si vous prenez le morceau là, vous ne remarquez rien de particulier. Curieusement, j'entendais soudain les hélicoptères dans Apocalypse now de Francis Ford Coppola, le halètement des pales...

   Une note répétée lentement, résonante, puis prolongée par une seconde plus grave dans un mouvement de balancier, celui d'une l'horloge hors du temps : le treizième monochrome est une marche extatique dans les champs de la beauté secrète, fleurissante de nouvelles couleurs harmoniques avec l'adjonction des notes suivantes.

   Qu'est-ce que cette chevauchée sourde ? Le monochrome quatorze assourdit les notes, nous livrant au mécanisme de l'instrument. Nouveau seuil : faire son deuil du son connu des notes, que l'on n'entend plus qu'en arrière-plan, dans des limbes, en attente du Jugement ! De temps en temps, lorsque la sourdine est atténuée, le friselis des notes se rapproche, vite recouvert par l'esprit frappeur frénétique qui se plaît à fustiger l'arrogance de la musique connue. Il s'agit bien aussi de cela, indirectement puisque Tolimieri ne poursuit pas de visée didactique : nous habituer aux autres pianos inconnus, ceux que le piano conventionnel étouffe, réprime ou ignore au nom d'une conception étroite de la musique. L'assaut final est donné par le monochrome quinze, pour piano préparé et notes "normales" résonantes : un duo apaisé, à égalité, un clair obscur de gerbes sans cesse renaissantes,

Au fil de ces quinze monochromes, Quentin Tolimieri met à jour tel un chercheur de vérité les trésors inconnus ou méconnus du piano, élargissant et rassemblant les perspectives sonores de l'instrument au point d'en faire un instrument infini. Avec lui, nous accomplissons un parcours initiatique dont chaque étape, fût-elle éprouvante peut-être au début, ouvre un chemin vibrant dans la beauté absolue.

Reinier van Houdt - drift nowhere past / the adventure of sleep (elsewhere 021-1, 2) by John Eyles in All About Jazz (7/8/2022)

When is a double album not a double album? That question is raised by the latest pair of Elsewhere releases from the Rotterdam-based composer and pianist Reinier van Houdt. The two come in separate sleeves, have different, unconnected titles, different cover art and were recorded months apart, although they both feature van Houdt alone. The two albums have catalogue numbers 021-1 and 021-2 which indicate they are two halves of a double album; Elsewhere's website has a photograph of the two sleeves side by side as a double album not two singles, listing the two together as "Drift Nowhere Past / The Adventure of Sleep (2 CD)...."

Reinier van Houdt - Drift Nowhere Past
Elsewhere 2022

This disc comprises the six pieces that van Houdt created in Rotterdam for the online festival AMPLIFY 2000: quarantine, commissioned by the Erstwhile label's proprietor Jon Abbey (who is also the husband of Elsewhere proprietor Yuko Zama—the two are jointly credited as producers of this album). His six pieces made van Houdt the most prolific contributor to the festival, no-one else having contributed more than three. In addition to its title, each piece here carries the date when it was first recorded—the twenty-second of each month from March to August 2020.

In the sleeve notes, Van Houdt writes, "I've made these pieces from what I played, listened to, recorded, played back, read, watched, heard, or imagined, each during one specific day in the quarantine of 2020." As that quote suggests, each of them is a unique, multi-faceted piece with its own personality, all of them sounding as if they were created by the same individual. The ingredients which van Houdt combined together included piano, voices singing and/or speaking, recordings of various other sounds, musical or otherwise. So, there is plenty of beautiful piano music here, but a great deal more too.

With playing times ranging from nearly eight to over twenty-one minutes—seventy-four minutes altogether—the tracks are as varied as those durations, and command attention from first note to last. For those who heard the festival pieces over the months they were broadcast—or for those who missed them altogether—having them all together, on disc, in sound remastered by Taku Unami, is a godsend; they work well as a coherent album, one which conjures up memories of the 2020 Covid lockdown.

Reinier van Houdt - The Adventure of Sleep
Elsewhere 2022

The Adventure of Sleep (great title, eh?) comprises four pieces which van Houdt created from May 2021 to February 2022, during the subsequent period of lockdown. They were created with the intention of pairing them with the six pieces on Drift Nowhere Past. That succeeded, as the music here is similar enough to that discussed above to make the two discs compatible. Yuko Zama is listed as this disc's sole producer. These tracks exhibit the same range of ingredients, with some additional ones not heard before; if anything, the soundscapes here are slightly fuller than before.

The Adventure of Sleep's four tracks run for a total of thirty-six minutes, which may explain the double album conundrum with which we began... That playing time is more akin to that of an EP than an LP, so maybe it was decided to release the two as one double album rather than two singles, one long, one short. However, such niceties are irrelevant once one has listened to van Houdt's music on both discs. Given their stylistic similarities, it seems sensible and logical that the two discs form a double album. Unsurprisingly, the Covid lockdown spawned many albums created by lone individuals working in isolation; when the dust has settled, a high proportion of these recordings are likely to be judged as highly successful. On this evidence, van Houdt's will be among them.

Quentin Tolimieri - Monochromes (elsewhere 022-3) by John Eyles in All About Jazz (7/6/2022)

Ever since its first release, Blurred Music, in July 2018, the Elsewhere label has never been reluctant to release multi-disc albums when the music has merited them. Of the label's twenty-one albums to date, three have been double albums, and two triple albums—that first release and this one, Monochromes. Another characteristic of Elsewhere releases has been the preponderance of albums featuring piano. Although the label's seventh, eighth and ninth releases were collectively labelled "Elsewhere Piano Series No. 1," to date there has been no sign of Series No. 2; nonetheless, the label has since released enough first-rate piano albums (by such fine musicians as Melaine Dalibert, Jürg Frey, Shira Legmann, Anastassis Philippakopoulos, Reinier van Houdt ...) for several more series, with Monochromes being one.

This album comprises fifteen tracks, composed by Quentin Tolimieri between 2017 and 2021, played by him on piano. Berlin-based Tolimieri, who is making his first appearance on Elsewhere, has a relatively small discography, with two of his past releases being reassuringly titled Piano (pfMentum, 2016) and Prepared Piano (Creative Sources, 2017.) The Monochromes tracks were recorded at various sessions in USA, Germany and France between March 2018 and December 2021; they vary in duration from five-and-a-half to thirty-five minutes, a total of three hours and ten minutes, so making Monochromes longer than the entire Piano Series No. 1.

The most striking feature of the fifteen pieces here is their variety and occasional novelty. Although the pieces are all entitled "Monochrome" plus a number, that should not be taken to mean they are parts of a larger work; instead, each of them stands alone. So, "Monochrome 1" is a slow-paced, delicately melodic piece which progresses logically, In total contrast, on "Monochrome 2" Tolimieri fires off a barrage of high notes at such speed that there is precious little time to appreciate the nuances of the music. Similarly, on the album's longest track, the thirty-five-minute "Monochrome 8," he continuously plays a limited selection of lower notes with occasional subtle changes, thus building a soundscape which is part drone, part wall of sound, but compelling from start to finish.

Tolimieri has opined, "It always felt to me that the piano was a bit limited by a kind of music history embedded in its construction: equal temperament, a particular kind of tone quality, etc., even the way the keys are laid out is not from any kind of acoustic necessity but is, rather, a representation of European harmony." With Monochromes it seems as if Tolimieri is not giving his opinion of the piano but has taken action to break away from its limits; the end results are a considerable distance away from the vast majority of solo piano music. As with any innovation (or revolution), it may take some years for the effects of this album to be fully appreciated. In the meantime, it seems certain to provide much long-term pleasure. - John Eyles

Quentin Tolimieri - Monochromes (elsewhere 022-3) by Marc Medwin in Dusted Magazine (6/23/2022)

It’s both an invitation and a micro-historical summation, that stark-standing object in Arthur C. Clarke’s short story “The Sentinel.” It somehow defines those that built it while also revealing very little of its vast and complex history and purpose but encouraging analysis by the as-yet uninitiated. It comes to mind as Quentin Tolimieri’s 15 Monochromes grind, flash, drone and luminesce, miraculously, while maintaining a remarkable staticity in the service of constant movement.

Tolimieri is a pianist. Many composers play, but he showers the instrument with a degree of obvious affection to which many composers recording their own works only aspire. His prodigious abilities are on unequivocal display in these virtuosic pieces, the longest of which runs to 35 minutes. As Michael Pisaro-Liu’s perceptive and equally ambiguous notes observe, the Monochromes are non-notated compositions comprising “a gesture, technique or phrase that unfolds in time.” There’s absolutely nothing new about that and, thankfully, nothing relegating the idea to any specific school or doctrine. Pisaro-Liu even evokes the concept, often associated with Brahms, of developing variation, a nod toward organicism. Despite any historical allegiance in the verbiage, and these are staggeringly difficult pieces to describe, Tolimieri is an improviser, and his version of variation in development is like no other. Even in the softest passages, these monolithic compositions exhibit a sleek durability justifying their titular concept. The ninth monochrome, in some ways superficially the simplest, consists of a single sonority whose components exist in constant rhythmic flux. This is far from the micro-canonic Ligeti universe, and drone in a somewhat purer form abounds in other instalments. The piano is recorded in such a way that the complete chord resonates even as aspects of itself inhabit various peaks and valleys of the dynamic spectrum. Like Pisaro-Liu’s recent Radiolarians series, the organism is both fixed and malleable, elements of its physiognomy on temporary and liquid display as the creature morphs and remorphs, nevertheless remaining fundamentally recognizable.

That, in a nutshell, is the blueprint, but only that. Each monochrome thrives on a similar relationship between what is and what becomes, but the being and becoming eclipse each other in a continual rebalancing act. Beyond the harmonic and motivic concerns, or rather serving them, there are the piano techniques in play, and these vary as much as the dynamics, articulation and sustain of each pitch. Pisaro-Liu calls the seventh monochrome’s timbre crystalline, but, as it should be, his notes hint rather than reveal. The octaves and fourths form a sonoric pattern that undulates with a cradle-song innocence enhanced when the open sound is ultimately given the gift of a major resolution. How those gorgeously transparent tones are created and captured with such subtlety is as mysterious as the rush, roar and ironic delicacy of the eighth monochrome. A confounding balance of tone and overtone combine in a sort of spectral counterpoint heard in only the best piano recordings. The opening octave tremolo lasts for some seven minutes, until, magically, a second pitch gives the already-present overtones body and shape. After seven minutes of that pulsing octave, that cohabitation of tone and overtone, the addition seems both inevitable and precipitous, which it turns out to be. The piece is a slow methodical descent, a subterranean refutation of the overtone’s’ antigravitational pull. The unfolding is as miraculous as it is exquisite, a thunderous trajectory flecked with promises of the rainbow always palpable but never foregrounded.

Like the civilization only glimpsed through the unchanging but absolutely active shape of Clarke’s sentinel, the piano seems to transcend itself. As a singular but multifarious entity, it provides a totality in multitextured undercurrent against which everything else evolves. In one instance, it is given a bit of electronic aid as an e-bow guides the fifth monochrome’s droning textures while they unfurl, float and dissipate; the addition is as subtle as it is unforced. To these ears, the piano’s most extravagant and complete liberation in this context comes with the second monochrome. Again, there is historical precedent, but to equate Helmut Lachenmann’s timbral intrigues to the second monochrome would be to condense the multicolored wonders and delectable nuances of a pastoral scene to two dimensions. The rapid-fire upper-register intertwinings force the piano to resonate with its own internal workings on full display. The glacial addition of tones in dynamic flux is continually complemented by that continuo of resonance, like wind or water, the closest the piano comes to offering its own individual form of speech. The instrument’s mechanisms and the disparate materials of its construction are foregrounded over this ocean of changeless change, a vast reservoir of never quite undifferentiated sound over which seemingly infinite permutations occur in a single pitch register.

Standing stark as the moments of intense concentration and forethought they embody and partially because of their singularity of purpose in such complex frameworks, these 15 pieces comprise one of the most fascinating and satisfying series for the piano composed in some time. They stand at points of intersection of their own making. Only superficially beholden to the past, they address another triumph for the label, highlight a glorious present for the instrument Varese cautioned decades ago to forget and the advent of a stunning compositional voice. (Marc Medwin)

Reinier van Houdt 'drift nowhere past / the adventure of sleep' (elsewhere 021-1, 021-2) by Bill Meyer in MAGNET Magazine (6/16/2022)

Reinier van Houdt is best known as an interpreter of new piano music, in which capacity he has performed compositions by Alvin Lucier, John Cage, Michael Pisaro and Robert Ashley. He’s also a key member of Current 93, the experimental collective helmed by mystical songwriter David Tibet. But van Houdt isn’t just a facilitator and communicator of other people’s visions. He also creates his own music, which delves deeply into the matter of making the ineffable palpable.

The genesis of Drift Nowhere Past/The Adventure Of Sleep was Erstwhile Records proprietor Jon Abbey’s response to the initial COVID lockdown. Confronted with the impossibility of planning a concert festival and the awareness that many artists were cut off from their usual opportunities to perform, Abbey instituted an online festival to present newly commissioned sound art that defied the moment’s isolation. Over a span of six months, beginning on March 20, AMPLIFY 2020: quarantine published 240 pieces, which can still be accessed via Bandcamp and the event’s Facebook and blog pages.

One of the first—and ultimately most prolific—contributors was van Houdt. His six offerings felt like bulletins from a space bounded, on one hand, by the unreality of the pandemic and humanity’s reaction to it, and on the other, by a zone of untouchable mystery that defied the ugly facts of life and death on the ground. They added up to about 74 minutes of music, which fits nicely on a CD. But when Elsewhere Records first determined to compile Drift Nowhere Past, the label also asked van Houdt to make a counterpart recording. The development of that follow-up corresponded with the liberating summer of 2021 and the subsequent, Delta- and Omicron-driven lockdown episodes.

On March 22, just two days after AMPLIFY 2020:quarantine went live, van Houdt submitted his first installment. If the track “Drift Nowhere Past” hadn’t been so compelling, the story might have stopped there. It opens with two alternating piano notes, which course throughout the piece. Gradually, other sounds appear: a third piano note, some outdoor traffic sounds, a tolling bell, a woman singing and speaking to herself in French. Although the piano asserts a rhythm, the music feels quite still, as though the atmosphere had vanished, but somehow left perceivable sound behind. Near the piece’s end, nameless dissonances swell, ending the music on a note of apprehension. What comes next? At the time, no one had any idea, but I know that when van Houdt delivered a second track exactly one month later, I was pleased to have the chance to find out what else he’d made out of, to use his words, “what I played, listened to, recorded, played back, read, watched, heard or imagined” during another month of quarantine.

That next report, “Friction Sleep Maze,” begins with threads of synthetic sound pushing like worms through an airless void. But if van Houdt was still stuck in the house, his mind was not. A sequence of sampled creaks, groans and voices drift by, while van Houdt picks out notes that seem to get bumped aside by the flotsam. At one point, his own playing is pushed away by someone else’s piano recording, as though we’re listening in on a moment of solitary. Even when you’re locked in, the work continues.

Each track on Drift Nowhere Past is a world unto itself, but the cumulative effect is like re-reading a series of letters sent during a time of trial. They share the writer’s mundane musings, emotional extremes and considered recommendations, bringing you closer to the author and the time, but you always know that you’re remembering.

The Adventure Of Sleep uses similar elements, but it doesn’t feel the same. Nor should it, since it was made in conscious response to the AMPLIFY tracks. He may have been working in another time of confinement, but van Houdt did so with the complicating knowledge that quarantine can be survived, and eased, and reinstituted. This pushed van Houdt deeper into the material, but also infused it with a sense of self-observation. For instance, on “A Stitch In Time” (the first of the album’s four parts), van Houdt’s piano is situated in the background, like a representative of unconscious awareness while the composer sets his mind to manipulating collected delineations of time and mystery in the foreground.

The Adventure Of Sleep is less than half the length of its counterpart. This brevity may be an acknowledgement that if, when you’re first going through something, you need to process it at length. When you’ve learned what you need to get you through it, however, you become more concerned with the efficient and effective use of your tools. As van Houdt has honed his facilities, the music’s quiet power has only grown.

—Bill Meyer

Quentin Tolimieri - Monochromes (elsewhere 022-3) by Frank Meadows in Downtown Music Gallery Newsletter (6/24/2022)

Folded within the beautifully crisp and minimal Triple CD packaging that is the hallmark of Elsewhere label, lies an insert that outlines the descriptions (which for all intents and purpose also serve as the notation), for each of the 15 movements that comprise Quentin Tolimieri’s microscopic solo piano epic “Monochromes”. A revealing aside embedded in the description of Monochrome 8 reads “There was a lesson the composers in the Wandelweiser collective learned in the early 1990’s in a way that seemed almost axiomatic; the longer you want the piece to last, the less material you should use. Likewise, many of the shorter Monochromes use more pitch material than the longer ones.”

Both within the pieces and across the 3 hour run time of the collection, this clear-headed focus and restraint allows for earned duration that avoids punishing severity by framing within a clear love for the mechanisms of the piano and an urge to caringly mine below the surface of its capabilities. Each piece is performed without written notation, but carefully plotted with goals of how to proceed into the depths of connection with the piano at both its most literal and familiar, and most abstract. A clear sense of reverence for and bottomless fascination with the piano is evident, and the pace is regulated by the feeling that simply hearing the instruments construction more fully should be enough. “Each time Monochrome 10 begins I’m reminded of the mbira” / “In Monochrome 14 very high, muted keys are struck so that the rattling of the mechanism is most of what is heard” / “Monochrome 3 consists entirely of a repeated low B.” As a lifelong pianist, rarely have I found solo piano music that is so inspiring and motivating towards returning to a constant point of discovery and newness with the piano, harnessing both a severity and rigor, and childlike exploration to produce a generous and fulfilling collection. - Frank Meadows

Reinier van Houdt - drift nowhere past / the adventure of sleep (elsewhere 021-1, 021-2) by Bruce Lee Gallanter in Downtown Music Gallery Newsletter (6/24/2022)

At one point during the pandemic, I decided to record 30 minutes of birds, insects and trains from the train platform one block from where I live. I did this as the sun went down and many of the birds and insects all seems to make (an organic symphony of) sounds.

I listened to the tape almost every night for a couple of months and began to become familiar with the sounds and patterns that usually go unnoticed. I still go back to that tape since it has become familiar to me and it reminds me of quiet times at home in a familiar environment. Reiner van Houdt did something similar for the first of two discs here. He recorded snips of things he listened to, read, watched and heard during one day each month during the Pandemic quarantine of 2020. This disc is called ‘drift nowhere past’ and it sounds like a sonic diary. It starts with somber guitar picking and a soft, dreamy female voice. Slowly other instruments, voices or sounds creep in. A hushed Satie-like repeating piano line is hypnotic and lulls us in a sleep-like state. Some sort of drone enters next, a bowed object of some sort? The overall effect is drifting on a raft on a slow motion body of water, the vibe casting a dream-like spell on all who are listening. Track 2 is called, “friction sleep maze” and it starts with a rather disorienting dark sample or sound with speckles of static-like sounds unwinding. Another section of exquisite Satie-like piano, soft spoken words and eerie bowed or sampled sounds. Each of the six pieces here evoke a different vibe or scene for our mind’s eye. When Mr. Van Houdt adds another layer of sounds, the effect gets more dense, the sounds both somewhat recognizable and mysterious simultaneously. Snippets of pre-20th century classical music float in and take us somewhere else for a spell. Like most discs on the elsewhere and erstwhile labels, this music does a good job of taking us somewhere else as long as we are patient and still listening closely.

The second disc is called, ‘the adventure of sleep’ and again Mr. Van Houdt recorded different sounds over a period of six months. He then worked with whatever sounds were at hand and manipulated or assembled these sounds into something new. The title of this disc refers to the way we enter another state when we sleep. There is a soft haze surrounding the music or sounds here. Van Houdt does a good job of stretching certain sound out and then altering them, some sounds familiar, some not so familiar. It sounds like Van Houdt has spent more time contemplating each sound so that things flow together in a more focused or directed way. Since things move or occur more slowly, it take time to adapt to what is going on here. It feels as if we are checking out the scenery which surrounds us and noticing things we haven’t noticed in the past. Time has slowed down so we see more of what is in front or around us. If you take your time and listen closely, some of the mysteries of life will be revealed. - Bruce Lee Gallanter

Quentin Tolimieri - Monochromes (elsewhere 022-3) by Eyal Hareuveni in Salt Peanuts (6/8/2022)

The Berlin-based pianist-composer Quentin Tolimieri has studied with British contemporary composer and pianist Michael Finnissy in the United Kingdom, with American reeds player Joe Maneri who focused on microtonal music in Boston, and with guitarist and experimental composer and a long-time member of the Wandelweiser collective Michael Pisaro-Liu in Los Angeles. He is influenced by contemporary music as well as free improvisation, New Orleans blues and Javanese music.

His solo piano triple-album «Monochromes» collects fifteen piano pieces titled «Monochrome 1 – 15», composed between 2017-2021. Each piece has its own distinct atmosphere with a single theme and a monochromatic palette of sounds and colors, unfolding over a long period of time. Some are lulling-style pieces with faint melodies in a slow progression; some are vibrant pieces with intense, repetitive layers of brisk beats, where occasionally a hint of harmony or melody ephemerally appears, in between atonal and tonal, or in the intersections of overtones and echoes, or behind the thick layers of reverberation.

Tolimieri explains that he always felt that the piano «was a bit limited by a kind of music history embedded in its construction: equal temperament, a particular kind of tone quality, etc.» and that this acoustic instrument represented European harmony and Western music history. But, slowly, he realized that the piano s actually filled with all sorts of «sounds that we don’t really hear or focus on because of all of the structural/linguistic things going on in music». His aim was to liberate the piano and eliminate the piano‘s language, syntax, and grammar (harmony, melody, rhythm and formal development etc.), so he could hear its «actual voice».

Tolimieri’s monochromatic «Monochromes» reinvent the sonic palette of the piano. He often takes the piano to radical and austere ends that strip the acoustic keyboard instrument from any familiar sounds and maps its possible sonic possibilities in carefully-executed architectures of time and space. His decisive commitment, intense energy, extended techniques and deep focus on these minimalist pieces produce a series of pure, unworldly sonorities. You can hear echoes of the radical rhythmic ideas of Conlon Nancarrow, the sparse meditations of Morton Feldman or the intensity of Cecil Taylor. After the opening, aggressive and quite obsessive Monochrome pieces, you may be bewitched by the sheer beauty of the serene fourth and thirteenth pieces which suggest an abstract ritual that brings to mind the ascetic qualities of Zen Buddhism or Butoh dances, or the meditative spirit of the fifth one that sounds like an electronic dreamscape and the unsentimental children’s song of the seventh piece. But you can also appreciate the almost inhuman methodical stubbornness of the 35-minute eighth Monochrome piece, the 24-minute twelfth piece and the shorter fourteenth piece.

Obviously, this exquisite work is an outcome of careful research of the piano, its universe of microtonal overtones, its reverberation and the physical qualities of the keys and the strings. The evolution of these bold, monochromatic pieces has its own logic, and the immersive listening experience of «Monochromes» allows us – the listener – to rediscover the piano. Or as Pisaro-Liu concludes: «Each Monochrome is a small world. Over the course of the three hours the series lasts, we travel across a system of fifteen planets».

Quentin Tolimieri - Monochromes (elsewhere 022-3) by Michele Palozzo in esoteros (6/2/2022)

Looking closely at minimalist painting can change one’s gaze forever. One realizes that these frames, these “screens” of colour, too, are none other than summations of textures patiently stratified over time, which even in the most radical chromatic continuity can hardly conceal their additive genesis.
Therefore it is never entirely true that the painting is uniquely and totally present, since the entire, indispensable timeline of the pictorial gesture is encapsulated in it, which if it fails to reveal itself to the eye is only due to the effect of distance or to a Gestaltic simplification.

In the “performative writing” of pianist/composer Quentin Tolimieri there’s no attempt at dissimulation in this sense: the sound action intends to reveal itself as ever changing, even in the apparent fixity with which the hands reach the keyboard: the acoustic phenomenology disclaims what the eye would tend, by approximation, to recognize as invariable, refracts the sonic matter in different propagations that betray its intrinsic plurality.
A Tarkovsky-like “sculpting of time” seems to inspire and give concrete form to the Monochromes of the young New York artist, the emanations of a stylistic integralism that has nothing in common with the rigid schematism of “learned” twentieth-century avant-gardes; if anything, it finds its tutelary deities in outsiders of contemporary experimentation such as Alvin Lucier, Charlemagne Palestine and even Julius Eastman, a militancy devoted to the mysterious and transfiguring power of the sound occurrence, before being a musical one.

Each piece presented in this impressive collection under the elsewhere aegis – whose catalog by now configures itself as an atlas of today’s pianism – is in its own way an essay of immovable obstinacy, an étude whose original spark could have been ignited almost by chance, the reflection of an instant turned into a formal rule to be adhered to until the putative completion of the unveiling process enacted.
Among these unwritten pages is the transcendental oblivion of Dennis Johnson and later Feldman (1, 9); the almost sacral focus towards reverberation and sound decay (from the impetuous maximalism of number 8 to the placid tolling of 13); the obsessive rejection of the instrument as a pure tonal intermediary, but rather the sum of mechanics – “prepared” or not – of which wood, metal, and stressed muscles partake on several planes (2, 12, 14).

Every single one of Tolimieri’s intuitions is here dissected and conducted to the point of extenuation, making the tour de force the only possible mode to break away from all those which, by contrast, appear to be nothing more than half measures; and this even at the cost of bordering on the futile, the most stolid expressive negation, anything that may dispel the impression that in these monochromes, as on rare other occasions, the ineffable essence that the sonic gesture proves to enclose in itself, regardless of the ultimate intent of its advocate, has been thoroughly investigated. Whether it be hypnotic, enigmatic or overtly annoying, the conscious experience of these pieces cannot possibly arouse indifference, but at most the clear perception of a ‘before’ and an ‘after’.

Quentin Tolimieri - Monochromes (elsewhere 022-3) by Peter Margasak on The Best Contemporary Classical on Bandcamp: May 2022 (5/31/2022)

Berlin-based pianist Quentin Tolmieri unleashes a clearing house of 15 hyper-specific works spread across three CDs, pushing the titular concept to the breaking point. Apart from the set’s three-hour duration, much of this music tests boundaries in its almost elegant conceptual simplicity, with certain pieces so punishing and single-minded that if someone walked in on the music mid-way it might feel downright combative. But once I spent some focused time with Monochromes each piece blossomed in dazzling, often unexpected ways.

“Monochrome 1,” which evokes both Morton Feldman and Ran Blake, begins with a gentle melody emerging from an austere, almost rickety chord progression, cycling with little variation. But as the piece proceeds the overtones seem to give the notes a new life, opening up with resonances that hover and envelop the struck notes. Before the listener can settle into that sort of spacious lyricism, on “Monochrome 2” Tolmieri leapfrogs to an incessant tangle of microscopically shifting patterns played in the extreme upper register of the instrument, where the percussive clatter upstages the glassy tones. Once again, an otherworldly veil of psychedelic overtones and elusive internal melodic shapes seem to take over before long. Tolmieri’s studies all produce wonderful discoveries, and his rigor in wringing out possibilities has clearly required significant research; he’s worked through each scenario, so we can inhale the heady results. One of the year’s most gratifying challenges.

Reinier van Houdt 'drift nowhere past / the adventure of sleep' (elsewhere 021-1, 021-2) by Marc Medwin on Dusted Magazine (5/12/2022)

“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.” - Franz Kafka

The quotation did not serve as a guide, or not at first, while listening to the music on these generous discs, generous in spirit as in bounty. It did guide the composer/performer Reinier van Houdt as he fashioned the music, which, like those words, connotes the passage of a definite amount of time as revelation. What a beautiful prescription, the axiom fulfilling self-actualizing desire just as the music manifests its own morphing destiny.

The facts are few but poignant. The first disc, Drift Nowhere Past, was conceived as a six-part journey between March and August of 2020, during the Covid pandemic’s first phase. The second, The Adventure of Sleep, a parallel but surprisingly alternate conception, was realized between May 2021 through February 2022. The first disc comprised six entries in Jon Abbey’s online festival AMPLIFY 2020: quarantine, and the second was meant to complement it. Van Houdt composed, performed and mixed. All that minutia begins a tale of mediants, of portals through which life passes with the subtle and natural grace of fantasy, or travel, or thought, caught just on the point of self-awareness.

On the first disc, juxtapositions can be jump-cut quick or smolder with the slow certainty of oncoming rain. “She was a visitor,” intones a calm voice in repetitions rendered either somnolent or hyper-conscious by the quietly glistening but semi-static harmonic context as “Horizon Without Traveler” approaches the half-way point, all bathed in a light as hazy as the engine, or siren, immediately preceding it was clear and presently dangerous. The natural vista on which the sound then opens is magically serene, inhabiting a bright space in vivid contrast to the dark-toned piano of the titular piece’s conclusion. The subsequent environmental shift is delicately jarring, a composite of technological buzz and mechanical grind before we’re plunged unceremoniously, dream-like, into the busy city street, anticipating a gentle return to the pastoral calm of water and fluid harmony in floatation. The second disc’s poised beauty inhabits that never quite static place just on the border of sleep. “Void” is anything but that, its stuttering tones belying all conventional notions of melody and harmony by emphasizing their points of connection as their timbral genesis becomes almost familiar. Even the comparatively punchy “Parallel Spaces” relinquishes each component with some reluctance as environments flow rather than simply changing.

So many syntactic linkages unify the music that a progression is initially obscure. The two large works taken together move from something nearly, or sometimes, frenetic toward a slower and gentler permeability, or malleability. It may be this, the persistent bleed of one thing into, around and through another, that signals any sense of permutation. Many paths through the ten individual pieces can be taken. The voice and its fractured, fragmented and repeated texts may constitute one of them. The piano in its various environments follows a similarly quotation-driven route. Beyond all of this, there are the things, the substances made manifest at the door, the window, just beyond the fence, the stream or the field. Taken as a single entity, and these two series are now best heard in tandem, they comprise a cross-section of life in the wonderfully musical language only spoken through distillation. Each sound is and is not, chronology playing only a minor role in the quiet and transcendent pleasure of experiencing each gesture. Each through-listening exposes layers of subtlety while consigning others to a lush but deceptively transparent background. Beyond, there is the gradual slowing, a tempo-less tempo bringing all toward the transient and reflective delicacy of near somnolence, necessitating only observation and acceptance. - Marc Medwin

Quentin Tolimieri - Monochromes (elsewhere 022-3) by Keith Prosk on harmonic series 1/16 (5/1/2022)

Quentin Tolimieri performs fifteen works for solo piano on the 189’ Monochromes.

As the title suggests, each track concentrates on one technique, to attenuate structures and to attune to textures. Silences zip modified melodies or rhythmic bars transpose octaves but more than any note monotony focuses the ear to hear harmonics’ spectral auroras. The seemingly autonomous lives of waves, in between in long decay or aggravated out of sustained stippling. Assuming various characters of starry twinkling, whale song breaching under rolling thunder, or morse chirps. Sometimes siloed in such a way to convey not the total mechanism of the piano but one material of it, the wood, the key, the string. And while approaches could be divided into shades of slow melodies and of driving rhythms, textures within that range can change from classical clarity to thudded plinks and from giant mbira to hammered timber. Colorfields can leverage size too, evoking the local acuity of open desert and vast sea that comes from a search for meaning in an enveloping nothing. Larger durations yield similar effects. And putting your nose to a tree with an eye for the forest induces a kind of vertigo. In this movement from nonmovement from nonstructural framing the material soul of the instrument is illustrated by the instrumentalist. (Keith Prosk)

Quentin Tolimieri - Monochromes (elsewhere 022-3) by Gil Sansón on Tone Glow (4/23/2022)

Monochromes is my introduction to the music of Quentin Tolimieri, and having read a few somewhat hyperbolic words on social media, I was a tad suspicious of any hype regarding this album. My reservations were unfounded, as it turns out. Benefitting from the clear and sharp piano sound of the Elsewhere records standard, the music here is a bit of a revelation. It shows an individual voice exhibiting a high level of timbral investigation along with a focus on restricted areas of the piano, yielding sounds that couldn’t possibly be notated and come straight from the piano as a machine. There are references that could be employed to give an idea about the music: Charlemagne Palestine, Hans Otte, perhaps even Cecil Taylor. The means of production are fully at the service of the intended sound; it’s rich in harmonic spectra, which requires, among other things, equal and constant pulsation and use of the resonance pedal. A piano can become a cavern and an architectural space in itself by way of this resonant frame and Tolimieri exploits this characteristic in many ways, each “Monochrome” piece focusing on one aspect of the piano. Some pieces work with contrasting dynamics, as with “Monochrome 4,” which displays simultaneous dynamic interplay between loud notes in the uppermost register with soft notes in the middle register. Over the course of the album, numerous aspects and timbres of the piano are explored, and each piece is a concentrated presentation of a single aspect. This gives the music a bit of an obsessive, even ritualistic quality that adds another dimension to what could have been an otherwise normal catalog of sounds. Strangely, Monochromes will never let you forget that you’re listening to a piano, but it’ll make you realize the possibilities it’s still capable of at the hands of an artist who treats it both at the ontological and phenomenological level (even metaphysical). If the piano is a place, Monochromes provides a good and accurate map.

Reinier van Houdt 'drift nowhere past / the adventure of sleep' (elsewhere 021-1, 021-2) by Dionys Della Luce on the Inactuelles Musiques Singulières (4/6/2022)

Music-Worlds

   I got to know pianist Reinier van Houdt through his performance of Dead Beats by Alvin Curran, released in 2019. So he belongs to the circle of pianists defricheurs. I didn't know anything else about this Dutchman from Rotterdam, who studied piano at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, while working with tape recorders, radios, objects and various stringed instruments at an early age. He is fascinated by everything that escapes notation: sound, space, time, memory, noise, the everyday environment. As a pianist, he has performed the works of the greatest composers of today and worked with some of them, such as John Cage, Alvin Lucier, Luc Ferrari or Peter Ablinger. But he has also collaborated with more unclassifiable musicians, such as Nick Cave or John Zorn, and released no less than fourteen solo albums, participating in numerous international festivals.
   Two albums conceived according to slightly different approaches, forming a diptych. For drift nowher past, each piece focuses on everything that enters the mind on a specific day of each month (the 22nd between March and August 2020 during the health crisis); for the adventure of sleep, another release conceived as a counterpart to the first one and commissioned by Yuko Zama (who directs elsewhere music) on what happens every day, such as the passage of time, the noises of the neighbors, the moment of falling asleep or waking up. A fragment of Kafka serves as an exergue to these two records: "You must not leave your room. Sit at your table and listen. You don't even have to listen, just wait. You don't even have to wait, just learn to be quiet, calm and solitary. Then the world will come to you and offer you to unmask him. It will have no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."
You don't need to leave your room. Just sit at your table and listen. Do not just listen, just wait, always be quiet and solitary. The world will offer you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

The notion of instrumentarium has little meaning here. Certainly, for the first disc, one will hear piano, Indian harmonium, strings played with a bow, blottleneck guitar, synthesizers... and samples, but also sound extracts from films by Marguerite Duras (Le camion, in particular), Robert Bresson, other archive recordings and sounds in and around Reinier's house; and for the second, piano, Korg synthesizer, all sorts of triturated recordings, very diverse sounds, rolling and flickering objects, clocks, glass singing bowls...and excerpts from the film Un Homme qui dort (A Sleeping Man) by Georges Perec! Each composition makes its sonic honey of all the components: everything becomes music, is musicalized, carried away in a flow of consciousness. Of course, musique concrète and other experimental music have long since pushed back the limits of what we call music. It seems to me that rarely, however, has one conceived to such an extent all the sounds of the world as musicalizable in pieces that no longer hierarchize the components, treating them as equal. In literature, James Joyce's experience in Ulysses (1922) is of a similar order.

The first eponymous piece begins with the piano, a continuous minimalist flow, a noise of chairs being moved, then accompanied by the pianist's chirping and a female voice, first without words, then with a text in French (unidentified: "qui se souviendra / qui pleurera ma peine / qui ma vie passée / pleurera cet amour"). The drifting began, very muffled, at first long led by the piano, then fed here and there with new materials, bells, drones of synthesizer, sound pushes. A dull pulsation animates this magnificent elegiac flow, ready to sink in which shipwreck, I think of Gavin Bryars' music, The Sinking of the Titanic. The first verses come back, we sink into the sepulchral bass. The stream of consciousness of the piece has already generated another stream, that of the listener, drifting in turn. The second piece, "friction sleep maze" brings up strange electronic limbo, grating, from which a long sound extract of the film Le camion by Marguerite Duras stands out: we hear not only Marguerite's recognizable voice, but extracts of the music, the thirty-first Diabelli Variations by Ludwig van Beethoven, on which Reinier's piano leans, almost merging with it, before detaching itself from it, and that's very beautiful, isn't that what happens to all of us when we like a music, it ends up seeming ours, it belongs to us, it's as if it were us who composed it. This drift is an invasion, an incorporation of the world into our consciousness, the world-being that we are. And here I am, embarked in my own memory, drawn towards Beethoven, watching Duras' film, so that the writing of this article could last hours, those of the back and forth between the compositions and their integrated, digested components... Reinier composes a soundtrack for parts of the film where Marguerite speaks alone, he is gone in the film, so the piece becomes both a rewrite and a posthumous tribute, a way of reviving and appropriating what has been implanted deep inside us for sometimes so long that we want to be part of it, so much so that it seems impossible that we have not contributed to its birth. The end of the piece seems to return to the dark depths of memory...

   "Horizon without traveler" : muffled voice, distorted, troubled speech that the piano prolongs with some misty notes... Where are we going ? In which unknown film, in which train? Sweetness of wandering, emptiness of things, memories of haunting tunes, clanking and sung murmurs, surges of sound objects, stammering repetitions of "She was a visitor", aren't we all visitors of the world, carried away by this sweet current that aggregates everything in a sovereign indifference? The piece, some would say, is ambient: beautiful and mysterious like the water of memories stirred by an unknown engine, evanescent and fragile like a nursery rhyme suddenly reappearing, then carried away. The world is "skies, waves, trails" (title 4: "ciels vagues sentiers"). The luminous trail of an electronic comet unfolds in a very slow undulation adorned with scintillations, from which emerges another more serious current. Consciousness, in the end, is another cosmos, a crossing of formidable forces, which gives us a fascinating piece, a sumptuous radiant drift of more than twenty minutes, which seems to breathe little by little at a crescendo rhythm, then to deepen with a languor, to metamorphose while rumbling, as if we were attending the slow agony of a dragon. Extraordinary!
"bardo for Cor" takes us elsewhere. Bursts of piano release stridencies, blurred zones, voices. Perhaps here Reinier made use of sounds from the archives of Luc Ferrari. A sort of electronic poem weighted with drones, an Ali Baba's cave, the piece is dressed in tatters under a heterogeneous rain of delirious noises, proliferating sound dreams. The first disc ends with "the mystery of erasure", the sixth drift beyond (of) nowhere, a magical sequence of sound memories melted in a hypnotic frame, pure surrealist free association, which reminds fleetingly of the complex disheveled compositions of Nurse With Wound. A little after the middle of the composition, the whole enters in resonance, reaches a hallucinatory intensity, vast haphazardness that sweeps a powerful wind, so that almost only a voice remains, ginning out words in English (unidentified origin...) in a gangue of electronics and distant piano. And the fading occurs, long halo of a diaphanous beauty, sublime softness punctuated by an immaterial light tinkling of bells, that I hear as the announcement of the second part of this fabulous diptych.

   The second disc announces the adventure of sleep. Haunted by clocks, it is as if suspended between day and night, or rather between night and night. The real floats, each noise takes an unknown relief, opens a world. So the extracts of Perec's film, Un Homme qui dort (A Sleeping Man), fit in quite naturally. The four titles are the ecstatic setting in music of the next world, which harmonizes with the interior flow of the conscience: the parallel spaces are not heterogeneous, they are of the same fabric. Interior / Exterior or Dream (Memory) / Real are no longer discernible, "everything is vague, buzzing / your breathing is surprisingly regular" says the soundtrack of the film. The void is a vibrant ocean of wonders, listen to this third part, "void", an electronic canvas iridescent with tremors, amazing advent of splendors, deflagrations, blooming in scintillations, in curved rain, and a small female voice whispers "now you have no refuge / you are afraid / you wait for everything to stop / the rain / the hours / the flow of cars / the lives / the men / the world / for everything to collapse / the walls / and everything / the floors and the ceilings / the men and the women / the old men and the children / the dogs / the horses / the birds / there they fall to the ground / paralyzed / plague-stricken" on a soft and troubled background of drones, of distant notes. After the daily apocalypse of falling asleep or waking up, "you are not dead, but you are not wiser", would you have fallen into a fold (track 4, "a fold")? Entangled in a micro swarming, you live in the presence of mysterious beasts of which one hears only the enormous snore, your burrow surrounded by deaf perforations, squeaks, twisted commas, all rises would seem, sucked by a light which will end up leading you to the day, perhaps...

Two precious discs like a sound collection that takes us so close, so far, and at the same time brings us back to the depths of ourselves, of our intimate history. Reinier van Houdt is the editor and sound director of two prodigious drifts, bathed in an unforgettable dreamlike grace. A monument !

(English translation via DeepL) *Original French review

Reinier van Houdt 'drift nowhere past / the adventure of sleep' (elsewhere 021-1, 021-2) by Michele Palozzo on Esoteros (4/22/2022)

Every norm, every habitual practice suddenly fell short in order to try and cope with the isolation months. Long-term plans were replaced by daily survival strategies, by whatever means necessary. For the professional artist – the “spare” gear in the social machine –, a crisis so profound as to call into question his individual role, surpassed by the acclaimed heroism of the health sector and the working class which, despite it all, etcetera.
In Reinier van Houdt’s rare public statements over that period I’ve read words of helplessness, empty of hope in a return to the normalcy of before, however precarious. But perhaps never as in that moment, for him and for many others, art was the most immediate and indispensable refuge, the seat of illusion and utopia in which to give vent to one’s own anxieties.

The material for this double CD published by elsewhere has its roots in the AMPLIFY Sessions which Jon Abbey promptly conceived in March 2020, not only with the aim of generating direct financial support for his musical entourage, but also to make each artist feel the closeness of their colleagues and their heartfelt public in the same conditions. From here takes shape the album’s main set, drift nowhere past, which only in the cadence of its chronological succession appears to be a diary (a piece per month for six months), while as a whole it consistently represents a progressive – and tragic – descent into the underworld of the mind, a Sebald-like journey at the ultimate border between memory and oblivion, studded with scant perceptive handholds offered by fragments of known melodies and voices, nothing more than half-answers in the guise of ephemeral reminiscences.

All of it’s already encapsulated in that first, instinctive evocation from the lied “Der Leiermann”, the final moment of Franz Schubert’s “Winterreise” cycle: the vocal fragment, excerpted from a French film, makes its way over a carpet of lulling, minimalist tintinnabuli a la Nils Frahm; and it is precisely the primal image of the miserable accordion player that embodies, at the same time, the sense of bewilderment and irrepressible melancholy, but also the familiarity of a cherished musical motif, and therefore a safe haven for the oppressed mind. The title track can’t be anything but an attempt to fabricate a momentary panacea, a space of intimacy that no malevolent presence can access. The subsequent iterations of this ritual, however, make apparent the futility of this purpose, and restlessness surfaces back in much less composite forms.

Decontextualized field recordings and other distant romantic echoes filtered by thick layers of celluloid (again Schubert, with the famous Andantino from the ‘Sonata in A major’, but also Beethoven’s ‘Diabelli Variations’) contribute to the disorderly cramming of Van Houdt’s psychic landscape, along with an overwhelming, almost omnipresent electroacoustic substratum, resonating as much with Keith Rowe’s crepuscular ‘Room Extended’ as with Michael Pisaro-Liu’s understated piano solos (the earth and the sky). In the nebulous collage of extraneous suggestions, the vocal refrain devoid of meaning from Robert Ashley’s “She Was a Visitor” (“horizon without traveler”) also appears, up until the actual manifestation of that fateful harmonium (“skies waves trails”), confined within a low register that causes it to vibrate like an infernal bellows.
A de profundis that nevertheless still springs from life, and therefore cannot be forgetful of those who have already crossed the liminal threshold forever: in July, Van Houdt paid homage to Cor Fuhler (1964-2020) a few days after his sudden passing, sketching in music a Buddhist bardo where his soul may ideally transit, although shaken by analogical jolts and hums around which uncertain Feldman-esque progressions unfold.

When compared with the somber, even deadly intensity of the first disc (with a total timing of seventy-four minutes), the complementary the adventure of sleep appears as a cold-minded – yet far from lucid – re-immersion into the same uneasy crevices of the unconscious. Certainly closer to a proper studio work, in the space of just thirty-five minutes it seems to condense the poetic essence of the Dutch sound artist: an itinerary of tranquil estrangement that preserves in different ways the cinematic suggestions of the previous journal, united here by an atmosphere of dreamlike abandonment that might be associated with Tarkovskij’s “The Mirror”; an expressive domain in which reality and simulacrum merge and feed off each other, the musical instrument becomes a brush soaked in faded but pervasive hues, the only human voice a mother who, through the gift of the word, proves capable of soothing every spiritual ache.

A work so imbued with inner life (consciously or not) could easily be classified as one of the many artistic exorcisms that came to light in the midst of the pandemic crisis: but for Reinier van Houdt this arduous accomplishment seems almost to have been the pretext for sinking hands deep into the repressed, a niche of his own complex individuality which otherwise, perhaps, would have remained indefinitely in the shadow. Only in this way can the contingent instance become universal, the solitary song a nocturne of the soul which, through different and inscrutable ways, manages to touch anyone’s heart.

> reviews on the older releases (001-019)

REVIEWS (020-030)

​Jürg Frey - lieues d'ombres (Reinier van Houdt) (elsewhere 020-3)

​Germaine Sijstermans - Betula (elsewhere 023-2)​

Quentin Tolimieri - Monochromes (elsewhere 022-3)

Reinier van Houdt - drift nowhere past / the adventure of sleep (elsewhere 021-1, 021-2)

Jürg Frey - lieues d'ombres (Reinier van Houdt) (elsewhere 020-3) by John Eyles in ​All About Jazz (12/1/2022)

Jürg Frey - lieues d'ombres (Reinier van Houdt) (elsewhere 020-3) by Dionys Della Luce in Inactuelles Musiques Singulières (11/23/2022)

​Jürg Frey - lieues d'ombres (Reinier van Houdt) (elsewhere 020-3) by Michele Palozzo in Esoteros (11/2/2022)

​Jürg Frey - lieues d'ombres (Reinier van Houdt) (elsewhere 020-3) by ​Ben Harper in Boring Like A Drill (10/20/2022)

​Quentin Tolimieri - Monochromes (elsewhere 022-3) by Alex Tripp in ​endaural (10/10/2022)

​Germaine Sijstermans - Betula (elsewhere 023-2) by John Eyles in All About Jazz (9/22/2022)

​​Germaine Sijstermans - Betula (elsewhere 023-2) by Bill Meyer in Dusted Magazine (9/21/2022)

Reinier van Houdt 'drift nowhere past / the adventure of sleep' (elsewhere 021-1&2) by Delphine Dora on the Revue & Corrigée website

​Germaine Sijstermans - Betula (elsewhere 023-2) by Keith Prosk in harmonic series 1/19 (8/1/2022)

​Germaine Sijstermans - Betula (elsewhere 023-2) by Ben Harper in Boring Like A Drill (8/11 & 15/2022)