‘Van der Aa: Here’, London Sinfonietta, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

Extract

Clicks haunt much of Michel van der Aa's music, often embedded in thick referential networks. In One, the pervasive clicks, both live and pre-recorded, sometimes come from a flashlight and sometimes from twigs snapping; similarly, in Sunken Garden, a character in the film nervously flicks a business card against his hand, this minor gesture imbuing the score with one of its most distinctive sounds. But in both these compositions (and in many other van der Aa works) the clicks share another connotation: they are also the awkward, glitchy sound of recorded music, either gone wrong or mid-edit. It's an unmistakable reference for twenty-first-century ears – our experience with recordings has changed the way we hear the click.