I am finishing this review in the Barbican Centre in central London, having just come from my flat in the east of the city. Perhaps this predetermines me to foreground an idea of urbanity when thinking about this music. The album does guide me in this direction with its cover image, a quotidian sight of two – I don't know what they are. Traffic not-cones? (A Google Image search showed me many articles about construction and destruction and delays.)
Recorded live at the Suoni per il Popolo Festival in Montreal in June 2019 and released in August 2022, this release showcases the ‘first meeting’ of Austrian electropop/new-music improviser Christof Kurzmann and Canadian/Australian sound artist Elizabeth Millar. The way in which the album is constituted of electronic textures in combination with either heavily modulated or very close-mic'd acoustic sounds gives it the effect of something which was created in the studio. Each sound (and there are many sounds) feels carefully placed, both from moment to moment as well as in the sense of a larger structure. I find it compelling that this is the product of a duo, and a live concert; it is much easier to imagine either lots of people contributing their small sounds or one person managing everything in post-production.
The album is accompanied in its write-up by fragments of an e. e. cummings poem, it is at moments after i have dreamed, a line of which provides the title, rare entertainment. I was struck by another of the fragments of the poem: the glassy darkness holds / the genuine apparition of your smile. For me, the idea of a ‘glassy darkness’ is so very accurate to this music.
When discussing this release, my friend Sidney mentioned the 2008 release The Breadwinner (Graham Lambkin/Jason Lescalleet), Duos for Doris, a 2003 release (Keith Rowe/John Tilbury), and the music of Michael Pisaro, as reference points. They all sit in a similar sonic and methodological space; however, none reach the coldness of rare entertainment. The depth and timbre of the modulated motor which opens the album is so icy, and when combined with strangled clarinet sounds and abstract metallic percussion it is a chilling and unwelcoming world into which the listener is placed. I was put in mind of the city in winter – damp(ened), desolate, inward-looking.
But there are elements of the album that made me reconsider this initial feeling of desolation. When the singing voice of Christof Kurzmann enters, 2’40” into 1 part 1, it is such a surprise. Intimate from its close mic'ing, the vocal doesn't disrupt the music's strangeness and coldness, so much as add to it in a charming way. The simple melodies, words and vocal delivery put me in mind of the deeply melancholic recent work of Nick Cave. A juxtaposition of EAI with experimental song is not uncommon, I suppose, but here it adds significant and unexpected depth and delicacy. From when the vocals enter, and especially towards the end of 1 part 1, I am bewitched by the wavering harmonies of the accompanying tones. At around 6’45” in, there is a moment where these accompanying pitches waver into a major third. Such moments, where I get a glimpse of a glowing harmonic world, which occur rarely but repeatedly throughout the release, are mesmerising among the quiet noisiness.
There is a subtle maximalism to this album. Instead of hearing the same sounds repeated against the motor rumbling and fan noise, I am treated to an ever evolving array of sounds, from both samples and live improvisation. I wonder if this understated excess speaks to ideas of the city in the winter, too. Upon reading the liner notes, it felt uncanny the degree to which my thinking on this resonated with that of their author Steve Bates (writing in winter in Montreal). His note recounts a list of ‘unaccountable, unfathomable’ sounds of the city, which he experiences as snow lands and situates him in space via sound, like some midwinter echolocation.
This liner note makes me consider an acoustemological reading of the album; I am put in mind of R. Murray Schafer's idea of the ‘soundscape’, and the widespread critiques of this most ubiquitous of neologisms. Schafer famously told us that ‘on a downtown street corner of the modem city there is no distance; there is only presence’.Footnote 1 He intended this to be a criticism, but perhaps this presence – even of something bleak – is exactly what can be treasured about this release, what might lead to a way of knowing through listening.Footnote 2
Writer, activist, and pioneer of New Urbanism Jane Jacobs (1961) wrote about the way pavements function in the city: ‘all composed of movement and change… we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance… to an intricate ballet’.Footnote 3 The quiet succession of sounds on this album, the constant rumble, its brittleness and strangeness speaks to the density and chill of London as I experience it now, in the November fog. The brief vocal sections initially endeared the release to me, but with the increased familiarity of repeat listens it is rather their sharing space with an array of strange and cold sounds which I have grown to enjoy.
Forty-five seconds into 1 part 4, I was abruptly reminded of some drilling which happened directly outside my bedroom window for several weeks in September – of when sounds of the city infiltrated my intimate space in a way that I could not opt out of. Later on in this track, I hear modified vocals which sound a bit like farm animals, alongside shifting tones which often settle into major thirds in a way which is very beautiful. A moment of lightness (with an unrelenting drilling sound): it makes me think of an urban farm under a concrete flyover in my hometown of Newcastle upon Tyne. I find myself feeling a strong affinity for the ‘glassy darkness’ for the impersonal and sometimes uncomfortable ballet of city living.
1 part 5 stretches the release's sonic and contextual parameters, featuring the only sample which is explicitly from the natural world (bird call) alongside one of the only traditionally ‘musical’ samples on the release (bells) alongside hospital beeps and bovine sighs and rockets lifting off. This moment of excess feels a little incongruous, and I wonder if it undermines the brittleness and strangeness of the release as a whole. On the other hand, as it comes at the end of the section, I wonder if instead it can be understood as the correct conclusion of the quietly maximalist, accelerationist ethos of the release as I have understood it.
I often think of my favourite Anne Boyer essay, Erotology, in which she talks about desire through the analogy of familiarity with the city in which one lives, of longing as cosmopolitanism.Footnote 4 I find Boyer's short essay endlessly lovely; it seemed uncannily relevant to this release, which leads me to a strange warming to the wintery city, where the glassy darkness holds / the genuine apparition of your smile.
