Ezz-thetics a column by
If 2023 has seen the passing of Covid’s reign of terror, things returning to a near normal balance of global warming and state terrorism, it has also given up some noteworthy, even astonishing, recording projects of scale, whether older material rediscovered, realizations of works composed, assembled or recorded during the lockdown, or recorded in its immediate aftermath. In this particular neck of the woods, there are four CDs and a film from Eddie Prévost, sharing the title Making a Journey to a Bright Nowhere, recorded with different projects over four weekends at Café Oto in July 2022 (the original event covered by David Grundy in Point of Departure Issue 80, the CDs in this issue); the saxophonist Seymour Wright has just released RITES (alto-saxophone solos 2003-2023), four CDs or download; there’s the remarkable Vinyl Box (Ni-Vu-Ni Connu) of the work of Bengt “Frippe” Nordström (6 vinyl records in three different sizes and a variety of texts and inclusions, reviewed in Issue 83), assembled and researched by Mats Gustafsson and Thomas Millroth (also reviewed in Issue 83). There’s also the remarkable blòc, an imposing set by bassist/composer Pascal Niggenkemper that’s also a deep dive into the persistence of a culture and an endangered environment, variously buttressed by choir, winds, low-pitched strings, electric motors, and amplification. Niggenkemper has produced impressive music across a variety of forms since releasing his first CD as a leader in 2011. As a bassist in an improvising quartet, he is on the two CD-set Strandwal (Aerophonic) by From Wolves to Whales, with Nate Wooley, Dave Rempis, and Chris Corsano, as glowing a free-jazz recording as I’ve heard in the past 20 years (for quick reference there’s a film of the performance on YouTube, see notes at end). His ambitions as a composer were apparent with his 2016 release of Talking Trash (Clean Feed) by a group named le 7ème continent, composition and ensemble alike inspired by the continent-size web of trash that has formed in the Pacific Ocean. Left utterly to his own devices, there’s also the brilliant solo bass recording Look with Thine Ears (Clean Feed), a remarkable exploration of the possibilities of bass preparation. These works can partially prepare one for blòc, since one of the CDs is another work by le 7ème continent, .Kipppunkt, and there’s also a solo bass CD, la vallée de l'étrange, taking the practice one step further, with Niggenkemper’s bass also triggering a second robot bass. However, blòc goes much further afield, a body of work that presses insistently into music’s philosophical realm, as much an inquiry into the nature of contemporaneity, language, time, history, the self and other as any music might propose to be. With blòc, Niggenkemper enters that special terrain of the philosopher-bassists: Charles Mingus, Barry Guy, and Joëlle Léandre. blòc is not easy. It’s six CDs, each by a strikingly different ensemble. Two of the CDs – the first two, to make it more challenging – are vocal works, song settings of poems in Occitan, a language spoken by a language group that runs from North-eastern Spain across Southern France into Italy. Translations of the poems can be found on Niggenkemper’s Bandcamp site, in both French and German, so speakers of other tongues might want to cut and paste them into google translate. It’s been produced in an edition of 120 copies, and there’s a clicker on-site letting one know that as of September 7, 2023, seven copies remain unsold. Downloads are also available. I soon realized I listen to a lot of music in languages I don’t understand and thought further of Ezra Pound’s polyglot collages and decided to brave Niggenkemper’s Occitan works in a spirit of joyous, open ignorance, having always known full well (though just not at that preceding moment), that language is as much an auditory experience as a semantic one, especially when you don’t understand it. This is, of course, no easy leap, but it immediately reflects the challenge and personality of blòc; that is, a six CD set in a black paper wrapper with a clever magnetic fastener that presents itself as blòc: that is “block,” something suggesting impenetrability. Clearly Niggenkemper is not interested in making things easy for himself or for his listener, but it is only as we spend time in this work that we can appreciate both its almost instantaneous beauty and power, but also the challenges and themes that Niggenkemper has set himself. More than a regional dialect, Occitan (Langue d’oc) is the language of medieval troubadours like Bertran de Born, who were translated into Modern English by Ezra Pound and W.S. Merwin. So Niggenkemper’s first two CDs consist of settings you’re unlikely to understand that might summon up, if anything, a poetic tradition brought to life by Ezra Pound, among the most “difficult” (it’s a rich term) of poets in the 6000-year history of poems, and one who also thought poets should learn Occitan. It might be a particularly challenging way of paraphrasing Andre Gide’s remark, “Do not understand me too quickly.” Niggenkemper isn’t making it easy for us, but nor is he making it easy for himself. One way to look at these assembled works is a particularly challenging exploration of the self and its range or the gap between self and other. Music is not only a double here, and there are acts that suggest various kinds of other. There is that duet for two basses, one played by Niggemkemper, the other an electronically altered instrument, a robot bass, activated by what he plays on the acoustic bass. There is a quartet of two cellos and two basses in which the instruments also have motors. If the first two CDs suggest the other of a “pure” linguistic and cultural group that has survived (and revived) over a millennium, Niggenkemper also revisits another project here, his work Seventh Continent that is named for the vast “artificial” web of debris that has assembled in the Pacific between Japan and Hawaii. Pick your “other”, whether the ideal of a “lost” poetic language (Pound’s study is named The Spirit of Romance [New Directions]) or a continent of garbage, an anti-continent, that is all too “here,” pressed on us by a musician whose instrument itself has a robotic other. Niggenkemper literally situates us at the heart of meaningful activity and that first CD suggests not just the appearance of life, the sound of voices charged with meaning and charm, but the possibility of life itself.
CD1: vèrs revèrs (subran001): suite for 8 voices and solo double bass drawing on texts in Occitan by Jaumes Privat: Voix en Rhizome and Pascal Niggenkemper. The poems intoned here by eight singers (women, men, a child) are accompanied by Niggenkemper’s bass and the poems alternate with highly inventive bass solos. For Niggenkemper, there are roots in the place and the language: “My mother is from this region and as a kid I would hear the old people talking to each other in this language. Also, I was living in Rodez the last 4 years and worked on a piece for eight voices based on the poem “la fleur inverse” by troubadour poet Raimbaut d’Orange. I discovered the poems by Jaumes Privat. They directly spoke to me: the sound of the language; the pictures that they draw, and the inventiveness of the poems.” The vocal performances are alive with richly dramatic voices. This piece is a kind of utopian cultural act, an incomprehensible mother tongue alive with life, its diction playful, even suggestive, but including a child in the choir, a work of achieved recovery, a lost experience fully embodied in these voices and the expanding resonance of Niggenkemper’s bass. These are works he has lived in for years (Niggenkemper: “It took me three years to do ‘la vallée de l’étrange’; with ‘vèrs revèrs’ we rehearsed for one and a half years; ‘levar lenga’ took 2 years...” [ibid]) and it shows. The qualities and experiences and ideas rampant in blòc interact on so many levels, as works of transcribed memory and commentaries on experience. The verbi-vocal motherland of Occitan now presses onto the same existential stage as the “Seventh Continent,” that other “recording” of our cultural activity – the nightmare to which we awake now posed versus the dream we might recover.
CD 2: levar lenga (subran002): 9 musicians, 2 dancers and a poet set into the wild around texts by Privat and Pieyre. Levar Lenga is a compound piece employing actors and sculpture as well as an orchestra ... the speech will be largely incomprehensible to non-Occitan speakers, though again delivered with rich expressive voices, but the musical interludes should communicate immediately – a richly heady mix of renaissance village winds and strings playing hypnotic modal music with wildly dissonant electric guitars and keyboards, and solo winds stretching the confines of orchestral free jazz – at times it feels very much like one of Sun Ra’s extravagant outer planetary explorations, a mix of alien sounds from oboe to unidentifiable noise, alone or in collaboration. In a sense, Niggenkemper composes these works on a principle of expressive analogues, actors’ speech (collaborations of author and voice) giving way to orchestral abstraction of strong collective feeling.
CD3: le 7ème continent’s second CD is .Kipppunkt (subran003), described as “collapsing container ship music for double trio or triple duo.” The music teems with life or, rather, the appearance of life; for that is what its artificial “playfulness” might suggest. Richly programmatic, it’s awash with suggestions for metaphoric readings of technique and mood. At one point, highly aleatoric lines compete with electronic clutter and weird bass clarinet imitations of tugboats and fog horns, a nautical chaos in which liquid and solid compete uneasily and unsustainably. Things happen very quickly on the Seventh Continent. The opening theme last only a matter of seconds, while “Okjökull,” the third movement, consists of strange, wandering, dissonant glissandi, ascending and descending. They possess a ghostly quality, like sirens calling belatedly to a disaster already beyond all hope. The pitch-bending clarinet solo that follows is a kind of memorial for past life. There’s even a kind of mordant wit here, a certain positivity about something that might harken all the way back to Jelly Roll Morton’s “Dead man’s Blues.” As .Kipppunkt proceeds, It may reference, or just resemble, a host of things: there are moments when it can sound like Conlon Nancarrow on a tack piano or Stravinsky’s “A Soldier’s Tale,” the Seventh Continent becoming a kind of metaphor of a crowded, unsorted, undigested cultural mass left to its own devices, breeding monsters.
CD4: la vallée de l’étrange (subran004): a face to face between a double bassist and an autonomous augmented double bass in an eight-speaker setting octophonic setting.” la vallée de l’étrange is a series of six pieces for double bass, in which Niggenkemper plays one bass, while a robotic bass is played in various ways by a series of motors. The sounds are transferred to eight speakers set up in the round behind an audience seated in a circle. Niggenkemper’s expressive range here is as large as the entirety with just the focus on his bass is as large as the entirety of blòc. On “choice processes frailty,” Niggenkemper plays the bass horizontally, with a series of bridges inserted among the strings to create distinct tones in the manner of a koto. The acoustic bass is struck with a mallet, triggering electronic buzzes from the player-less bass. The piece consists of often rapidly shifting sounds, resembling a percussion orchestra at times. Without Niggenkemper’s description, one might imagine a mixed ensemble containing percussion instruments, paper crumpled at a microphone, certainly a bass koto, and perhaps some Italian Futurist intonarumori. Another piece, “fusion,” will have various forms of sonic grit, but the foregrounded sound resembles the glissandi of sirens, the piece feeling like an extended, slightly jocular alarm until it fractures into a weird, bowed bass version of a hoedown accompanied by assorted eructating jugs.
CD5: have you ever wondered (subran005): chamber music for carillon, trumpet, voice, electronics and double bass. Have You Ever Wondered is performed by a trio of Corinne Salles (carillon), Ben LaMar Gay (trumpet, voice and electronics), and Pascal Niggenkemper (voice, composition). A carillon is a set of at least 23 bells encompassing two or more octaves in half-tones, and manually played from a touch-sensitive keyboard. Niggenkemper’s notes provide other circumstantial details of this particular carillon and recording situation, beginning with a temperature of “44°C (111 fahrenheit) in the shade,” indicating recording during the 2022 French heat wave. The three musicians are playing in a tower that’s 20 metres high (about 67 feet) with an ascending spiral staircase of 100 steps, with a 360° view. There are 11 tracks, with durations ranging from 1:14 to 7:06. There are muffled conversations and a car starts up outside. There are 37 bronze bells weighing 4.42 tons and a baton keyboard with 57 keys. The space is described as “cramped.” In these unusual conditions something remarkable happens. The result is music of tremendous grace, perhaps not overtly religious, but of a heightened lyric focus, certainly, drenched in the after-effects of enormous tuned bells. It’s insistently about resonance, whether it’s Gay’s voice, trumpet or electronics, the hammered resonant metal of the carillon or Niggenkemper’s bass. Something like “teeter-totter” sounds appear, percussion music made largely with the space itself. At one point there is rhythmic accompaniment that is likely a person ascending the 100 steps.
CD6: beat the odds (subran 006): music for 2 cellos, 2 contrabasses, amplifiers and motors. The strings of the instruments are hit by a lever. beat the odds might be the most machine-like string quartet music ever composed. Electric motors are mounted on the bridges of the two cellos and two basses, with sticks attached to the electric motors to create high-speed, high-pitched percussion sounds that are far more drum-like than string-like. From there, heavy amplification further transforms the sounds of the instruments. Varied compositional forms and the mixed bowing and drumming result in tracks sufficiently to invoke prehistoric reptiles, aerial invasion, a drum circle or a construction site complete with cement mixers and power saws, sometimes all of them in combination. It’s an extraordinary conclusion to a remarkable series of extended works.
© 2023 Stuart Broomer
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