Not many producers could come back with an electronic music album 19 years after the last one. Yet that is exactly what Charles Webster has done with Decision Time, ‘following up’ his widely acclaimed 2001 opus Born On The 24th July. Webster is very highly respected in dance music circles of course – he learned his trade as an engineer with Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson, then moved to San Francisco in the 1990s and recorded under the pseudonym Presence as well as his own name.
Decision Time, as with the previous album, is curated by Webster but features an array of vocal talent, from established dance music royalty Shara Nelson and Terra Deva to South African talent Sio, Thandi Draai and Sipho.
What’s the music like?
Classy. Very little would seem to have changed for Webster in two decades of writing, which is of course an extremely good thing. Webster writes music of real feeling but with meticulously detailed production, so he can create a smoky atmosphere through deep house or more urban soul, brought to life by the chosen vocalist.
Shara Nelson’s guest turn, This Is Real, is heat soaked and emotive, while Sio’s second track Love Lives has a wide open production with intimate vocals. This is a trick Webster manages on several occasions, including Secrets Held, an atmospheric piece of soul where vocalist Emilie Chick draws the ear in.
It is in the deep house tracks where he really plays the winning cards though, the shuffling beats of I Wonder Why twinned with evocative, spacious keyboards, and the tougher beat of Music given a lovely wide perspective before Thandi Draai’s excellent vocal comes in. Webster uses an accordion sound in the middle which works beautifully.
Closing the album are two contributions from Ingrid Chavez, The Spell and The Second Spell. Chavez wrote the spoken word element of Madonna’s Justify My Love, and she appears with Burial, who gets a rare co-production credit on the second of a pair of pieces that crackle with atmosphere. If anything, Chavez’ vocals are better here than with Madonna!
Does it all work?
Very much so. Webster is still a master of creating vivid scenes with his music, be they in smoky, street-based soul or in hot weather deep house music. His use of orchestration is sublime, as is his knack of pacing in the music.
Is it recommended?
Heartily. It has made me revisit the older releases I have from Webster in my collection – and if you’re already a convert then you will need no persuading to buy. If the name Charles Webster is new to you, though, make sure you waste no time getting acquainted with his sublime music!
This is the second collaboration on the Glacial Movements label between Chihei Hatakeyama and Dirk Serries, a follow-up of sorts to their album The Storm Of Silence in 2016. Like that release, Black Frost has four tracks and runs for just over 40 minutes, expanding their already widescreen approach of guitars and electronics.
Chihei Hatakeyama is a musician and sound artist currently living on the edge of Tokyo, and has many releases under his belt both as a solo artist and as part of the duo Opitope, with Tomoyoshi Date. Dirk Serries, meanwhile, is an experienced ambient artist based in Belgium who has built up an impressive CV of collaborations through work on an ongoing Microphonics series.
What’s the music like?
Simple – but that word should not be taken lightly. It is simple in the sense that the music is very simple to listen to. Each track largely hangs on a specific pitch, and no effort is required on the part of the listener to reach a meditative calm. In fact the less effort made, the more effective the ambience is. And yet, if the ear moves in for a closer take, the layers and subtle oscillations / variations reveal themselves, and the 40 minutes can be seen as a single unit, one gigantic four-part chord progression.
The textures are wonderfully airy and cool, polar in their chilled temperature but with a hazy warmth too. In terms of colour the music has sharper outlines and more piercing tones than the blue wisps of The Storm Of Silence – hence the dark overtones of the cover.
Those dark colours become more evident in third track Breen, which gives off an icy residue, but they don’t take root as such – and Frossen Luft closes out the quartet with more drawn-out pitches which eventually disappear into the middle distance.
Does it all work?
Yes. As anyone familiar with Glacial Movements releases will know, the ambience is of the deeply immersive kind, ideal for the end of a working day, the beginning of a new one, or an antidote to the fast and worrisome pace of life we are faced with from time to time.
Is it recommended?
For sure. Anyone enjoying previous music from this source will not need further encouragement, for Black Frost ends up as the ideal complement to The Storm Of Silence. It may be darker in countenance but it still ends up in the same, contemplative space.
On an autumnal day, Arcana has time with composer Augusta Read Thomas, known affectionately as ‘Gusty’ to her friends. The nickname is more than appropriate, since Gusty is speaking to us from her Chicago home. In a year that has been testing at best, she has taken the time to talk through her new album The Auditions, released by Nimbus in October. The collection proves an ideal introduction to her music, including as it does pieces for brass quintet, carillons and a ballet score for ensemble, The Auditions – of which more later.
Our interview subject is bubbly, engaging and intensely focused – rather like her music. The bubbly aspect is in part related to the recently announced result of the US presidential election. “The year has been so out of body, as we both know in lots of ways, but I’m so happy about Biden and Harris. Then we hear about Pfizer and the vaccines, and as such I feel better. In Chicago we’ve been having record temperatures, and it’s been 75 degrees, like a July day! It has been perfectly sunny, day after day after day, the best November weather I can remember in 30 years, which is definitely a bonus. Right now it’s insanely beautiful outside!”
Is her work as a composer affected by the weather? “Yes, I think so – not so directly as writing dark music on a rainy day, but I do feel that the sun is really a giver of energy. I mean that globally, over a lifetime, not a day-to-day thing. There is energy from the sun that I feel. I don’t know how it translates into the music, but it is a real feeling in my body. For instance, sometimes in my little apartment there is a slant of sun that comes through and I’ll move my chair to sit in it. It feels so beautiful to be having that sunlight and then the slant is moving, so you move the chair a little bit. Then it goes beyond the window, but I will gravitate to sunlight!” The Auditions release encounters different forms of light as you journey through it. “Absolutely. I think that nature is really a great teacher. If you’re going to write a piece of music, you should just look at a tree, and it will tell you a lot. Look at the snowflakes and all the differences in their swirls, then a flower, or a garden – or even DNA, the way that cells reproduce; the ocean. I’ve been telling my students this for decades – look outside, there’s a great teacher right there in the window. It’s really true. If you were to go to my website and just read titles of my works on the alphabetical index, a lot of them are to do with the sun, the moon, nature or spirituality. It is the perfume of my whole catalogue. This CD has evocations of light, or ripple effects like those in the ocean. It is like the caprice of birds, and their beauty – the difference between hummingbirds, flying from the north all the way to the south, and the majesty of the swans.”
We move on to discuss the ballet itself. The Auditions is the idea of moving from this other spiritual space, which is the arcs nos. 1,3, 5 and 7 of the auditions, and then these very earthy, playful jazzy bits. It is like going from the cosmos down to the earth and then back up in the ending. You definitely feel the rise in those arcs. The ballet is modelled on the instrumentation used by Copland’s Appalachian Spring. “It was the 75th anniversary of Appalachian Spring”, she confirms, “and the commission was for an anniversary ballet, with the Martha Graham Dance Company set and costumes, which was amazing. Her choreography for Appalachian Spring was very stylized and of its time – a period piece which was wonderful and absolutely fabulous. Then there was an intermission and then The Auditions. I had to use more or less the same instrumentation, and I added the percussion, a trombone, and a saxophone, so that when you got to my piece it was like smelling a different kind of like world right away. The dance company has many bookings for the show with the two together, but of course they all got postponed. They are touring the show though.”
The list of composers commissioned by the Martha Graham Dance Company is a roll call of some of the 20th century’s finest. “Martha Graham really had a tradition of working with living composers”, she says, “and some great works exist in repertoire because of it. I feel really fortunate to have been receiving this commission. I spent a year on the piece – it’s so detailed, nuanced and sculpted in terms of the form. I worked really closely with the choreographer. In parentheses, there’s a broadcast going out to New York on Sunday night. One of them is going up on my website today, so a lot of people will be able to actually see what the dancing was like. I love it, and wish I could send it over!”
That must be a boon in these times where performances have been scarce or even non-existent. “Absolutely”, she agrees. “One of the other pieces on the disc is Plea For Peace, and there is a version where the solo is played by flute, trumpet and violin. That version just aired on 55 television stations all over the country! That’s a big deal in America, to have things out on the television, but in a pandemic it’s just golden.”
Read Thomas studied with two figureheads of 20th century classical music, Oliver Knussen and Pierre Boulez. “I believe that Oliver Knussen is an ‘A’ list composer”, she says affectionately. “I would put Chopin and Debussy and Ravel on that list, all the greats. I want to say that as loud as possible and I also think, amazingly, he was a great conductor and teacher – he was unbelievable. All of that stems from the central core of being a great musician. Very few people are both – you have some conductors who compose OK, and then you have some composers who conduct, but he was both.”
She fondly remembers their meeting. “When I was in second year college in America, I would have been 21-22 say, he heard a bunch of my music. He invited me to be a fellow at Tanglewood, which in America is a very big deal. So, I was at least ten years younger than the other fellows. We would go through my scores and we would sing the lines, and he taught me a lot about nuance and form and when he was very detailed. Then he brought me back for a second year at Tanglewood, because normally you’re only allowed to go once, and then a third year. I learned a lot from him, and then we continued our friendship. I commissioned his piece Requiem: Songs For Sue, and I brought him to the Chicago Symphony. I have a beautiful score he wrote to me and we would share CDs of people’s music. He did my Helios Choros with the Cleveland Orchestra and also the National Symphony, and he brought my piece In My Sky At Twilight to the Queen Elizabeth Hall with the London Sinfonietta. He just supported me over all those years, and in my little modest way I tried to support him too. We could speak on the phone for a long time about pieces of music. It was a friendship, but I do consider my teacher because in the time I had with him, he taught me a lot but I learned a lot from his music. I studied his music and I teach it too. He was just a great artist.”
Having been fortunate to see Knussen in concert at the Proms, with his visionary programming, it was clear how music was a sharing experience for him. “Totally”, she agrees. “Towards the end of his life, when he did the Scriabin Poem of Ecstasy, he called me up and said, ‘You’ve got to hear this!’ It had all the extra players and stuff, so of course I listened and then I listened again. And then after a step I listened again to that Prom. At the end he did the Piano Concerto by Phil Cashian. For many summers I taught at Tanglewood, and he was a frequent guest. A great, great person.”
Of Boulez, Read Thomas is similarly enthusiastic. “The Chicago Symphony invited me to be their composer in residence, and that came about because Boulez and Barenboim reportedly liked my music. I was young, and it was in the mid-1990s. I was 32 or something like that. Just before that I was commissioned to write a piece, called Words Of The Sea. It’s a four movement piece for orchestra, and it’s easy to find the audio of it. I sent in my manuscript on huge pieces of paper and rolled it, and Xeroxed it, rolled it into the tube and sent it off. I got a call saying they had sent it to Boulez with about twelve other pieces. Then about a month later they called up and said ‘Out of a pile of 12 he’s only going to play one…but it’s yours!’”
Boulez conducted the world premiere of Words Of The Sea, and the two met over the manuscript. “It was a great premiere”, she recalls, “and then that night we had this dinner party with the orchestra, and he turned to me and said he would like to commission another piece. So I did a piece called Orbital Beacons. He was so generous, like he bothered to look at my piece and program it, and it was around this that they invited me to be a composer in residence. He nominated me for a prize for the Siemens Foundation, which I won. It is a generous prize! Then he did the premiere of In My Sky At Twilight, and recorded it as well as taking it to Lucerne. There were lots of different projects.”
Read Thomas’ stories are given with great affection and gratitude. “What I liked about him, and also Knussen, is that they would play my tempos. They were both so precise. I remember with Boulez there was one little thing with In My Sky At Twilight, and he said, ‘I think you have the oboe as mezzo forte there, I think it should be mezzo piano.’ I looked, and said, ‘I think you’re right. So the whole group is sitting there and I remember he had this little box with his pens, so he went into his pen box and opened it, looked around and then he took out the red little red pencil. Then he went on to the score and crossed it out and changed it to mezzo piano. It was very precise, and all about getting it right. The players loved him. They played perfectly and with such artistry. It was a teeny change but it was reflective of the fact that my scores are so detailed.” Knussen’s operating method were not too dissimilar. “Olly was also very precise. I remember when we did In My Sky At Twilight at the South Bank Centre, I said to him, ‘Ollie, it feels too slow – can we keep it going so many bars?’ He looked at me and said, ‘Let me think about it.’ Then, at the show, he did it slower! He came up to me afterward, and said ‘I did it slower! You see, it really works!’ He went with the musicality, and the harmonic rhythm of things.”
Moving back to The Auditions, we discuss the programming of the CD release itself. Was it tricky to get in the right order? “You’re absolutely right. I sat with the engineer and we tried it in lots of different ways. We decided to start with the brass quintet because it’s such a good performance, and it’s very hard! They make it sound easy, but it’s tricky – and it just blasts out of the machine. I’ve been listening to jazz my whole life, so while I am a classical composer, I speak a lot about jazz and my process is very full of improvisations and so forth. What I like about that is starting with be-bop. When you put it in a brass quintet, it’s like, ‘What’s going on?’ You know, there’s no other brass quintet that sounds like that piece, there are no folksong arrangements or church chorales. It’s pure protein in terms of material, a bite size thing that shows lots of different sides of me. The chords are jazz chords, but end up sounding like Stravinsky or Messiaen in this context, like Bebop meets Ravel.”
The next piece presents a contrast. “We thought after the intensity of that to go for the intimacy of Plea For Peace. It’s a beautiful recording, made by Chicago Symphony Orchestra members. You go into this other world, and for the contrast that seemed to be a good place to put that reflection.”
“It’s Ripple Effects next!” she says excitedly. This is a piece for 72 bells, and Renske Vrolijk’s wonderful picture above should be examined when listening to the piece, where each player is clambering over one another to get all the notes played in the final chord. “Some of those bells wouldn’t fit in my room!” she laughs. “One of the interesting things about this piece is that most carillon players play solo. They climb all the way up the tower and they sit there alone, they don’t see their audience, and by the time they get down whoever heard them as walked away. It’s very lonely, and there’s not much repertoire that’s not for solo carillon. Also, a lot of the repertoire is arrangements of a chorale or a song or something. What was really interesting to me was that the first version brought all those people together. The humanity made it very special for that instrument. The two player version is on this recording. It’s tricky, they’re going non-stop with their feet and hands. It multiplies in a way, it sounds like an orchestra in the way it goes, because of the way the bells ring. It’s such an interesting sound world, and again, like the brass quintet, there is no piece that sounds like that – it’s very singular in the carillon repertoire.”
While these pieces are for very different instrumental forces, Read Thomas notes the importance of a connecting thread. “I try to imbue all my pieces with the ‘Gusty’ personality, so if you hear a piece of mine you’re not going to say, ‘Oh well, that sounded like warmed-over minimalism, or retro movie music, or spectralism layer three. There are no categories, it’s just my music. With Plea For Peace, what’s interesting about that piece is it’s just a crescendo, but when you use a text, like post-Hiroshima, or an ancient poet, or a political figure, it narrows. When you make it just a vocalise, the piece means the same in South Korea as it does in North Korea, and as it does in Africa, Azerbaijan or Kansas. That was a big decision, to make it a vocalise, but I think it cuts so much deeper. It feels risky to do it, but in the deepest human way it is like a cry from the heart. While that piece is very total, I still think of it as very singular.”
The Auditions roll-call continues with Two Thoughts About The Piano, with Read Thomas effusive about her soloist. “Daniel Pesca was fabulous. His technical skills are outrageous, but he’s an artist, he sculpts the form as crescendos, and also the repeated notes are hard. He really did a great job. I appreciate his touch.” That is followed by Selene, arranged for percussion quartet and winds. “This is an arrangement that Cliff Colnot made”, says Read Thomas. “He took the string parts and put them in the winds, but the percussion parts are identical. I do think it works, there are certain things like when you get those bass clarinet and bassoons, it’s such a cool colour. I think it’s a very successful arrangement; the credit for it should go to him for the wind parts.”
From vivid experience, Read Thomas’s music consistently creates a picture in the listener’s mind. “One of the things that’s also really interesting to me in my practice and life, is how much, for example, Johann Sebastian Bach can fit into two minutes. If you take one movement of The Well Tempered Clavier, one of the Preludes and one of the Fugues – it’s two minutes, but there is a whole universe there. It starts and there’s just not a note out of place. I’ve really taken that to heart in my music, like the first movement of the Brass Quintet – four minutes is it, that’s all you need to paint the picture. We are matching the material to the duration, and to look at Bach’s Goldberg Variations, some of those movements are less than a minute, but there’s a whole universe there. I guess if I had to summarise, generally I’m a poet and not a novelist. I write shorter pieces with every word in place, every dash, every thought, and every line break to use a poetry metaphor, every adjective too. It’s only four minutes but that really interests me. This CD in a way brings out the poet side.”
The same tenets apply with music of longer duration. “The Auditions is a longer piece, but it still breaks down into much shorter sections”, she explain. “It is a kind of pure, protein poetry. You have to edit and sculpt move the comma, so to speak. I really believe that form conserves energy, and I say that to my students all the time. It’s three words but they’re very important. If you have the material and form that are allied, a four minute piece – like Plea For Peace – projects out to a universal statement that is 20 minutes, but you say it in a very short time. That kind of craft, for lack of a better word, I learned from Oliver Knussen. He was a miniaturist also, and so was Boulez. My main model would be Bach but those other two were the same.”
Our conversation pans out to consider the past year and all its challenges. Has it been difficult a a composer? “I will answer that in two layers, if you don’t mind”, she says thoughtfully. “The first layer is that I’m very mindful that we have a lot of people on this planet without shelter, water, healthcare and food, and so on. Also, in my opinion, the systemic racism is outrageous and should have been set right centuries ago. I would like to say loud and clear, that black lives matter. There is a whole social conscience side, and it is important to state that before I say number two, because they are very much interlinked. I think that when we look back in 10 years of what was created in COVID, there is going to be a burst of creativity, which is great. For me, typically, I travel every week. For 200 days a year I’m just zooming around all the time, and I’ve been doing that for 25 years. Then, all of a sudden, I stopped, and when I was cancelling travel and hotels I was thinking, ‘how did I do this?!’ To be honest with you I have been writing, non-stop, and have had enormous focus. It has been a huge boon. I’ve also continued with online teaching, so it has been really busy. I can’t wait to share what I’ve just made with people.” It is reassuring to hear a positive benefit to the imposed isolation, but not surprising when you consider the creativity such adversity can often inspire. “It is, but for me it’s not the adversity, because I’m really trying to help in whatever way I can. For 30 years I wish there was more than 24 hours in a day, and I typically work like 16 hours a day because I like to. I like to get at least eight or nine hours’ composing and then maybe five hours of teaching and then citizenship work. I think after this, with the whole work / home / travel thing, I think a lot will change for big corporations, and for artists. We realise now that certain things really can be done.”
Finally, I have to ask about the origins of Gusty’s nickname. She smiles warmly. “I have been called that since I was a little girl, because we had ten kids in the family and I was the tenth. Since I’ve been about two it was always my name. Then, as my life developed, then it seemed better for the public to have my formal name, which was fine given name at birth. So we just ended up using that. By coincidence the initials are A-R-T. It just fell into place!”
Augusta Read Thomas’s new release The Auditions is available on Nimbus Records. To listen to clips and for purchasing options, visit the Wyastone website. The composer’s own website contains a great deal of information behind the music, with multimedia and details of future performances. To read more, click here
Copenhagen trio WhoMadeWho are an established and much-loved force in electronic music, bringing together their various backgrounds of rock, jazz and dance to a project that is always interesting to chart and invigorating to listen to.
Synchronicity suggests more of a jazz influence, and indeed it is there in the idea that each track should be a collaboration with one of the many artists they have rubbed shoulders with along the way. It is their first album for Kompakt in eight years, and includes staples of the label Michael Mayer and Robag Wruhme, part of a guest list also including Axel Boman and Frank Wiedemann.
What’s the music like?
Although it is a set of collaborations, Synchronicity is carefully planned and structured, making a coherent album that works really well from start to finish. Like a DJ set it has a measured beginning, working through Frank Wiedemann’s collaboration Dream Hoarding to hit the groove with Sainte Vie in Hibernation.
There are some really excellent tracks here, from the moody and atmospheric Oblivion, with Mano Le Tough, to the strutting groove of Hamstring with Michael Mayer and the broken beat of Peter Pan Me, another Wiedemann co-write. The slinky undercarriage of Twenty Tears, with Rebolledo, is notable, as is the slightly dubby Anywhere In The World, a shimmering delight in the company of Axel Boman. To illustrate the variety on the album, the preceding Shadow Of Doubt, with Adana Twins, has a lovely open air twang to its guitar, while the scoring for the strings in Cecil – with Echonomist – is sublime.
Does it all work?
Yes. WhoMadeWho work economically, so their percussion is never crowded but still hits the right mark – and their vocals are on point too. Synchronicity could easily lose its emotive punch given the number of people involved, but that doesn’t happen at any point.
Is it recommended?
Yes. The Copenhagen trio are still not as well known as they should be, despite the love they get in electronic music circles, and this release really should propel them onto the playlists of anyone looking for something switched on and new. A really excellent album.
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You can listen to clips of Synchronicity and purchase on LP, CD or download at the Kompakt website
Deutsche Elektronische Musik has proved to be an enterprising series from Soul Jazz Records, with its packaging proving to be every bit as colourful and quirky as the music it presents. While the mention of Krautrock will make readers think of bands such as Can, Neu! and Popol Vuh, the crate diggers at Soul Jazz present some of the lesser names alongside these luminaries.
It proved an effective formula on the first three volumes, each offering a double album’s-worth of treats, and the fourth looks set to offer similar rewards.
What’s the music like?
A great deal of fun. One of the great things about this set of tracks is the feeling that the rules have been pushed to one side. Anything goes, and as a result the variety of grooves, colours, riffs and moods range far and wide.
To offer a few highlights, Agitation Free offer a lovely bit of pastoral cheerfulness with Laila, Pt. II, a mood which could also be levelled at Between’s Triumphzug Kaiser Maximilian I. Can’s I’m So Green is typically excellent, with a shuffling groove, while Michael Rother’s Flammende Herzen expands really nicely from a dreamy interlude to a more driven groove.
My Strand-Eyed Girl from Virus is very Doorsy, with that late 1960s psychedelia feel, and E.Mak impress with their more modern sounding Tanz In Den Himmel, and its hazy block chords. On the stranger side of the fence sit the German psychedelic band Kalacakra, with a long, drone-led ritual of goblin like voices. Meanwhile Roedelius offers a nice, woozy instrumental in the beatless Halmharfe – the lack of beats immediately compensated by Dzyan’s descriptive drum workout Dragonsong.
Finally Günter Schickert applies a really excellent beat and guitar panning for Suleika, a track which has already found favour with the likes of Richard Fearless, then Witthüser & Westrupp apply some dreamy meandering for Schöpfung (1. Mose 1), before it grows into a more athletic wig-out.
Does it all work?
Not all of it will be according to taste, but that is part of the appeal with this series – Soul Jazz include so many different free standing styles that it would be almost impossible to like them all. This instalment is noticeably more relaxed in its grooves than the last, but the musical positivity is still ever-present.
Is it recommended?
Wholeheartedly. If like me you already owned the first three volumes of this excellent series, there is no need to hesitate about the possibility of adding a fourth. It is another history lesson cum late night party soundtrack.
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You can hear clips from the compilation and purchase from the Soul Jazz shop, Sounds Of The Universe
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