Havergal Brian
Symphony no.7 in C major (1948)
Symphony no.16 (1960)
The Tinker’s Wedding (1948)
New Russian State Symphony Orchestra / Alexander Walker
Naxos 8.573959 [61’58”]
Producer Pavel Lavrenenkov
Engineers Aleksander Karasev, Gennady Trabantov
Recorded 16-19 January 2018 at Russian State Television and Radio Company KULTURA, Moscow
Written by Richard Whitehouse
What’s the story?
Naxos continues its traversal of the symphonies by Havergal Brian (1976-1972), once more with Alexander Walker and the New Russian State Symphony for two works as rank among the composer’s most impressive in this genre – plus one of his most appealing shorter pieces.
What’s the music like?
The Sixth and Seventh Symphonies saw Brian’s active return to composition after a hiatus of four years. Whereas the former is in a taut single movement, the Seventh Symphony is a four-movement work on a Brahmsian scale and its composer’s final such symphony. Inspired by the chapters of Goethe’s autobiography concerning his student years at Strasbourg, where he was never to return, the work charts a course from innocence to experience which might (as John Pickard surmises in his booklet note) extend to the degradation of Teutonic culture over the Nazi era. Walker has the measure of the out-going initial Allegro, not least its musing central episode, then points up the energy and extroversion of the scherzo. In its amalgam of intermezzo and Adagio, the third movement unfolds from fugitive restlessness to an anxious searching whose emotional depth is undercut by Walker’s relative swiftness, yet he brings due purposefulness to the Epilogue with its remorseless motion towards a coda whose bell-clad remoteness fairly encapsulates the ‘Once upon a time’ aura of intangibility at the heart of this ambivalent work.
Forward 12 years and the Sixteenth Symphony is the highlight of a group of one-movement such pieces where Brian wrestled with new possibilities of formal and expressive continuity. Here the overt rhetoric of its three predecessors is replaced with a tensile momentum which accumulates across its six sections. Walker draws due expectancy from its slow introduction, then finds brusque energy in the allegro and playful fantasy in those quixotic variations on a ceaselessly changing ‘ground bass’ that follow. The main slow episode evinces real nobility, and if the ensuing fugal galop undeniably taxes orchestral coordination, the closing section moves methodically though confidently towards a heady cadential QED as only Brian could have conceived. Absence of any concrete ‘programme’ only adds to this work’s fascination.
Opening this disc is the second of the ‘comedy overtures’ that span Brian’s creativity. Taking its cue from the play by J. M. Synge, The Tinker’s Wedding is a blueprint for its composer’s final years as it alternates hectic energy and pensive musing prior to a tersely decisive close.
Does it all work?
Yes. Brian may be an acquired taste, but his output contains numerous pieces of undoubted quality and the two symphonies featured here are, in their appreciably different ways, among his best. If the playing of his Russian players is intermittently less assured than that accorded Charles Mackerras in the Seventh (EMI/Warner) or Myer Fredman (Lyrita) in the Sixteenth, Walker is demonstrably his own man when it comes to an interpretative stance. Those who are new to Brian’s music will find this release starts them, qualitatively speaking, at the top.
Is it recommended?
Indeed. Sound is a little airless, but this is not to the detriment of the intricacy or dynamism of this music – with annotations that could not be more authoritative. Hopefully Walker and his orchestra will record the nine remaining Brian symphonies yet to be covered by Naxos.
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Ahead of his first foray into classical waters with Third Coast Percussion, Devonte Hynes – the man behind Blood Orange – releases a companion piece to last year’s Negro Swan album. It is a habit the producer has developed, making a set of ‘offcuts’ available to friends in the wake of a bigger release, but given that in his own words ‘I’m older now though, and life is unpredictable and terrifying’, he has made it available to the wider public.
What’s the music like?
Cool and compact, but emotional too. Hynes has always possessed the knack of expressing himself keenly through music that does not have to be loud or brash, and the level of Angel’s Pulse even drops to a murmur at times. In doing so it draws the listener in, through songs that never outstay their welcome. Of the 14 tracks here, only two are over three minutes in length.
Musically the mood is consistent with Negro Swan but has more room in its texture – which takes it closer to the 2016 album Freetown Sound. Cool soul and funk mix freely, with the odd hint of West Coast rock. Textures are dreamy but lyrics are on point.
Taking individual tracks, the sonorous speaking voice on Berlin comes from Ian Isiah, with Porches also contributing – as with Freetown Sound, the guests easily accommodated into the album. BennY RevivaL contributes an urgent rap on Seven Hours Pt.1, while Birmingham brings a flourish from vocalist Kelsey Lu. Meanwhile Toro y Moi brings a sense of yearning to Dark & Handsome, at which point the album behaves like a radio station, switching with background fuzz to Benzo, which evokes Hynes’ home city of New York through a soft, nocturnal sax. Baby Florence (Figure) crackles with a sudden momentum from its samba-like beat.
Some of the songs on Angel’s Pulse feel half finished, but the mixing effect links them seamlessly. If anything their shorter form makes it easier for the listener to get to their essence.
Does it all work?
Yes. While not as concentrated a listen as the Freetown Sound and Negro Swan albums, Angel’s Pulse does still hang together beautifully. There is perhaps room for the songs to have been further developed, but if anything this heightens their immediacy.
Is it recommended?
Yes – followers of Hynes and Blood Orange will lap it up, while looking forward with great intrigue to the Third Coast Percussion collaboration Fields, due for release on the Cedille label on October 11.
Paul Woolford, the man behind Special Request, is releasing just the four new albums this year. In his description they were ‘made in his underpants’, and represent a clear wish to make instinctive music that gets to the listener as quickly as possible. This no frills approach is all about making incisive dance music that cuts to the quick, losing none of its energy to post-production.
What’s the music like?
Woolford gets a thrilling blend of old and new in his music, and the refreshing lack of studio gloss keeps the music strong and vital. There is something here for house heads, drum and bass and techno lovers alike, for he has a very unique approach to beat making. Nothing is conventional, yet his rate for hitting the sweet spot is unerring.
The key element of his approach is a love for the use of riffs and sounds harking back to the late 1980s, with electronic dance music still in its infancy and full of thrills and spills
Vortex has the quicker cut and thrust of the two albums. Memory Lake cuts to the quick, getting its raw shots of adrenalin through a killer beat and hook. Ardkore Dolphin takes the same rhythmic cell and presents it in different, thrilling ways. Vortex 150 then typifies Woolford’s approach, with beats that strain at the leash and a primal intensity that reflects the need to dance while capturing the thrill of early hardcore discoveries. Fett is even quicker – 175 beats per minute to be precise – before a flurry of synths and rapid fire drums for A Gargantuan Melting Face Floating Effortlessly Through The Stratosphere. The brilliant title itself pays homage to The Orb, but the rhythms are about three times the speed!
The lo-fi Bedroom Tapes is a bit slower but has a wider sound perspective, impressing with its expansive structures. Panaflex Sunrise is an opening beauty, a singular loop channeling the spirit of early Aphex Twin releases with its softer beat. Despite not grabbing the listener by the scruff of the neck like he does on Vortex, Woolford still finds a fiercely singular voice. Xenopsin is the biggest track – nearly 12 minutes – but arguably the best too, spacing out time as the riffs turn over, backed by a solid four to the floor beat. Phosphorescence is also very fine, a beautifully hazy construction of techno that delivers power but has a softer heart.
Does it work?
Wholeheartedly. These are albums three and four under the Special Request moniker, and as with the first two Woolford packs an original punch in his music that can be breathtaking. In it he finds raw, untempered sounds, wiry melodies and beats that can’t take you anywhere else but the dancefloor.
There is something for everyone here, from the mottled sunrise moments of Bedroom Tapes to the out and out thrills of the Vortex faster tracks.
Are they recommended?
Both albums are unreservedly recommended – and with Offworld next up at the end of September, part three beckons for what will surely be a clean sweep of Special Request winners.
As Arcana discovered only the other week, Andy Bell is a musician with several strings to his bow. Many will know him as a founder member of Ride, the Oxford group popular in the early 1990s and enjoying a creative renaissance capped by new album This Is Not A Safe Place, released as this interview is being written. Others will recognise the Ride genesis but think of Bell more as a sometime member of Oasis – where he played bass guitar – and Beady Eye. Add to that Bell’s time as front man for Hurricane #1, at peak Britpop in the late 1990s, and you have a pretty formidable indie discography.
As it turns out, this is only part of the story, for Andy also makes music in a solo capacity, under the name of GLOK. Here the keyboards take over, and a love of Krautrock and other weird and wonderful electronica becomes clearer – as does the sense that here Bell is really able to indulge his full portfolio of styles.
Last week we had the chance to talk all things GLOK – and to ask Bell that now he’s been ‘outed’ if he intends to make it a more full time piece of work.
Arcana: When you started making music as GLOK, was it your intention to keep it private?
Andy Bell: Originally I was using the name to hide behind. I didn’t want people’s first experience of hearing it to be tied to a mental image of me, or what they thought I stood for. A side effect of this was that the tracks barely got noticed, or at least it felt that way. But in a way that was what I wanted. Dissident got added to a pretty big Spotify playlist and that was cool. But after that none of the other tracks did much.
At the time the tracks were signed to a label called Globe. This was a couple of years ago. I’m still signed to Globe, myself, as a composer, that’s the nature of that deal. GLOK was just one way of getting music out into the world really, but after a couple of years, the tracks were basically sitting dormant on iTunes and Spotify, until I got a call from Bytes about doing a physical release. There were 5 tunes out at the time, from a group of around 10 or so GLOK tunes which I’d made and had mastered for Globe. By that time it was no longer a secret that GLOK was me, I’d done a few remixes under that name including one for Ride. When Bytes got in touch Joe Clay told me that he loved Pulsing way before he knew it was me, which was really cool to hear.
When did you start to realise the potential of making your own music with synthesizers?
I bought a Yamaha CS-5 after Dave Sitek had used one in the studio with Beady Eye. That was because I saw how easy it was to use and what great sounds you could get with it, especially using it with guitar pedals. Dave had brought over a ton of gear with him to London and I ended up getting a lot of things he turned me on to, for example that was the first time I came into contact with the Eventide Space Reverb, which for me now is like a member of my family or something. It gradually spread from there. I got a Roland SH 101 and a couple of things from the Critter and Guitari range, a little bit of modular, apps on the iPad like the mellotron etc. Initially I was buying this stuff to augment the sound of songs that were still in guitar world. The catalyst for me to start to get my head into actually making electronic music was kind of a side effect of the Music recording software Logic going from version 9 to version X.
I had been using Logic 9 – by trial and error, after Jeff Wootton showed me the ropes. Jeff was horrified that I was making demo’s on Garage Band! He was like “You’re using kids’ software man. Here’s the grown-up Garage Band, you need to be using this”. So then I was stumbling around inside Logic 9 but able to get ideas down. Then 9 kind of became obsolete and the next version, X, was totally different. I was completely lost by it so signed up to learn Logic X at a place called Sub Bass Academy, near Waterloo. I spent six months inside Logic X and it was amazing. The course started with sampling and went from there. As soon as I learned to use the onboard sampler I was away. Just like when I learned the guitar, I started off re-making tracks I liked (Mr Fingers‘ Can You Feel It, Underworld Rez, and A Guy Called Gerald‘s Voodoo Ray) and then moved on to coming up with my own stuff. And I was getting help from them along the way. So basically after that six months, I was OK at sampling, synthesis, all the stuff I’d been getting interested in but didn’t really know. Logic became the way I made demos, and therefore, a lot of the time, the way I wrote songs.
Was it a leisure activity to start with, or did you always see a single / album release as part of it?
Leisure, for sure. I don’t feel like I have an actual ‘job’ ever, except maybe when I’m doing promotional stuff. It built up into quite a collection of music over a year or two, and then through conversations with Marc Robinson at Globe, he told me he’d like to put some of the tracks out. It wasn’t envisaged as a conventional album at the time. I think they did one track a month, for five months. But I kept on making GLOK tracks long after Globe stopped putting them out. OK, so most of them are half finished, but so were the first seven until Marc gave me a deadline!
Fully electronic music has become something I do equally as prolifically as guitar songs, and it’s never something which I start with a release, or even an end product in mind. What it comes down to, is I would much rather start a track than finish one. I’m lazy and on any given day I’ll just start about five ideas, name them, and forget about them. They could be electronic or guitar-y. I’m always finding tracks that I have zero memory of making. I love that. Some of them are even half decent.
Was it enjoyable keeping GLOK a secret, and has your approach to it changed at all now it’s out in the open?
Maybe I didn’t need to use another name at all, but that just made me more comfortable with it at the time. Nothing has changed about the way I make music since then.
What other music using synthesizers / keyboards do you admire?
Everything from The Beatles onwards and outwards. Psychedelia and Krautrock opened rock music up in the ‘60s and ‘70s and from that point there’s no huge need to categorise. But if we are talking pure electronic music, then for me the biggest influence is Mr Fingers. I love the home made feel of his records. There’s a direct line there to Voodoo Ray which is another of my favourites, I bought that on 12” when it came out. Recently I’ve heard Harald Grosskopf – he’s an artist I think I’m going to really love. But my taste is pretty broad and I think I’m not that unusual in that respect. That’s how people listen now I think.
How did you get to writing much longer pieces like Dissident, and when did you realise you could write much more substantial tracks while keeping the interest high?
Dissident was almost that long right from the first demo. I’d set up an arpeggiator and started playing chords over it with a softsynth, and in essence the track hasn’t changed that much since then. I hadn’t realised how long it was, I was just noodling around with it. I think the first version was about 12 minutes, and I repeated a couple of sections along the way, and it ended up around 20, which feels like its natural length.
Have you ever considered writing in a more classical form – and has classical played any part in your musical development so far?
I have never had any interest in classical music, but Loz Colbert did get me into Minimalism, which I think had a lot of influence in the rock world, that’s something I’d never heard about, and it blew my mind when I started connecting the dots. Steve Reich is the man, and I especially like Come Out and Piano Phase. Phases and Music for Eighteen Musicians are two albums of his I play a lot the whole way through. I’ve also been to see two Philip Glass operas, Satyagraha and Akhnaten – they are incredible. A couple of hours passes in what seems like 15 minutes! I’m still waiting for a chance to check out Einstein On The Beach.
Do you think you’d like to take GLOK out as a live concern?
Yes, I’d like to but I have no idea how it would work. There’s a lot of scope for what a GLOK live thing could be, from a DJ set with bells on, all the way to a full live band. I don’t think it is going to happen anytime soon. I’m about to go around the world with Ride.
In terms of songwriting, how would you summarise the contributions you’ve made as a band member to Ride, Hurricane #1, Oasis and Beady Eye?
All those songs, even the GLOK ones, all come from the same source. There’s no rule as to the end point, whatever the starting point has been. I am quite instinctive and I don’t always know when I’ve written a really good, or really bad song. I’ve put out a few of both. It’s hard to tell at the time, weirdly. I know when a song feels special to me, but often those particular songs don’t mean much to anybody else. The ones people really like are normally the ones that took the shortest time to write. Those ones can feel quite throwaway to me until time passes and I can look back and see where the quality really was. I think it’s normal to associate effort with quality but it’s not always that way at all.
On the new Ride album (the band photographed above), the approach allows for more electronics. Was that your input?
No, not at all. I use bits and pieces in places. But I think Steve Queralt is the one whose demos are the most full of synths. When Erol Alkan came on board, I felt the door was open for us to make a fully electronic album. It’s still open. It would be cool to do. But Erol plugged into the band element. I think that was the braver move in the circumstances, and the better one for the big picture of the band.
It must be gratifying to see how Ride have developed over the years.
It’s great, it still feels like we have so much to do. I just mentioned an electronic Ride album. But a full on, “Daydream Nation” kind of Ride album is something I think we could do. I think that could be incredible. To go in and just turn up the guitars, jam out on open tunings, do some real long freeform songs, make like a mid 70’s Neil Young or late 80’s Sonic Youth album, would be fantastic.
What are your plans for the rest of the year – and do you have many beyond that?
The Ride tour will take us through into the middle of next year. But alongside that there are various other things I’ve been working on. GLOK is one of them, but there are a few other things in the pipeline as well.
Finally, could you select a Ride song (or any other) that you’ve had a big hand in that you’re particularly satisfied with?
Cool Your Boots is one of my all time favourite Ride records, mainly because of the last two minutes.
The Glok album Dissident is out now on Bytes…while the new Ride album This Is Not A Safe Place is newly available on Wichita Recordings. Both can be heard below on Spotify:
The chances are that if you haven’t heard of Blanck Mass before, you will have heard his music. It is the solo project of Benjamin John Power, a founding member of the duo Fuck Buttons, purveyors of drone – and whose music featured heavily in Danny Boyle’s creation to mark the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics in London. This is Power’s fifth album under the alias.
What’s the music like?
High on adrenalin. When you first hear Animated Violence Mild the sheer force of the wall of sound could well take your breath away. There is so much white noise and percussion, with riffs thrown at the listener like blocks of concrete, that the feeling of overload early on.
Big, bold rhythms cut their way to the front of tracks like Death Drop, while House vs. House flirts with flash metal before panning out into huge textures, like the end credits on an incredibly bloody movie. There is a terrific release of energy here for sure, and tracks like Hush Money have plenty of thrills, but it soon becomes overwhelming. Power provides some very welcome respite with Creature / West Fuqua, cutting from the wall of distortion to the more exotic thrum of the harp.
This is a key moment on the album, as it keys up the brilliant and euphoric No Dice (above), another ‘end credits’ contender, before another thrash fest on the closing Wings Of Hate. To borrow a sporting adage, Power leaves nothing on the pitch in his quest for a big, big sound!
Does it all work?
Sporadically. There are many thrilling moments on this album but several of the tracks have such a massive wall of noise that they sweep through the listener like a sonic tsunami, leaving some of their best bits behind.
Is it recommended?
Yes but not to those of a nervous disposition! Nor would it be an immediate recommendation for newcomers to Power’s work. They might be better off beginning with 2015’s Dumb Flesh, and approaching this from a bit of a distance. Power makes spectacular music here, and could never be accused of being a shrinking violet, but Animated Violence Mild is the musical equivalent of too much caffeine!
