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| Avant-garde main man … Edgard Varèse. Photograph: Katherine Young/Getty Images |
The raw material of NYC-based composer William Basinski’s work is the humble tape loop, which in the case of his famed Disintegration Loops series – completed on the morning of 11 September 2001 – came to symbolise something concrete being shredded to dust as the tape loops unwound and collapsed towards static and noise. Basinski’s latest music comes as a pair. First up is Cascade, in which a pirouetting piano phrase loops through space with the slow-motion elegance and purposeful meander of a fish curving around its bowl.
Then The Deluge. The loop introduced in Cascade is itself looped through what are described as “feedback loops of different lengths”, a process that generates harmonic overtones that loom like a Hitchcock staircase, before evaporating towards silence.
Clarinettist and composer Jürg Frey is affiliated with the Wandelweiser group, a network of composers and performers thinking through the consequences of John Cage’s apparent silence, and what to do next. Petit Fragment de Paysage is a characteristically delicate piece, scored for violin (Mira Benjamin) and viola (Emma Richards), crawling slower than clock time, a procession of cracking drones and overlapping monotones that aim to draw your ears into the corporeal splendour of undiluted sound.
One from the archives, included now to flag up an essential new release on Mode Records: mid-1960s documentaries about Edgard Varèse and Karlheinz Stockhausen made by the composer Luc Ferrari (in collaboration with director Gérard Patris), which appear on DVD with English subtitles for the first time. The Varèse documentary had meant to include an interview with the great man himself, and his death, only a few weeks before filming started, lends an elegiac air to proceedings as the likes of Xenakis, Boulez and Marcel Duchamp pay tribute.
Ferrari’s own work cut across the usual boundaries: electronics, field recording, improvisation and tightly controlled chamber-pieces all part of his creative catchment zone. In 2003, he collaborated with the Japanese composer and free improviser Otomo Yoshihide, running a ragbag of sources on CD – chucks of Beethoven slamming into raw grooves – into the mania of Yoshihide’s turntablism. A combustible fusion resulted, the high-velocity churning of physical material overlaid by fractious and unpredictable beats.
Ten years on, here’s Yoshihide with the Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, carving a meticulously detailed monolith out from inchoate scrapings and strummed rustlings. This duologue finds their sounds colliding, but also finding common cause – Nilssen-Love’s viciously rolling snare fusing against Yoshihide’s hollering guitar.
Will Montgomery is a London-based writer and sound artist, and his new album The Crystal at the Lips neatly scoops up ideas introduced earlier in this column. Two scores by the Wandelweiser composer Manfred Werder – text scores, words as provocations to make sounds – are overlaid, Werder’s instructions leading Montgomery to mix and juxtapose field recordings. Elsewhere, Montgomery filters out the ambient backdrop, leaving loops of feedback underneath.
