#marginal frequency

[musicmakesyousmart]

Joda Clément & Mathieu Ruhlmann - Kindred

Marginal Frequency

2017

[musicmakesyousmart]

Grisha Shakhnes - ARCS

Marginal Frequency

2018

[dustedmagazine]

Michiko Ogawa — Junkan (2020) (Marginal Frequency)

Junkan (2020) by Michiko Ogawa

Junkan (2020) is the second album by Michiko Ogawa, a clarinetist, composer and researcher who is currently based in Berlin. She moved to Berlin following significant activity in Japan, where she played with Taku Sigimoto; the USA, where she earned a doctorate at University of California-San Diego; and Australia, where she presented work derived from her research into the life and music of Teiji Ito. 

It was in Berlin that Junkan (2020) took shape. When the city went on lockdown at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, she found herself with a plenty of opportunity to listen to her environment. Two pitches, A# and B, emerged from the sounds of her apartment block. Over time, she imagined harmonies that could work with or against them, and the composition was born. Near the year’s end, just as Omicron showed up to ruin everyone’s holidays, bass clarinetist Sam Dunscombe recorded two versions of the piece, each lasting a bit over half an hour. Both were performed by an octet comprising a who’s who of microtonally aware musicians from Berlin. Dunscombe, Ogawa, guitarist Fredrik Rasten, flautist Rebecca Lane, and string players Sarah Saviet, Catherine Lamb, Lucy Railton and Jonathan Helbron played on both editions, and then the two clarinetists overdubbed eight additional passes over the second.

Despite being inspired by the aural ambience of city living, this music brings to mind human-free, vistas. As its long tones coalesce and diverge, overtones ripple like a canopy of leafy foliage seen from above as it bends and shakes under the influence of gusting breezes. Just as one might look for patterns in the leaves, Junkan (2020) invites the listener to find whatever order or disorder they seek in the crosshatching and convergence of slowly bowed strings and patiently blown woodwinds. Attend to both performances back-to-back and the thickening textures induced by the second edition’s extra clarinets will conspire with your pattern-seeking brain layers of perception that disappear into each other like the infinite reflections of two mirrors facing each other in a dimly lit room. 

Bill Meyer

[dustedmagazine]

Alexander Garsden — Of Another (Duos 2018-2019) (Marginal Frequency)

MFCD K | Of Another (Duos 2018-2019) by Alexander Garsden

Gatefold sleeves are good for more than cleaning dope. They can also conceal communications from the artist to the listener, luring you further into the world they make with music and telling you things that decode a record’s sounds. They might just look inscrutably cool. Of Another sports an external image of branches bearing green fruit that might be more recognizable to people with an Antipodean horticultural background than they are to this writer. Open it up and you’ll find an image of one twig in closeup, with one fruit intact and another hollowed out. Since this is an album of acoustic guitar duets, one wonders which musician is whole and which has been gnawed by bugs? Does Garsden, like Derek Bailey so flippantly self-described years ago, consider himself to be so devoid of ideas that he needs to get them from another musician? Or is he suggesting that in a duo encounter, one musician must submit to being consumed in order for the cycle of musical life to continue? Think about it; you might prefer purchasing intact fruit at the grocery store, but any fruit that comes to you that way has been hijacked and misdirected from its evolutionarily designated task of seducing animals into enabling floral reproduction Unless, that is, you’re depositing those swallowed seeds where they’re likely to grow into new fruit trees. If so, your mom and the local cops might disapprove, but Mother Nature smiles upon you.

Wait, isn’t there a record to be discussed here? There is, and it’s a lovely one. Alexander Garsden is a guitarist (and composer, electronic musician and planner of experimental music events) from Melbourne, Australia. Since Australia is remote, it behooves its residents who are interested in unusual sounds to get out of town and make some connections, and this record appears to be the product of a creatively motivated walkabout. Each of its eight tracks is a duet, named for a city associated with the other guitarist, but not necessarily where they live now. The pieces bear names like “Tokyo 20,” which suggests that Garsden and his Japanese duet partner, Tetuzi Akiyama, recorded quite a few pieces that didn’t make it to the record. Stockholm is indubitably where David Stackenäs resides. But Melbourne? Maybe Julia Reidy lived there once, and maybe the tracks she plays on were recorded there, but she’s been based in Berlin for years. Anyway, if Garsden got to travel to make this record, the poor guy isn’t doing so in 2020; he’s spent chunks of the year confined to small subsections of his city. But at least he got to put out this a CD of music that’ll take you places. 

Geographical discussion probably doesn’t get you to the point of why you need to hear Of Another, but its gatefold picture might. Nowhere on the sleeve will you learn if the album’s music was improvised, composed or played in a way that accesses the virtues of both methods. Garsden’s not telling. Maybe, like a good writer, he prefers to show you what he wants you to know. While each of these duets places him in the company of one of the other guitarists, you have to listen closely to catch what he does. Garsden’s playing is like a mirror, reflecting the other player’s sounds in the listener’s direction.  The rippling, 12-string fingerings on “Melbourne 04” can’t come from someone other than Julia Reidy. But these duets don’t just spotlight her sound, they foreground her actual playing, which is becoming easier not to notice amidst the increasingly elaborate production of her solo albums. The intertwining, fractal shapes of “Tokyo 16” evoke images of a DNA strand bent upon expanding its slender bulk rather than reproducing some larger organism. Akiyama’s performances here take you to the reactive, non-boogying corner of his musical consciousness (Not that there’s anything wrong with boogying; here’s hoping that Akiyama someday cuts an album with David Nance). And “Stockholm 02” radiates the bright woodiness of Stackenäs’ sound, which you might already know from his work with Fred Lonberg-Holm or Tri-Dim. The tiny burst from each plucked string is as essential to his playing as the big, swelling sound is to Reidy’s and the changing constellation of sounds is to Akiyama’s. And Garsden? He’s the light that illuminates these qualities. So maybe he’s neither the whole fruit nor the chewed up one; he’s the guy pointing the camera. 

Bill Meyer

[specialistmorgenj]