Sunday, May 2, 2022, 7:39pm (partial listen to tracks 2 and 3 of 3)
So these two tracks are largely identical to the first one, which is a multiple-drumset and guitar-based wall of noise. The first track was a quartet and the group gets bigger and bigger as the tracks - all live recordings - progress, and I suspect that this album is a collection of recordings of the same "piece" played at different times and places. Upon closer inspection of the packaging, there are diagrams of the layout of the musicians for each track on the stage that was performed upon, leading me to think that maybe this was meant to be witnessed in concert rather than just heard, with the spatialization of the musicians perhaps allowing it to attain some sort of installation-y kind of vibe (this would also potentially explain/excuse the rather monotonous auditory content herein).
Well, for whatever reason, this is certainly not what I was expecting, but I do suspect - largely due to the wildly divergent credits from track to track - that this disc is largely a roundup of various OY offerings. And that's also not to say that I am not familiar with the more extreme ends of OY's output, into which this track slots very cleanly. It's a nearly unmoving block of very dense, chaotic, double-drumset/guitar/optron(?) insanity that is somewhat too muddy to illuminate its charms very well; left me pretty unmoved, but curious to see what the rest of the disc offers.
Welsh harpist Rhodri Davies first convened Common Objects in 2005, and you could say that it has evolved patiently between then and now. Once unfixed, the group’s line-up has settled upon six musicians (Davies, electric harp; Angharad Davies and Lina Lapelyte, violins; John Butcher, saxophones; Pat Thomas, electronics; Lee Patterson, amplified devices and processes). The players’ collective experience encompasses established and emergent classical music, electroacoustic improvisation, and electric and acoustic jazz. Common Objects’ performances have been freely improvised and guided by various unconventional scores, but the 2016 concert reproduced on this CD is the first time that the score was made up of objects.
They were by no means common objects. Butcher selected them from the collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum, an anthropological institution based in Oxford, England. Each of the four objects was made to contain animistic energy. The musicians aren’t believers, nor do they do anything so gauche as to try and create some sort of shamanic ritual in the objects’ presence. But they are all serious diviners of the spirit of the moment, tuned into each other and the space that contains them. It is large but crammed with display cases, and one choice that Common Objects has made is to avoid both the regularity and the density of the museum’s layout. The music develops organically from the opening scrapes of the two violins, adding machine-like churning and bird-like reed cries that test the space’s resonance. The timbral contrasts between dry wood, spit-dampened reeds and bumping electronic tones trace the outlines of a space in common flux. The musicians move carefully through that space, managing proximity with senses that most people don’t know they have, let alone how to use them. Is that magic guiding them, or a conscious effort to imagine how long-dead magic might once have motivated small cabal of believers? Whichever notion you choose, there’s no denying that this music casts a spell.
