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.
