Catherine Lamb and Johnny Chang — Viola Torros (Another Timbre)
Viola Torres is a work of mystification. According to an interview on the Another Timbre website, it grew out of a recurring conversation between Berlin-based violists and composers Catherine Lamb and Johnny Chang about the work of a composer named Viola Torros. The musicians share an insider’s skepticism about core assumptions and practices of classical music. Both believe in giving musicians the opportunity to provide not just instrumental skill but creative input. While little is known of Torros beyond reports that she was born in the Indus valley during late Vedic age (c. 500 BC) and was sighted in different locations across India, Europe, and points in between, Lamb and Chang grew their discussion into a body of work that has been recorded for this album and performed around Europe and the United Kingdom.
The record comprises two CDs. The first features two “V.T. Augmentations,” each played by the two violists, a vocal trio, and Bryan Eubanks, who is credited with “resonances.” Each piece lasts about two-thirds of an hour, during which the violists switch off the roles of patiently unspooling melodies that stand somewhere between Indian and Western classical traditions on ground as solid as the home turf in the movie Solaris, or sympathetically adorning said melodies. Wordless vocals and outdoor sounds fade in and out behind the strings, giving one the feeling of being randomly beamed from church onto a train platform by a wonky Star Trek transporter.
The second disc includes a half hour-long piece by Chang, which was recorded in Tokyo with the Suidobashi Chamber Ensemble, and a longer one by Lamb that is played by a quartet that includes the two violists, cellist Derek Shirley, and Andrea Neumann on “secondary rainbow synthesizer.” The simple theme of Chang’s “Citaric Melodies III” proves to be a sturdy framework for a continuously shifting array of tones that bleed into one another, and then filter prismatically before mixing it up again. Lamb’s “Prisma Interius VI (for v.t.)” is more melodically elaborate than Chang’s piece, but likewise uses its recognizable structures as suspension points for sounds in a continuous state of blurring. As on “V.T. Augmentations,” outdoor sounds leak into the music. But this time the strings periodically yield the field to the rumbling of passing trucks, the chatter of passersby, and swelling electronic tones. It’s simultaneously lovely and quite disorienting.
By now the alert reader has likely started searching for information about Torros and the musicians to try and understand just what they’re reading and hearing. The easy part is learning the explanation of the workings of Eubanks’ so-called synthesizer, which is actually a system of microphones and filters. Tracking down Torros is harder. They will find that despite having been born 2500 years ago, Torros has a page on the Wandelweiser website alongside otherwise still-breathing composers like Antoine Beuger and Michael Pisaro. They will further find that beyond that page, the only references to Torros on the web involve discussions of this album or live performances by Chang and Lamb. What to make of this? Are Lamb and Chang musical archaeologists, unearthing the work of a forgotten female artist of antiquity? Or are they playing out a fiction beyond prankdom, using it to turn their shared musical pursuits into an invitation to think about just why we don’t read much about excluded and suppressed sectors of the human population, even though that population must have had just as high a proportion of people capable of creative thought and action as contemporary humanity? Well, what do you make of this?
