blog.Crónica

The press release for this is very lengthy, even when it doubles with information to be found on the cover of the CD. There is also some information on the composer, but it leaves out what I know him best for. I am sure for him that’s ancient (or perhaps irrelevant) history, but maybe it is for readers a few lines to connect. Martijn Tellinga I know best from the time we spend in an office together, working for Staalplaat, and him presenting lots of music he created as Boca Raton, one of which I even released. Tellinga also had his own label, Stichting Mixer, which acted as a publishing house for cross-over between beat oriented music and musique concrete. Tellinga later on went to the Institute for Sonology in The Hague and established himself as a serious composer of new music, dividing time between Amsterdam and Beijing. His current work, and I didn’t hear any of his work since ten years or so, is all about composing and performing ‘musical proposals and acoustical situations’, ‘rendering an on-going meditation on the rudimentary condition of the sonic arts’. It is ‘drawn from a reduced formalist-seeming vocabulary’ but his ‘scores are often open-ended, simple rule-based system providing performers with a template for listening, acting and interacting’. The five long pieces that we find on ‘Positions’ certainly could all be linked back to all of this. There is for instance ‘Truth, Exercise For A Listener’, which can only be recorded with a handheld device, so the engineer is part of the execution of the piece (and thus sounds sometimes far away). ‘Positions, For Those Involved’ is a piece for audience making sounds for themselves, and there are no musicians. That’s the kind of music one can expect here. The press text mentions some notes by Michael Pisaro and although it’s not mentioned, maybe Tellinga feels these days connected to the Wandelweiser group of composers? His music would certainly fit in that with these more silent composers. Tellinga’s pieces are part minimal, such as ‘Three Modulators, For Trombones’, which employs slow moving, long sustaining trombone sounds, such like ‘Branching Into Others, For A Large Instrumental Field’, which is for more instruments and who location is wide apart in an auditorium. These pieces I really enjoyed; it reminded me of Phill Niblock. The other pieces worked less for me. The absence of music and everything being in favour of an idea rather than music is nice, certainly when it’s presented in the context of a live ‘concert’, however broad that might be in this case; it’s perhaps too much John Cage, Fluxus and ‘happenings’ to me. I know that sound may equal music, but I rather sit down and be enchanted by musicians doing whatever is possible with sound. (FdW)

Trois trombones, trois contrebasses ou absence de musiciens, l’art du Néerlandais MARTIJN TELLINGA explore les possibles et l’au-delà sonore sur ‘Positions’ (Crónica). Ardue et enthousiaste, l’expérience acoustique inscrit pourtant sa première écoute dans une âpreté repoussante, elle s’estompe dès la seconde entame pour ne plus lâcher. Tout démarre avec l’extraordinaire pièce ‘Three Modulators, for trombones’, où trois acteurs de l’instrument – on tire un énorme chapeau à Nathan Lane, Milton Rodriguez et Facundo Vacarezza – évoluent dans un espace- temps physique et musical où le lointain côtoie le proche, telle une expérience sensorielle troublante et enivrante. Plus loin, si ‘Truth, exercice for a listener’ donne surtout le sentiment perplexe de se promener au milieu du public d’un vernissage, les sensationnelles variations de dynamique de ‘Branching into Others, for a large instrumental field’ nous ramènent au cÅ“ur de l’exercice, vital et conquérant. On s’imagine quelque part sur une partition de Lene Grenager, voguant sur un océan déchaîné par Giacinto Scelsi. Vous redemandiez de l’énergie en basses fréquences? Rendez-vous sur ‘Three Modulators, for basses’ et ses variations de hauteur à couper le souffle, avant-dernier propos d’un disque exigeant et novateur, à manipuler avec soin. Fabrice Vanoverberg

‘Positions’ finds Tellinga exploring space. Not outer space, but physical space, and the relationships between sounds when created within certain spaces. Yes, it’s all relative, and ‘Positions’ is concerned with the interactions of sound and performers, performers, sounds and audience or listener within the dimensional space of rooms. The way sounds resonate, reverberate or otherwise differ within the confines of walls and ceilings, spaces with and without people, are all integral to the tonalities and atmospheres of the five pieces collected here.

A lone voice issues for a shrieking note in an empty room… unidentifiable instruments vibrate against one another to forge unsettling half-chords.

Modulating trombones create long, low, swelling drones, eerie and affecting. At times strangely like whale song, others like building fear chords, the album’s first piece is ominously atmospheric and alien-sounding.

‘Truth, exercise for a listener’ is a truly ambient work. An improvised work recorded with handheld devices, the distant ripple of chatter, the creak of a door hinge, clatters and scrapes, and long, slow trombone drones drift through the air like a fog horn in sonic slow-mo. At times, you feel like saying to the people talking ‘can you be quiet, I’m trying to listen to the music’, but of course, that’s the challenge the piece presents the listener, and this is a participation exercise on multiple levels.

The success of ‘Positions’ lies in the fact that it can be appreciated from many perspectives, and while it is thought-provoking and theory-driven, it’s also interesting on a sonic level.

via whisperinandhollerin

The trombones at the top of Positions droop like aged oak trees, hunched under the insistent weight of centuries alive. The drones curve solemnly; sepia memories of passing spitfires, fanfares pointed downward to rattle through the ground and the buried dead, swarming into a microtonal smog of weariness and withering vibrancy. Their tones are noble and bold, yet their pitch wavers with weakness. It’s a sad situation to perceive. Time hasn’t been fond. I loiter beneath the three trombones and watch them stagger above me, retreating and advancing perilously. I wait for them to collapse over my head.

And now it’s me on the advance. “Truth, Exercise For A Listener” carries me through a venue as trombone and double bass emit low hums like static portions of electric fences. I step right in front of them; I wander between the conversations of half-listeners; I venture outside where the drones are a peripheral presence largely obfuscated by traffic noise. My soundscape pivots upon these two constants, and I understand my own movements only as a proximity to these two players (how the reverb respires, how the instruments bob and recede amidst the other sounds that grace the venue). In an inversion of the first piece, space navigates sound rather than vice versa.

With these first two pieces – both quarter of an hour long – Tellinga erects a spectrum upon which I traverse. On one end: sound as sculpture, as protagonist, as centre of the room. On “Three Modulators, For Basses”, I return to examining sound in the same manner as I would a painting in a gallery – reducing all of sensory data to the role of marginal experiential padding in order to grant greater focus to the object in front of me. In this instance, I hear three double basses hyperventilating as the bow surges back and forth, uncomfortable in their proximity to one another, rubbing eachother raw with harmonic friction. Echo (and by extension, space) form an absent backdrop against which these three pillars of sound are erected. For the other pieces, the focal point disperses. The instrument becomes a sound of equal prominence to the scuff of feet on bright gallery floors, or the sibilance of audience voices that rebounds into the vast space between my head and the ceiling.

I don’t know whether the whistles and extended breaths of “Positions, For Those Involved” are figments of deliberate performance or unexpected acts of focal hijacking, seizing the social rituals of the live show (in which the crowd remains quiet and still, leaving the performers to pronounce themselves upon the pale sonic canvas) in order to slip into the guise of performer. My field of listening contracts and expands as I readjust my understanding of what I should be listening to. Should my experience revolve around the sonic objects I deem to be deliberate acts of performance, or are the reverberant dog barks that infiltrate the space of equal importance? Who exactly qualifies as “those involved”?

via ATTN:Magazine

Released earlier this month via the Porto, Portugal-based imprint Cronica is Martijn Tellinga’s debut album “Position” in which the artist, who’s also been a part of the great experimental project Zona Fumatori which has released one CDr named “Enteng” via the Staalplaat-related label Stichting Mixer in the early 2000s, explores experimental territories as well albeit these are of organic, largely unprocessed nature instead of being based on electronic knob fiddling. The opener “Three Modulators, for trombones” immediately reminds us of large cruise ship horns echoing and clanging through Hamburg’s harbour – yep, we are located not far away from that area -, “Truth, exercise for a listener” combines Field Recordings of audience and background noise, wind, deep bass drones and general chatter with tenderly played trombones before surprising the listener with off-kilter pipes throughout the compositions last quarter whilst “Branching Into Others, for a large instrumental field” serves layers of deep, bewailing lugubriousness and heart-felt melancholia.”Three Modulators, for basses” transfers the approach and composition of the opening track into the musical world of double basses to a more agitated, unsettled and partly even disturbing result and the final “Positions, for those involved” is a fragile structure built of Field Recordings, echoes and droning frequencies from a far distance – without any real instruments involved. An interesting one for sure.

via nitestylez.de