{"id":9959,"date":"2017-11-05T13:36:34","date_gmt":"2017-11-05T12:36:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.cronicaelectronica.org\/?p=9959"},"modified":"2017-11-05T13:36:46","modified_gmt":"2017-11-05T12:36:46","slug":"monty-adkinss-shadows-and-reflections-reviewed-by-54","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.cronicaelectronica.org\/?p=9959","title":{"rendered":"Monty Adkins\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Shadows and Reflections\u00e2\u20ac\u009d reviewed by 5:4"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nAn interesting aspect of what i\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been calling \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcsteady statism\u00e2\u20ac\u02dc is the relationship it has with the idea of stasis. What is a musical stasis? Considering that music unfolds in time, isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t it an oxymoronic idea? Furthermore, is such a hypothetical stasis intentional (objective) or perceptional (subjective) \u00e2\u20ac\u201c or both? When writing about Markus Reuter\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Falling for Ascension, i remarked about one of the fundamental characteristics of steady statism: behavioural stasis, where the music changes over time but its underlying mode of operation \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the compositional processes that lead to the musical material \u00e2\u20ac\u201c remains essentially static, a system out of which musical outcomes emerge. More recently, i\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been reflecting on the other kind, perceptional stases, where the emphasis is on extreme stillness of utterance, which may or may not be (or appear to be) the product of a behavioural stasis.<\/p>\n

A striking example of this can be heard on Monty Adkins\u00e2\u20ac\u02dc Shadows and Reflections, released a couple of months ago on the Cr\u00c3\u00b3nica label. This album was one i\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been anticipating for a while; Adkins spoke about it briefly during the Dialogue we recorded together in the spring, explaining how it was inspired in part by the process of painter Gerhard Richter:<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the way in which he chooses certain types of colours on his squeegee, and then draws them very slowly down the canvas. So one of the things i\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been working on recently is how you could actually compose very short fragments of material and then slow them down, and then, as he does, layer them on top of one another. So i\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve just finished a long, 40-minute piece, and that piece is made up of six three-minute pieces, and what I did was slow those pieces down, just as Richter would take very specific parts of the paint, and then slowly draw those across and add extra layers on the canvas. So that piece was drawn out of the technique of his paintings. [\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 It has] no gesture in it at all, which is quite unusual for me [\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6] it does go somewhere but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pushing that to the absolute extreme: out of forty minutes, the main thing happens at thirty-two minutes. And I find, [when] you get to that point, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s almost a sense of ecstasy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This latter aspect is a familiar Adkins trope, one i\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve remarked upon numerous times previously, where the timing of a gesture or sound is not merely pivotal but transformative, making one reappraise much if not all that went before. But my anticipation for Shadows and Reflections was particularly piqued by the idea of it being essentially bereft of gesture, suggesting an altogether more \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcflat\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 sonic journey.<\/p>\n

That suggestion is emphatically borne out in the work\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s two 20-minute movements, which are easily Adkins\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 most perceptionally static pieces to date. Beyond this, they also mark the furthest point away from his acousmatic beginnings, focusing on just a single timbre \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the organ in Phipps Hall at Huddersfield University \u00e2\u20ac\u201c which is tightly-woven into a musical fabric that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ostensibly dense but suffused with differing levels of light. The importance of light is indicated too in the album\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s complementary artwork, which features details from two paintings by landscape artist Andy Fullalove, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcSounds of the Shadow\u00e2\u20ac\u02dc (blues) and \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcSounds of the Sun\u00e2\u20ac\u02dc (reds). Adkins has mirrored these titles in the work\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s two movements, while a different painting of Fullalove\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u201c featuring a network of crosses suspended in a kaleidoscopic colour-space \u00e2\u20ac\u201c bestowed on the piece its overall title Shadows and Reflections. Light is paramount.<\/p>\n

Monty AdkinsTo call it \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcstatic\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 is not an overstatement, and whereas Adkins\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 music has often had the epithet \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcambient\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 applied to it (often, indeed, by me), it has never been more appropriate than here. It displays those wondrous paradoxes endemic to ambient\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s unique demeanour: aloof warmth, passive engagement, disinterested serenity. The perceptional stasis it establishes is not unlike the experience of staring at a mountain, or a landscape of fields, during the night and day respectively, as the play of moon- and sunlight, occasionally deflected by clouds, passes across its surface, causing tiny shifts in the details of its complexion.<\/p>\n

Though both movements are dronal, Sounds of the Shadow is the more steady, fundamentally exploring minute shifts in harmonic emphasis, always in relation to an omnipresent deep drone, a low F\u00e2\u2122\u00af. This unwavering drone becomes the root of a harmonically stable stasis in which, like a glacial passacaglia over a ground bass with just a single note, Adkins echoes the practice of pulling out organ stops by teasing out certain pitches and overtones to tilt and rebalance the music\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s tonal implications, giving the delicate impression of chord progressions. Especially lovely is a series of small higher register surges that occur from around four minutes in that result in an exquisite penumbral balancing act.<\/p>\n

That these movements are primarily perceptional and not behavioural stases is more clear in Sounds of the Sun. The drone here, despite being no less omnipresent, is mobile, although one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ability to identify the points where it \u00e2\u20ac\u201c or, indeed, anything else \u00e2\u20ac\u201c moves is almost impossible (skipping through the track at, say, 30-second intervals is genuinely eye-opening, revealing just how much is imperceptibly going on). The paradigm for this movement is established in the first few minutes: tonally more complex \u00e2\u20ac\u201c its opening chord is a tight diatonic cluster \u00e2\u20ac\u201c with a roaming harmonic sense. The word almost seems ludicrous in such a context, but the piece literally modulates: its shifting tonal centre is gently recoloured via inversions, and there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a distinct long-term understanding that emerges of how we have infinitesimally been harmonically relocated. Despite employing just the sound of the organ, for the first half of Sounds of the Sun it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s curiously easy to forget that this is what we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re hearing, a side-effect (and, i think, a healthy one) of being drawn into its contemplative static space and focusing less on surface details. At certain points, though, Adkins exerts more obvious involvement, and these are the only moments when the perceptional stasis is noticeably disturbed by activity. A rich sequence of swells around thirteen minutes in is the most arresting example of this \u00e2\u20ac\u201c gorgeous for its own sake as well as in its continual clarifying and blurring of the harmony \u00e2\u20ac\u201c yet even this doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t cause enough ripples to worry the weight that keeps the music almost anchored in place.<\/p>\n

For all its supposed lack of detail \u00e2\u20ac\u201c \u00e2\u20ac\u0153no gesture in it at all\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201c i\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve found myself returning to these two pieces again and again and again in recent weeks, and every single time hearing them entirely differently, finding new details, reappraising their trajectories (if that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the right word for such crawling material). Sometimes it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s been the entire focus of my world for 40 minutes, sometimes it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s been there with me while i\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m doing other things; as with the very best and truest ambient music, it works either way, fluctuating freely in its engagement with me and mine with it. That being said, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s very hard to ignore such utterly mesmerising music.<\/p>\n

Shadows and Reflections is available direct from Cr\u00c3\u00b3nica as a limited edition cassette and digital download. Simon Cummings<\/em><\/p>\n

via 5:4<\/a><\/p>\n