Looking back at the list of artists I wrote about in advance of the 2023 Big Ears Festival, I’m reminded of what an amazing yet indeterminate musical adventure the whole experience is. Not everyone I wrote about ended up playing; I wasn’t able to get to the performances of all of the artists I mentioned; and not all of the shows I made it to lived up to my hopes. Still, there were plenty of shows that exceeded my expectations.
Of the artists I wrote about last year, two whose shows I saw and that I would strongly recommend seeing (or listening to) are Kali Malone and Tarta Relena. With the audience seated and surrounded by speakers, Kali Malone performed an extended drone work at the Knoxville Museum of Art, while Catalan folk duo Tarta Relena held a full crowd entranced with their ancient-meets-modern, vocals-and-laptop performance at St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral.
But enough of Big Ears 2023. The lineup for 2024 has been announced, and while there will no doubt be adds and drops between now and March, I’m going to give occasional shoutouts to artists I’m hoping to see perform.
First up is Bitchin’ Bajas, a Chicago-based trio that combines overlapping, repetitive motifs with polyrhythmic complexity, hazy psychedelic grooves and more ambient-like explorations of tone and texture. Their Bandcamp page notes that parts of the piece below, “Amorpha,” were created with Laurie Spiegel’s Music Mouse software.
The theme of today’s post is legato keyboards. There wasn’t any forethought in that direction; I just happened to come across two pieces recently that both use this seemingly simple element to great effect.
Abstract Aprils, Hold
There’s a fine line between ambient bliss and new age schmaltz — and it’s admittedly a subjective one. But Abstract Aprils seems to me to be a good place to draw the line, offering just enough soothing ambience to calm the nerves and focus the mind but not so much that it loses a core sense of artistry and composition. (I’m not saying that new age artists aren’t composers; I am saying that their artistic choices tend to smooth out the rough edges to a degree beyond where my own preferences lie.)
On one level, Abstract Aprils’ “Hold” is a simple composition built from layered synth pads played at a slow pace and in a manner not dissimilar from any number of Eno-inspired artists of the past few decades. But if you’ve ever tried writing music like this, you know that the sum is more than its parts. You can put together all the right elements, but it’s still missing something. In its ambition, “Hold” is reaching for something in the realm of Eno’s 1983 “An Ending (Ascent).” While it doesn’t reach that height — what does, really? — “Hold” creates an enchanting world of sound over its four-minute run time, and rather than wear out its welcome it invites repeated listens if only to stay in that world a little longer.
Daigo Hanada, “And It Goes On” (Moderna)
Music can do many things — so many, that some composers are tempted to show their audience just how many elements they can cram into a single piece. But the ‘shock and awe’ school of composition has never held much interest for me: Just because you can throw in any amount of complexity into a piece doesn’t mean you should. The important thing is to use the right elements at the right time to create the desired effect.
Daigo Hanada clearly understands this. Hanada’s three-and-a-half minute “And It Goes On” evokes spiritual asceticism with a reverb-covered, 4/4, legato motif built from layered organ notes. The organ forms a warm, enveloping foundation over which upper-register, faster-paced piano notes dance and sparkle. Both organ and piano increase in intensity — the organ swelling in volume as the piano intensifies in its pace — but its conclusion in a quick fade leaves matters somewhat unsettled. The listener is left wondering whether the scene has completely played out, and if so, what exactly has transpired.
If the title is to be believed, “And It Goes On” is just part of an ongoing story — and one that Hanada will continue to tell in subsequent works.
I’ve been studying up for the Big Ears Festival, listening to a 96-hour playlist my friend Will has amassed in preparation for our March trip to Knoxville, Tennessee. And while I’ll never get through the full list, I can at least sample enough music to pick out a few highlights — which I’ve already been doing on this blog (here and here in posts highlighting Ichiko Aoba, Bing and Ruth, Caroline, Catherine Lamb, Kali Malone and Tarta Relena).
Two more artists I’m hoping to see: Lesley Flanigan and Xylouris White.
Lesley Flanigan – I can only assume that Flanigan, a New York-based experimental musician who makes her own instruments, is still making music, but the latest two releases on both her Bandcamp and Spotify pages are Hedera from 2016 and Glacier from 2014. The 20-minute “Hedera” juxtaposes a steady, driving percussive sound against layered, ethereal female vocals. “Can Barely Feel My Feet” builds on a foundation of vocals while also exploring drone, microtonality and shimmering electronics.
For more mainstream-oriented audiences, “Shattering” from the 2014 release Glacier will be a more accessible distillation of Flanigan’s ideas, also building up from layered vocals but offering the additional entry points of lyrics and a clear melody. What will she sound like in 2023? I have no idea, but I’ve heard enough from these two releases to know that I want to find out.
Xylouris White – Lesley Flanigan has fewer than 200 monthly listeners on Spotify; Xylouris White has just under 1,200. It’s a testament to the philosophy of Big Ears that the festival opens its doors to artists with such small followings alongside artists with hundreds of thousands or even millions of listeners. Lead with quality, and the listeners will show up.
Xylouris White is a duo consisting of George Xylouris, a Greek singer and laouto player (the laouto is a stringed instrument that is part of the lute family), and drummer Jim White of the Dirty Three. The music — which includes both original compositions and Cretan folk music — ranges from melancholic, traditional-sounding ballads to propulsive, rhythmically complex tunes that evoke experimental jazz. Xylouris is a powerful singer with wide emotional range, and his laouto playing similarly runs the gamut from gentle, refined plucking to manic strumming. White is a versatile and intuitive percussionist, matching Xylouris’ mood at every turn and adding not just rhythm to the equation, but also tonal color.
The beauty of this music is in how well Xylouris and White complement each other, how much emotion and energy they both bring to the music, and how it can sound both deeply traditional and fiercely fresh — sometimes alternating between the two, other times simultaneously.
Some pieces are so moving and so mysterious that you can keep coming back to them for years, continually finding new sustenance without ever finding complete answers. For me, two such pieces are “And Still They Move” (2015) by Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld, and “So It Goes” (2013) by Greg Haines.
The mystery is part of the appeal. “And Still They Move” brings the listener into a world of dark, undulating sounds layering upon each other, bending around each other, butting up against each other harmonically, all the while moving at a measured 4/4 pace as a quiet disturbance — not loud enough to be a rumble, but rumble-like in its timbre — enters and recedes.
The rumble is easy enough to identify — it’s Stetson’s breath moving through one of his many reed instruments, and sometimes making an audible vibration. But other sounds remain mysterious. Sure, there might be an interview somewhere in which saxophonist Stetson and violinist Neufeld break it all down, but there’s something enriching about listening, over and over, and asking yourself: Is that a bass saxophone or a baritone saxophone? Are there vocals in there? How many tracks of violin am I hearing? Is there a keyboard in the mix, or is that all natural instrumentation? I might never know for sure, and that’s one of the reasons I’ll keep coming back.
Greg Haines’ “So It Goes” has a similarly powerful hold on my musical imagination. A distant percussive sound underpins a slowly unfolding drone. Subtle bubble-like bleeps pop. An electronic sound of indiscernible origin oscillates. A thick wall of drone builds and builds as a three-note motif develops alongside it, with the motif returning to the first note for the fourth note of each phrase and the wall of drone incorporating new sounds, overtones and bits of distortion as it pushes relentlessly forward.
Then, as if that relentless push has gotten us where we needed to go, we’re back to a quiet sonic palette of synth beds and fading bleeps, wondering what it is we’ve just been through — and wanting to go back through it.
The Big Ears festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, is coming up next spring. I was a latecomer to the festival, attending for the first time in 2019. Having been once, though, I vowed to myself that I will try to attend every year.
This is the second in an occasional series of posts on artists I am looking forward to hearing.
Bing & Ruth – “Nearer” is one of two solo piano works from the 2022 release Species. It’s an intimate, four-minute work that speaks with a profundity that only solo piano can, with each chord making a statement, while its resonating aftermath offers a moment of contemplation about what that statement might mean.
Catherine Lamb – One of the thrills of new music is challenging yourself. Enter Catherine Lamb and her microtonal drone works. They’re the kind of pieces that could send an unsuspecting audience member to the exit, muttering that what they’re hearing isn’t “music” because it doesn’t have a clear beat or a discernible melody. They’re also the kind of pieces that reward an open mind and patient listening, as layers upon layers of elongated notes shift subtly in timbre and intonation as they move toward, away from and against each other, creating a complex web of harmony and dissonance.
This coming March will mark my third time at the Big Ears festival in Knoxville, Tennessee. If you’ve been there yourself, then you know it’s a one-of-a-kind musical experience — an almost overwhelming lineup of world-class artists covering every genre from drone to indie rock to jazz to contemporary classical to Americana, along with plenty of styles that fall between the lines. Among the artists I saw this year were Low, Arooj Aftab, Caroline Shaw and So Percussion, 75 Dollar Bill, Sarah Davachi, Kronos Quartet, Efterklang, Leyla McCalla, and Myra Melford.
The 2023 lineup promises to be amazing, too. Here are just a few of the artists I’m looking forward to hearing.
Tarta Relena – I’m basically throwing out the “instrumental” playbook for this blog entry. Tarta Relena is a vocal duo from Barcelona that updates Catalonian folk melodies with gorgeous, mesmerizing arrangements.
Ichiko Aoba – Japanese singer-songwriter who plays guitar, piano, clarinet, accordion and flute.
Kali Malone – Minimalist compositions for pipe organ, choir, chamber ensembles, as well as electroacoustic formats.
Caroline – Fragile pieces that exist somewhere in the space between indie, Americana and postrock.
The music on this list is the music that moved me this year. With very limited exceptions, it is all instrumental, and it falls mostly under the minimalist and meditative parameters I have set for this blog.
The list is made up mostly of albums, but also includes some EPs and one single. This is a reflection of how music production is evolving, with musicians incentivized to release shorter recordings more frequently.
Like all Top 10 lists, mine is subjective, reflects my own feelings on what makes music compelling, and is subject to the limitations of what I actually heard this year. My intention is not to detract from anyone else’s conception of the year’s most compelling recordings. Instead, my hope is that some of the music that moved me might also move you.
Ben McElroy, Soon This May All Be Sea
Ben McElroy seems just as home with Nick Drake and Simon & Garfunkel as with Brian Eno — and that’s definitely a good thing. From bird calls and ambient drones to subtle feedback, understated piano chords, Celtic strings, and windswept coastal landscapes, Soon This May All Be is a beautiful statement of McElroy’s singular and organic mix of drone, folk and ambient.
From my original review: “In genre and form alike, McElroy is ambiguous, operating at the margins of several genres and thereby creating a sound that’s truly his own. In a world with no shortage of ambient records, McElroy’s musical worldview encompasses ambient but isn’t constrained by it.”
Jessica Moss, Opened Ending
I’m usually a traditionalist about Top 10 lists: I am listening for my 10 favorite albums, not opening up the field to EPs and singles. But at a certain point, you just have to recognize that full-length albums don’t hold the sway that they once did. So, while my preference to highlight full-length releases remains, I’m not going to be an ideologue about it.
Enter Montreal violinist Jessica Moss.
“Opened Ending” is just one track consisting of layered violins, electronics and feedback. An homage to Jewish music, it is an 8-minute meditation on loss. That loss includes the ultimate loss — death — but Moss also notes that she is also concerned with the loss of the things that make us feel alive, like live musical performances.
What starts as a beautifully dark violin piece with multiple mournful legato lines morphs into a drone piece as deep, rumbling processed strings and electronic noises enter after the 3-minute mark. Perhaps not surprisingly for a musician who has played since the early 2000s with Thee Silver Mt Zion (among others), “Opened Ending” delivers an epic, elegantly paced and expertly developed build. Against a din of drone and sonic detritus, the melody re-emerges, unbowed by the chaos around it. A drone note becomes an oscillating rumble. Two drone notes diverge, then converge again, amplifying their power in the process.
“Opened Ending” is a fitting metaphor for 2020: It’s mournful but powerful — not overcome by loss, but powering through it.
Morimoto Naoki, Hibi(Seil Records)
This beautifully impressionistic record encompasses subtle electronics, found sounds, toy bells, plucked strings, and warmly humming static noise. In mood, it contrasts with many of the records on this list: Hibi is a fundamentally hopeful record, delicate in its approach and playful in its exploration of sound.
In its capacity for inducing a blissful trance, Hibi could be classified as meditation music — but it is too interesting to be just a meditation record. In its creation of an inward-looking sound world — it’s instrumental, sometimes has drone notes and drifts along in a hypnotic haze — it could be classified as an ambient record. And yet, it’s an outlier in that the works don’t rely heavily on synthesizers, and also in that most pieces are short, clocking in at between 2 and 4 minutes.
“Kino” combines a distant upper-register drone, gently plucked strings alternating from speaker to speaker in the mix in a non-linear rhythm, and intermittent creaking and squeaking sounds. “Ink” brings piano and soft bells. “Fl” gives us rain, piano and soft electronic pulses. “Hz” adds a warm hum of radio static.
To the expected genre descriptions of “electronic” and “ambient,” Morimoto Naoki adds the word “toytronica.” The term makes sense as you hear a succession of toy-like bells throughout the album. No matter what you call it, Hibi is intimate, exquisite and inviting.
S.hel, Disconnect (Whitelabrecs)
This debut recording made an impression on me upon its release, and that impression remains. Iceland’s Sævar Helgi Jóhannsson is a skilled composer and sound artist operating at the convergence of several related genres — compositional ambient, ambient electronica and so-called ‘modern classical’ — and melding them in a way that shows an ability to absorb the lessons from the icons of these genres without falling prey to imitation.
From my original review: “Human Geography,” the lead track on Disconnect, “gives us impressionistic piano that is minimal but not simplistic, with both melodies and harmonies that offer a sense of the unexpected. We also get synth pads, feedback, electronic pulses and shimmering metallic sounds, all progressing in a grand, cinematic build.”
S. hel is making inventive music that is also compelling.
Night Gestalt, Sudden Rituals Vol. 1 (Bigo & Twigetti)
This album gets into darker electronica territory than my taste usually takes me; it’s also a compilation album, which perhaps makes it an outlier for a year-end list. But it’s precisely the fact that Swedish composer and producer Night Gestalt (Olof Cornéer, of the DJ duo Dada Life) is working with so many artists that makes Sudden Rituals Vol. 1 such an interesting listen.
For all its creativity, the basic elements of ambient — keyboards, drones, found sounds, static, electronic pulses — can sometimes seem finite. “Night on Earth” — an entrancing mix of ambient with Arabic sounds made with Iranian composer and setar player Behdad Babaei — makes it feel fresh. Babaei’s setar (a member of the lute family with two and a half octave range) mixes with Cornéer’s low, thick synth chords that rumble along in the lower registers as Babaei dances above with mesmerizing setar lines.
Arpeggios are at the heart of many of these tracks. Cornéer’s fascination with them is clear: “The arpeggio is everything in one — melody, rhythm, harmony — ringing out like a bell in space forever,” he says. The philosophy is reflected in the opening track, “All Directions at Once,” a collaboration with Joseph Shabason in which electronically generated arpeggios bounce off in all directions and mix with various warped vocals and space-age sounds.
“Like a Particle of Dust,” with Klangriket, offers beautiful legato sax notes that evoke the ambient jazz of Trio Ramberget, which are then propelled along by an insistent beat. Eventually, all melts into ambient tones.
“After All Our Elements Are Gone,” with C. Diab, is a driving and insistent work of ambient drone. It begins with the sound of falling water, but soon introduces the pulsating, distorted low drones that define it. Just shy of the 4-minute mark, it veers into hazier, calmer realms and recedes.
“The Sunken Machine,” with Lisa Rydberg, blends ambient electronica with deep, emotive folk violin. It is the most organic, least electronic-sounding work on the album.
Like most compilation albums, Sudden Rituals Vol. 1 is both more varied and less coherent than an album by an individual artist. But its variations are what makes it special.
Clarice Jensen, The Experience of Repetition as Death
I’ve said it before, and I’ll probably say it again: The phrase “holy minimalism” might not be a compliment in some circles, but it’s definitely said with reverence here.
Brooklyn cellist Clarice Jensen demonstrates the powerful combination of musical simplicity and spiritual contemplation on the opening track “Daily” and throughout this 5-track EP. Layered cellos play long, beautiful notes, and as the notes and their overtones reverberate and decay, they create a headspace for reflection and contemplation. Is “Daily” a reference to a daily prayer? A daily meditation? A daily ritual? We don’t know, but we could all use more of this feeling in our daily lives.
Jensen lets it be known soon, however, that The Experience of Repetition as Death will not be an entirely calm one. “Day Tonight” is a 12-minute dark ambient drone piece, with low-end, electronically processed scrapes of a bow across strings combined with sounds both pastoral and eerie in the upper registers. Later, we get an upper register hum juxtaposed against low-end pulses.
“Metastable” is an enchanting blend of low cello drone, higher-register cello work, electronic pulses and simple, legato cello notes, the relative mix of each shifting throughout as the drone takes center stage and then recedes again.
“Holy Mother” opens with what sounds like repeated melodic fragments from a pipe organ, but the notes for this album assure us that every sound on the record comes from a cello (often assisted via pedals or other effects). The work is defined by this repetition, alternating between hypnotic spiritualism and foreboding tension as deep, ominous cellos interact with — and, at times, overtake — the repeated fragments.
“Final” again juxtaposes long, simple lines against drone notes, building in a steady progression that gradually envelops the listener in the warm embrace of low but pristine tones. As the work fades, the drone recedes and the organic warmth of non-processed cellos remains, carrying the listener to a peaceful end.
Juilliard-trained Jensen — who has worked with Jóhann Jóhannsson, Max Richter, Björk, Arcade Fire, Nick Cave, Jónsi, Nico Muhly and Beirut, among others — is a powerful force for new music, taking her conservatory skills into the realm of drone, minimalism and compositional ambient for a sound that is of her own making, but also carries echoes of minimalist tradition throughout. On The Experience of Repetition as Death, Jensen sounds like a true student of minimalism, now giving a master class.
Rotor Plus, Fugue States
If you have somehow stumbled upon my blog and are not already familiar with the site a closer listen, I encourage you to check it out: It’s a comprehensive and well-written chronicler of all things intstrumental, and it’s where I found Rotor Plus.
New Zealand’s Rotor Plus writes postmodern chamber music, for lack of a better term. Using trumpet, piano, violin, modular synth, clarinet, viola, cello, oboe and English horn, the ensemble moves easily from moody woodwinds to static noise to languid postrock to indie film score territory. One minute it’s minimalist piano and violin; the next minute it’s electronic drone.
Fugue States consists of two pieces, each just under a half-hour: “Before – I awoke in a dark wood,” and “After: The beautiful background.” Each piece is subdivided into several named movements.
“Before” opens with the subtle rustling of leaves, which are joined by soft piano chords. For awhile, it sounds like we might hear a work of cool jazz, but that expectation is snuffed out by a low electronic tone and the hum of static — only to return later when woodwinds enter and a cello plucks a line that sounds more like an upright bass. All bets are off, though, when a dense, dark synth sound enters just before the 13-minute mark.
“After” opens with silence. Single, long lines come in eventually, still sounding distant. Just past the three-minute mark, a far-off tone sounds in one ear as a slightly higher, oscillating tone sounds in the other. Instead of building to a climax, both tones recede into nothingness, to be replaced by low static and new sustained tones.
A new section brings simple woodwinds and pizzicato cello, subtle piano chords and, in a deep corner of the mix, a drum set. For a moment, we’re in Talk Talk land, until it’s all overtaken by harsh, building static. In the aftermath, there are soft pizzicato cello, woodwinds and a subtle hum of noise, followed by warm strings, insects at night, indecipherable rustling sounds, and the return of soft piano chords. At the 15-minute mark, it takes an unexpected (and temporary) turn into ambient space music. And then at the 20-minute mark, silence — though the piece continues for seven more minutes. Occasionally the silence is broken by a far-off birdcall, a subtly pulsating drone, and later guitar and soft droplets of piano.
In mood as well as in genre, the strength of Fugue States lies in its exploration. It is both foreboding and beautiful, and it is captivating as it moves between the two. This is composition without boundaries, touching on contemporary classical, ambient jazz, ambient electronica, drone, postrock and more.
Do these works hold together as coherent compositions? After repeated listens, I still don’t know. But that’s beside the point here: Fugue States offers fascinating and enriching musical adventures, and the journey is a strong statement all on its own.
Library Tapes, The Quiet City
Even within the relatively narrow universe of contemporary minimalist piano music, different artists create widely varying music. Some artists get muddled on the minimalist part of the equation, delivering instead an incongruently ornate second incarnation of new age. Others keep it simple, but underdeliver on inspiration.
On The Quiet City, composer and pianist David Wenngren — along with guests such as cellist Julia Kent and pianist Olivia Belli — delivers 10 short, intimate works for piano, strings and ambient sounds that speak softly and with appropriate reverence for what this minimalist genre of contemporary, piano-based works can be.
Like most “neoclassical” music, the melodies and harmonies here are warm and comforting, not experimental or even mildly dissonant. But there is true emotion at the core, not the artifice of emotion that I sometimes feel from some “modern classical” compositions. This is slow, thoughtful music — with pristine piano chords, subtle synth pads and legato strings — that would pair well with an indie film.
Many songs are under 2 minutes, and only one is over 3; the entire recording clocks in at just 22 minutes. These are more than fragments or sketches, but they seem intentionally skeletal in their development and variation. It’s the concept of minimalism applied not only to the contents of composition, but also to its form. On The Quiet City, Wenngren gives you just enough to draw you in, mesmerize you and leave you wondering what might have been. And maybe that’s exactly where he wants you.
Alessandro Cortini, Memorie I
Much like Night Gestalt, Alessandro Cortini’s Memorie I takes me into musical territory that is both darker and more electronic than what I typically listen to.
Like C. Diab, Cortini — once a touring keyboardist for Nine Inch Nails — specializes in long, slow builds, adding and subtly manipulating sonic elements to create a sense of propulsion and rising tension. Made on a vintage analog EMS Synthi AKS synthesizer, this is dark ambient music that drones, rumbles and crackles, as Cortini tweaks sounds throughout to produce wobbles, distortions and clashing sound waves.
In my favorite track on this release, “Paragioa,” a drone bed of low synths sets the foundation, with a simple melody pressing forward amid low-end oscillations and subtle shifts in pitch and speed. Slowly, the melody is joined and overshadowed — but not entirely drowned out — by static noise, and a massive river of sound flows forward inexorably.
Memorie I is both unsettling and darkly resplendent. With its dark, electronic drones, it’s a world away sound-wise from the simple piano chords of, say, Library Tapes or Goldmund. And yet, like the work of those artists, Memorie I also exemplifies the idea that simple elements can go a long way.
Shida Shahabi, Lake on Fire (Fat Cat)
I try not to overuse adjectives like “timeless,” but it’s one that comes immediately to mind when listening to Shida Shahabi’s 14-minute EP Lake on Fire.
Composed as a soundtrack to a short film of the same name by Jennifer Rainsford, Lake on Fire consists of three short, organ-based tracks and one solo piano piece. In the spellbinding opening piece, “Prolog,” long organ notes are interwoven with analog synth textures and given plenty space in which the notes hang and dissipate. The piece feels like the act of breathing, with subtle waves rising and falling, gradually pushing the music forward. The mood — though not the sound, exactly — is reminiscent of the hazy ambient jazz of Trio Ramberget, but on downers and with spiritual overtones. Textures vary, but all are of a dark, warm hue.
“Interlude + Main Theme” is arresting from the start, with legato organ chords set against a single, upward-sliding note that rises both in pitch and intensity, causing a sense of tension and impending climax. Rather than a bombastic climax, however, the background pitch recedes and a church-like organ part enters.
It’s Shahabi’s organ work that gives “Interlude + Main Theme” — and the whole EP — its timeless feel. Though not dissimilar in general outlook to the work of Sarah Davachi, Shahabi generally takes a less experimental approach. The result is that while Shahabi’s work sounds like it could be contemporary, not all of it sounds like it has to be. Some sections of her music sound like they could have been written anytime in the past 350 years, others are clearly of a more recent vintage.
“Epilog” brings together a classic pipe organ sound with echo, delay and dissonant hums, laying claim to a more contemporary sound. Then the short EP comes to a close with a beautiful, close-miked, felt-dampened piano piece, “Main Theme – Piano Version,” with an early classical elegance.
Shahabi is gifted both as a pianist and as a composer. She masterfully pulls a lot of meaning out of deliberately minimal source material, playing with space, texture, pacing and harmonic progression to create a sound world that is adjacent to that of her contemporaries in the genres of compositional ambient and ‘neoclassical,’ but stands alone. Lake on Fire is brief, but — like last year’s piano-based EP Shifts — it makes a strong statement for Shahabi’s vision.
With minimalism so widely accepted and practiced today, it’s easy to forget that the name began as a pejorative and that this umbrella of musical styles had to fight for the cultural space it now occupies.
The history is worth a brief recap — both as a reminder that every artist working in this space is standing on the shoulders of giants, and as a framework for seeing the common underlying tenets of music that might on the surface seem quite different.
What is minimalism? It’s exactly what the name implies: a stripping down of art to its essence; a spare, judicious use of the basic building blocks of creation.
In visual art, minimalism came into focus in the late 1950s and early ‘60s in Frank Stella’s black paintings. In music, it came out of 1960s New York City and composers such as LaMonte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Phillip Glass. Their music incorporated elements such as drone, repeated patterns (often arpeggios) and consonant rather than dissonant harmonies.
No doubt there were numerous sources of inspiration for these composers: the philosophies and music of John Cage and Morton Feldman; Indian raga; African drumming; John Coltrane; and Miles Davis, whose explorations of mood, tone and space offer inspiration for both compositional ambient and minimalism more generally.
The shadows of those early pioneers have since been cast in literally hundreds of directions: Brian Eno, Max Richter, Talk Talk, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Low, Stars of the Lid, Nils Frahm and many, many more.
What was the knock against minimalism? Essentially that it is quite literally not enough — that its elements are too simple to engage a serious ear. In a classical context — Western art music, if you want to call it that — this criticism comes from the fact that minimalism represented a repudiation of what came before it, which was fiendishly complex modernism.
Clearly I’m on the side of the minimalists or I wouldn’t be writing this blog. But there was a kernel of truth to the criticism: When taken too far, minimalism can become too predictable — too harmonically or melodically static. Of course, where that line falls is subjective: No doubt the music I make is too slow and devoid of surprise for some, while others might take comfort in its repeated patterns, layers of instrumentation and subtle variations.
At a certain point, it’s fair to ask whether “minimalist” still has any meaning. After all, the movement’s influence has spread so far and wide — among classical, film and ambient composers, and all along the spectrum from “art” to “pop” music — that it’s no doubt become an amorphous term. Not to mention that plenty of musicians and composers who have been tagged with the label reject it — and some of them have produced large, complex works that don’t fit easily under a minimalist banner. Also, terminology evolves. In the visual arts, the term “post-minimalism” has been used since the early 1970s, while in music it’s been around since about 1980.
So, is there any point to continuing to use the word “minimalism”? Again, it’s a fair question.
My answer is simple: Musicologists might split hairs over this, but I’m not going to. When I use the term “minimalist,” I’m referring to a framework of ideas — not strictly to the 1960s movement where those ideas originated. While there are certainly many subgenres that have spun out of the decades-old minimalist movement — and I’ll use those identifiers as needed — there’s still a common element that unites them all: the idea that less is more.
That’s not to say that minimalist music is always simple — in fact, lots of it has plenty of musical sophistication and subtlety — only that it starts from a philosophy that a single note, or even silence itself, can speak volumes. And that’s enough commonality for me to continue to use the term to denote a big-tent philosophy that continues to yield beautiful and meaningful creative works, both throughout the decades and across a range of related genres.
“S.hel” is the musical name of Iceland-based composer Sævar Helgi Jóhannsson, who released the album Disconnect earlier this year on the U.K. label Whitelabrecs. The album places Jóhannsson at the convergence of several related genres: compositional ambient, ambient electronica and minimalistic piano (often called “modern classical,” but not by me). Nils Frahm is an obvious reference point, but Jóhannsson is carving out his own space.
If the genre names above sound too esoteric to bother deconstructing, here’s another way to look at it: From the outset, it’s clear that Jóhannsson is both a composer and a sound artist. The terms are related but not identical: The distinction in my mind is that a composer excels at working with notes, while a sound artist excels at working with sounds. No doubt there is a lot of overlap, but anyone who has both skills is working with a broad music-making palette.
Jóhannsson is certainly working with a wide palette. White Label released Disconnect on Piano Day (March 28), and while piano is featured prominently, it is presented within a context of strings, electronica and found sounds, and the piano is more of a unifying element than a strictly defining one.
“Human Geography” gives us impressionistic piano that is minimal but not simplistic, with both melodies and harmonies that offer a sense of the unexpected. We also get synth pads, feedback, electronic pulses and shimmering metallic sounds, all progressing in a grand, cinematic build.
The delicate, hypnotic “Delay Common Sense” is on the minimalist piano end of the spectrum, sounding like it could easily have been written by Frahm. Driven by walk-down arpeggios in the left hand and a graceful melody in the right, the three-minute piece also features the trademark piano creaks one hears in Frahm’s music. The piece is short, but nonetheless offers ample evidence of Jóhannsson’s gift for melody and phrasing.
“Irritant Bodies” lies at the sound artist end of the spectrum, composed of percussive electronic and found sounds interspersed with piano. Here, Jóhannsson is building a collage more than crafting melodies and harmonies.
“Law and Market” offers the fragmentary and formless feeling of ambient at times, but it also gives us notes and patterns, not just sounds and textures. It builds slowly with gentle (and, again, creaking) piano chords. Most of the piece moves along with a 3/4 (or 6/8) pulse, but starting between the three- and four-minute marks, Jóhannsson begins to play with our temporal center of gravity: The pulse shifts, the piano loses its clear pulse and the strings seem to inhabit a separate rhythmic reality; meanwhile, electronic sounds intermingle with organic ones.
On “Eia Popea,” Jóhannsson almost veers into the territory of what is often called modern classical — minimalist and piano-based music that, when executed poorly, bears a little too much resemblance to the stylistic excesses of new age. What keeps “Eia Popea” from crossing over the fine line between beauty and schmaltz are its unexpected subtleties: atmospheric and electronic effects in the background, piano lines disintegrating into creaks.
Whether he’s working with piano melodies or electronic pulses, Jóhannsson is a sensitive and highly skilled artist capable of working on multiple levels at once to create a compelling whole.
His seven-minute closing track, “Permission society,” is a case in point. One on level, we get an abstract melody on what sounds like some type of bells; on another, legato strings rise and fall in an atmospheric drone that augments but does not strictly align with the sound of the bells. The effect is lovely and contemplative: a bifurcated sound, with bells operating on one end and strings on another, creating an ambigious space that draws you in and carries you along. About two-thirds of the way into a seven-minute build, Jóhannsson brings in a drone, a counter melody and indecipherable electronic pulses. It’s the sound of a skilled composer and sound artist bringing everything together — beauty, mystery, tension — and creating something both inviting and moving.
Long ago in an entry-level college poetry class, I found myself dissatisfied with the ending of a poem. I don’t recall the poem, only that it raised a question that went unanswered. I pointed this out to my professor as a flaw.
The professor replied that there are two types of people: the kind who need an answer, and the kind who are comfortable with ambiguity. No doubt she was right. Apparently, at that time and in that context, I was the type who needed an answer. Later, I went on to a career in journalism, where it’s malpractice to leave unanswered questions in a story.
Thankfully for all of us, art and journalism are played with different rules. Ben McElroy’s Soon This May All Be Sea is built on ambiguity — and it’s beautiful. In genre and form alike, McElroy is ambiguous, operating at the margins of several genres and thereby creating a sound that’s truly his own. In a world with no shortage of ambient records, McElroy’s musical worldview encompasses ambient but isn’t constrained by it. Instead, he is fluent in ambient, drone and folk, and he combines them masterfully. He is comfortable in the language of fingerpicked guitar and bowed strings, but he can also create wobbly, pulsating drones to go with them.
The opening track, “Fading Rhymes and the Last Flight,” opens with a gentle ambient pulse and a simple three-note motif on acoustic guitar, then brings in a windswept wash of sound interspersed with melodic fragments floating in and out. Once you’ve settled into this musical universe, McElroy changes direction — bird calls enter midway through the six-minute track, followed by a fingerpicked guitar and what sounds like a harmonium, along with strings, snare drum and bells.
“Soon This Will All Be Sea” gives us eerie, layered drones, a bow skating across strings, a muted moan of feedback, a barking dog — and, then, a ramshackle piano building a simple edifice of chords around the continuing drone, feedback and strings.
“Outside the Bubble” is a blissful union of drone with Celtic folk music. McElroy captures the contemplative feeling and resonant sounds often present in Celtic music, making it his own not only by adding the element of drone, but also with the sparing use of his voice. (Used for atmosphere and melody rather than lyrics, vocals also show up on “This Pond is Life.”)
From track to track, McElroy dials up different combinations of his musical vocabulary: The 10-minute “All the Things That Once Were” is all drone and ambient, while the acoustic guitar part on “This Pond is Life” sounds like it could be a Nick Drake outtake.
McElroy’s short, (mostly) instrumental compositions are beautifully constructed works of mood and texture, evoking a full range of thoughts and feelings. But their beauty lies in the journey, not in the destination. The tracks on Soon This May All Be Sea don’t move you through a series of compelling harmonic progressions to a big, satisfying resolution. Instead, the album invites you into a rich, beautiful world of sound that is inviting and comforting — but also fleeting. No, we don’t get the certainty of the musical architecture of a pop song or a classical concerto. In its place, we get an intimate space to ruminate — and then, like so much else in life, it just dissipates.
