info I contact
advertising
editorial schedule
acknowledgements
join the realtime email list
become a friend of realtime on facebook
follow realtime on twitter
donate

magazine  archive  features  rt profiler  realtimedance  mediaartarchive
back

earbash

sound/music CD reviews


 Da Contents H2

May 1 2013
Jon Rose
Rosin

April 3 2013
zephyr quartet
a rain from the shadows

July 17 2012
the wired lab
wired open day 2009

May 22 2012
ros bandt, johannes s sistermanns
tracings

March 20 2012
new weird australia editions: thomas williams vs scissor lock, spartak
jewelz & nippon

October 25 2011
avantwhatever label collection
gulbenkoglu gorfinkel; ben byrne; alex white; ivan lysiak

May 24 2011
decibel
disintegration: mutation

May 10 2011
blip (jim denley, mike majkowksi)
calibrated

various
listen to the weather

March 22 2011
topology
difference engine

November 22 2010
various
artefacts of australian experimental music volume II 1974-1983

September 20 2010
clocked out
the wide alley

September 7 2010
clocked out
foreign objects

August 23 2010
matt chaumont
linea

July 26 2010
sky needle
time hammer

May 10 2010
mike majkowski
ink on paper

November 6 2009
various
new weird australia vols 1 & 2

October 26 2009
clare cooper & chris abrahams
germ studies

July 17 2009
erdem helvacioglu
wounded breath

rice corpse
mrs rice

April 28 2009
james rushford
vellus

joel stern
objects, masks, props

January 22 2009
loren chasse
the footpath

mark cauvin
transfiguration

December 12 2007
the splinter orchestra
self-titled

October 24 2007
various
artefacts of australian experimental music 1930-1973

August 28 2007
jouissance
akathistos fragments

pateras/baxter/brown
gauticle

various artists produced by le tuan hung; dindy vaughan
on the wings of a butterfly: cross-cultural music by australian composers; up the creek

May 1 2006
ai yamamoto
euphonious

camilla hannan
more songs about factories

found: quantity of sheep
monkey+valve

philip brophy
aurévélateur

rod cooper
friction

December 1 2005
anthony pateras
mutant theatre

December 1 2005
charlie charlie & will guthrie
la respiration des saintes & building blocks

dj olive
buoy

hinterlandt
new belief system

jodi rose & guest artists
singing bridges: vibrations/variations

lawrence english
transit

lawrence english
ghost towns

michael j schumacher
room pieces

robin fox
backscatter dvd

tarab
surfacedrift

the necks
mosquito/see through

tim o'dwyer
multiple repeat

toydeath
guns, cars & guitars

warp: various artists
warp vision: the videos 1989-2004

zane trow
for those who hear actual voices

 

various artists produced by le tuan hung; dindy vaughan

on the wings of a butterfly: cross-cultural music by australian composers; up the creek



Melbourne: Move, 2005
MD3297
www.move.com.au/

Melbourne/Sydney: Cracked, 2005
www.crackedrecords.com.au

The influence of New Age-ism, and its associated, banal reinterpretations of Brian Eno’s “ambient music”, has contributed to a surfeit of dubious, cross-cultural musics.
Machine For Making Sense react against this by crafting harsh textures and violent, sound art concatenations (for example, Dissect the Body, featuring Satsuki Odamura on koto and Stevie Wishart on hurdy-gurdy), while Liza Lim and Julian Yu produce orchestral works incorporating European and Oriental instrumentation which possess some characteristics of both Euro-American Romanticism and high modernist dissonance and atonalism. The material compiled by editor/producer Le Tuan Hung for On the Wings of a Butterfly has some sympathy with this second approach—notably Brigid Burke’s fabulous, lightly perturbed mix of scattered percussion, sudden tabla accents, and irregular rumblings of clarinet, embedded within a harmonic vibraphone and electronics wash (track seven). On the whole however the artists presented here have chosen less arch and more lyrical methods, with several Oriental classical traditions being brought together with European Medieval and Renaissance ideas as well as atmospheric percussion. In this sense, On the Wings of a Butterfly sits well alongside the rest of the work of soprano Deborah Kayser (featured here in collaboration with shakuhachi player Anne Norman), Jouissance and others. While not “wallpaper music” in Eno’s sense, On the Wings of a Butterfly largely presents a meditative, seductive listening experience whose aggressive elements are found more in sudden jumps of the volume (as with Dindy Vaughan’s work; tracks five to six), rather than in overt sonic or textural distinctions. The materials are on the whole well balanced, harmonised and successfully melded. The approach is therefore more one of fusion rather than contrast or dialectic, of finding common timbre and rhythmic patterns across traditions rather than setting them against each other in a kind of debate.

On the first track, Kayser and Norman present a gorgeous, soaring, while at times barely breathed meditation on the work of Hildegard von Bingen, the long, gliding tones of the shakuhachi complementing the extended vocal lines of early European liturgical chorale. This is perhaps not surprising given that both musics developed partly to assist spiritual contemplation.

Nevertheless, some of the shorter, more hesitant enunciations of the duo help to give their interpretation a more modern, formalist touch. Norman’s collaboration with vocalist Ria Soemardjo (track three), underscored by Hindustani dulcimer strings, successfully melds two Oriental improvisatory traditions (Japanese and Indian) in a work which not only recalls the ragas and chants of the Indian subcontinent, but also incorporates some freer, non-verbal sung motifs, which are, in turn, echoed by Norman. Tuan Hung’s own contributions, in which he plays dan tranh or Vietnamese zither, are less effective, with the musician tending to flatten the material by interjecting repeated passages of strumming rising and falling through whole scales (notably in his collaboration with Ros Bandt on Medieval psaltery; track two). Where Tuan Hung resists this particular temptation, on track four, his work is impressive, the zither’s slightly fractured, discordant tones and string-bending technique answered or supported by ringing bell percussion and open, tube-y sounding pan-pipes.The CD closes somewhat disappointingly with the linguistically unremarkable (and strikingly Orientalising) poetry of Rewi Alley (tracks eight to 11), supported by shifting organ chords from Warren Burt, to which the vocals have also been tuned.

On the Wings of a Butterfly features an additional two compositions selected from Vaughan’s own CD, Up the Creek. The latter, 12-track collection sees Norman paired with harpsichordist Peter Hagen. The duo play six works together, and then perform as soloists on three pieces each. Hagen’s technique is at times harsh and brutal, with Norman generally doubling the main harmonic lines and introducing sections with a rising, breathy spaciousness, or rising above the stately lines of the harpsichord to lead in a complicated series of jumps and glides. As noted earlier, the dynamic of the pieces is often striking, with abrupt leaps from quieter, building sequences and scattered phrases, versus loud, crashing motifs and crescendos.

The harpsichord is such a cultural loaded instrument that images of Baroque symmetry and early cinema horror soundtracks cannot help but intrude, with much of the interest being generated by how Vaughan disabuses one of such assumptions without totally abandoning the idea of adding her own little, mathematic, self-enclosed passages, derived in part from the high Classical tradition. While only occasionally exhibiting actual atonalism, several tracks nevertheless attain a dissonant complication of musical structure through the tentative indirectness of the links between passages as well as their attendant silences, which makes for a highly unconventional listening experience. The vaguely modernist tracks five and six break, clash and then pause in a highly arresting manner.

Norman’s solos move from clipped materials which sound almost like discontinuous allusions to Stravinsky’s Firebird played on shakuhachi, to the more characteristic woody, breathy tones of the instrument, but with a fluttering and lack of intensity only found in 20th century American-Japanese composition. Hagen has less to play with in this sense with his rather more unbending instrument—though during the duets he performs some arrested plucking of the strings and abortive, percussive keyboard strikes. The recordings also include a subdued background of feet rearranging and wooden finger-block clattering. Up the Creek is, in short, a very interesting collection of pieces which is worth repeated listening to fully appreciate its sometimes hidden intricacies. Overall, Up the Creek is somewhat more satisfying than On the Wings of a Butterfly, exhibiting in a more overt fashion a sense of musical and textural rigour in composition. Nevertheless, both are fine, thought-provoking additions to the ongoing corpus of approaches which bring together the various and only indistinctly separate terms of Oriental, Western, Euro-American, traditional, classical, Early Music and New Music.

Jonathan Marshall

© Jonathan Marshall; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]

Back to top