“WARNING: Extreme Dynamic Levels. Listeners experience may change
during playback!” So goes the garish blood-red text accompanying the
jittery typeface of Wild Tracks (Mego), whose first few
track titles, “Exceptionally Loud Propane Gas Cannon Bird
Scarer,” “Jamaican Blowhole,” and “Ant Colony (featuring Eurofigher
Typhoon F2 Flyby),” place this excellent album in a netherzone between
sound-effects discs and soundscape composition—music made with,
or entirely of, field recordings.
Compiled by English artist Russell Haswell, Wild
Tracks stakes out overlooked and often less-than-glamorous
locations, including a drainage pipe, a rotting carcass, and a wasp
nest. I love the analogies of scale implied by “Ant Colony,” in
which ants are dwarfed by a recordist, who in turn gets miniaturized by
the roar of overhead jet fighters. At a time when albums in all genres
strive for unceasing maximum loudness, Tracks breathes like the
real world, so don’t bother listening on headphones. You’ll miss too
much.
Another release that defies headphone listening is EQUUS:
Grande Véhicule (Pogus), a collaboration by Lionel
Marchetti and Oliver Capparos. Imagine This American
Life bouncing our planet’s radio transmissions off the sun just to
dapple the show’s music, script, and sound effects with sunspots.
Somehow, the muffled textures (hoofbeats, recessed voices, snippets of
movie dialogue) and fizzed-up transmissions coalesce into an utterly
alien—and compelling—33-minute radio play. But you can
never truly hear EQUUS on radio; FM compression would
disfigure the delicate gradations of volume and timbre wrought by
Marchetti and Capparos.
Recorded in the 1960s, Haydn: Early London Symphonies (Sony) is much more headphone- and radio-friendly. Conductor George
Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra coat Haydn with a
flawless, corporate sheen. Although Szell used the then-recent
scholarly editions by Haydn guru H. C. Robbins Landon, forget about
period-instrument authenticity. Bustling Presto sections move with
implacable precision; the trembling woodwinds at the end of the Andante
in the “Miracle” Symphony flutter precisely, gracefully; and rather
than razz as it should, the bassoon seems merely disgruntled in
the Symphony No. 93’s Largo. Szell, brilliant and dictatorial,
conjures an idealized Haydn that may be bygone and inauthentic, yet is
nonetheless beautiful.
Finally, don’t miss singer and composer Jody Diamond, who
teams up with Gamelan Pacifica (Sat Dec 5, Poncho Concert Hall
at Cornish College, 8 pm, $10–$20). My favorite pieces on her new
disc, In That Bright World: Music for
Javanese Gamelan (New World), include “Kenong,” whose gentle,
rainlike tapping evokes the spare loneliness of Morton Feldman’s piano
pieces, and “Hard Times,” which interleaves Stephen Foster’s song “Hard
Times Come Again No More” within percolating gongs and ringing chimes.
You might weep when Diamond sings, “Let us pause in life’s pleasures
and count its many tears.”
Agreed, that Marchetti is exquisite.
Performing Haydn on modern instruments is in no way inauthentic, you idiot.
@2 If you are indeed a string player, you should already know that given the differences in tuning and instruments (e.g. gut instead of steel strings on violins, horns with crooks instead of valves, Boehm-keyed flutes vs. tone holes, etc.), as well as historically documented improvements in overall ensemble and intonation, the argument for “authentic” vs. contemporary performance remains open and ongoing.