Patrick Farmer, Kotis Kilymis, Sarah Hughes, Stephen Cornford
No Islands

1  Improvisation #1           09:21            

2  Improvisation #2           17:10

3  John Cage   Four6         30:10              

                   Total time:   56:41

Stephen Cornford  amplified piano
Patrick Farmer  turntable & electronics
Sarah Hughes  chorded zither
Kostis Kilymis  electronics

Recorded at Oxford Brookes University, March 2011

Interview with Sarah Hughes

Firstly could you explain how you came to this kind of music?  Are you musically trained, and how would you describe your current engagement with music and art?

I initially found this kind of music by trial and error, I wasn't satisfied by what I was listening to, but didn’t really know where to look, or what I was looking for. I bought the Looper Squarehorse disc shortly after its release in 2004 and that interested me quite a lot, and some documentation of an installation Alfredo Costa Monteiro had done in Barcelona directed me towards his music. I think I just looked until I found things I liked and was sometimes rewarded with something great, and inevitable one finds links and names though names and eventually I could filter out more and more to find the stuff I was interested in. In 2007 I met Patrick (Farmer), and he was already quite involved with a lot of musicians and was promoting this kind of music, he played me Wolff's Stones shortly after we met and I was really happy; it’s a recording that certainly holds a lot of significance for me in terms of composition, space and material. Around this time I was also reading a lot of David Dunn and the two seemed to relate a lot to what I was doing with installation, there is definitely a reciprocity between my installation and performance and drawing and listening, if in a more cognitive sense. Externally I think the two, music and art, have remained quite autonomous, perhaps because I find sound a difficult material to work with, but in terms of space and compositional intrigue the two are part of the same practice.

I was taught violin when I was younger and have retained some music theory, and can read music, but I was taught to pass exams and found it a rather detached way of learning and stopped at grade six when I was around 13 (with some regret) and took up guitar, which I still play now. I was given the zither a few years ago, and didn't really know what to do with it for a while, I'm still working it out.

When I've seen you perform, you mostly play very quietly and with frequent long pauses.  These are both qualities often associated with Cage's late music, but in the recording of Four6 on 'No Islands', you are actually really busy - and the music as a whole is really beautiful but has a quality of wildness.  How did you approach the score, and was it challenging to perform?

The relation to listening, improvising and structure is very intriguing in Four6 and I find the framing quite impish, in knowing that the other performers have set brackets for set sounds, and thus a somewhat limited response to your own sounds does give it, as you say, a quality of wildness, but at the same time, there is a massive opportunity to listen and a sensitivity to what, in that moment, one can hear. I first played this score in Brussels with Patrick, Kostis and Julia Eckhardt, and I approached it in a similar way to my usual manner of playing little and quietly and I restricted the times at which I could play to a very limited period. The value of this score is the freedom to make those decisions, and in the recordings with Stephen, Patrick and Kostis on “No Islands” I wanted to try it differently, and felt it much more successful as it freed up the listening and the improvisation elements. I also wanted to make some noise, I like making noise occasionally, and am not a particularly confident performer, so the brackets seemed to allow for a bit of recklessness on my part. The challenge of the score is knowing it, and in knowing becoming more malleable, your description of beautiful and wild is I think a testament to that.

 

The recording of Four6 is also striking because of the wholehearted way in which you embraced chance as a constitutive element in the music.  In addition to the chance-derived structure of the piece, your realisation introduced other chance elements that I think add to both the interest and quality of wildness.  Can you tell us about this?

The drama studio at Oxford Brookes, where the album was recorded is set between Headington Hill park and some allotments, so the spring birds were apparent to us as absent figures throughout the recording, as was the frequent passing of light aircraft and the occasional passer-by. Before recording the Cage piece we opened the double doors of the drama studio, which back on to the allotments, and so added an extra dimension to the realisation, a spatial quality which opened out the recording. For me the notion of external sound is at the forefront of this realisation, as each player can be considered autonomous, or not, and the external, environmental sound can to be considered as situational cues, or not, it toys with the varying levels of the reception of sound, and the value given to each, and its perceived quality. It becomes an aesthetic response to an acoustic environment, the brackets allow for this, and the score as a whole frames a period of attention. I think Michael Pisaro’s Only [Harmony Series #17] works in a similar fashion, when he asks of it "What, in the sum of things occurring now, do I hear, and how do these things harmonize themselves?” Of Four6 one could ask - "how do these things relate to one another?", which could be disjunctive, and often is.

I believe you first played with Kostis Kilymis at the residency you mentioned at Q02 in Brussels.  Can you tell us a bit about that residency, about how it worked  and how it affected you musically?

Patrick and I spent two weeks at Q02 in March, with Kostis joining us for the final four days and then returning to Oxford with us to record. Q02 is a wonderful space, and really affords a lot of opportunity for experimentation. Julia and Ann are very accommodating, and open, and honest, which is a fabulous combination. For the first week Patrick and I worked on a duo that he'd written for zither, piano, bass drum and feedback,  I also took the time to do some drawings, and Patrick some recording. When Kostis arrived we spent the time on Michael Pisaro's A discrete reconciliation between balance and flux, which he'd written for the residency and we also played a lot of improvisations. It was great introducing Kostis to the residency as Patrick and I know each others playing rather well and it was good to have someone we were both quite unfamiliar to change the dynamic. We went to Q02 with the intention of  allowing the situation to dictate what we did, the space became integral to the residency for us, an instrument in many cases, such as the duo and the Pisaro score and the improvisations tended towards a bricolage of found material, forks and glasses, paper, postcards from around the space. The residency lends itself to a mode of working that is very site responsive, the degree to which was made apparent when recording the same pieces, four6 and A discrete reconciliation between balance and flux in the Drama Studio the day after we returned from Brussels. Spending the time at Q02 before hand undoubtedly informed our realisation, both in my wanting to move away from a sparse realisation, and also in the site responsiveness, which is why it seems so fitting to have the bird song so apparent in four6. This is also the reason the Pisaro score was unsuccessful in this instance. The instrumentation, which we had kept the same in Brussels and Oxford, didn't respond so well and the score was somewhat deadened in the Drama Studio, and the environmental sound became an intrusion,  the richness of the acoustic in Brussels was central to how we'd chosen to realise it. This is an element of recording and playing, and field recording,  that I find relates very strongly to how I approach installation and drawing, in how one articulates a space as a material, and how the volume of a vacancy can inform, and is integral to a piece. The performative

silence in composition and improvisation is paralleled, for me, by the exhibition space of an installation, the space that allows one to recognise the relation between objects and their material quality.  In Brussels I tended to act as a mediator between Patrick's and Kostis' playing,  so when we were joined by Stephen on our return to Oxford the dynamic  inevitably changed again, with the various degrees of familiarity making apparent the quality of each of us, dependent on the quality of each other, dependent on the quality of the room.

 

The qualities or practices that you describe in the playing situation - such as mediating between different musical personalities or responding to/using the particularities of the room etc - have in a way been staples of improvised music since the 1960's, though I feel that a number of younger players like yourself are currently giving them a new twist. But I'd be interested to know if you feel yourself as being part of that now rather long tradition of improvised music?  Is it something that you are conscious of - whether positively or negatively - in your practice?

I’m certainly conscious of the context in which I play, and the context in which I make work, I think that its integral to how I approach what I do, though I’m more aware of the visual art context than the music side of things, I certainly know more about the arts, but they parallel each other a lot of the time, and in my mind are often interchangeable. Do I feel myself part of that tradition? In many respects I do, the artists and musicians that I've met though Compost and Height and through playing appear indicative of a certain zeitgeist with which I feel an association and with which  I share a common approach. The recurrent discussions around this music, on and off line, are indicative of the general awareness and respect that people involved in this sort of music have for one another and for the music being made, and that is continuing to be listened to.  I think unless there is an attempt at replication, being aware of the context in which one is working, both historical and contemporary, can only be a positive thing, as is extending that context as far as one can, which is also something i find prevalent in this sort of music, and something Wolf Notes attempts to respond to. I see a lot of similarities in reading Lucretius and improvisation, for example, and in something like making good coffee - how the physical characteristics of a substance affects another, that’s everywhere, all the time - its an obvious correlation, but one which continues to intrigue me.

Reviews

“As purveyors of the Compost and Height website/label and untiring makers of things, Patrick Farmer and Sarah Hughes have high profiles of late, and this little disc won't do anything to diminish that. With Farmer on turntables and electronics, Hughes playing chorded zither, Kilymis on electronics and Cornford with his amplified piano, this quartet tackles John Cage's "four6" and a pair of short improvisations. Their usual stock in trade is a mostly quiet carpet of crackle, hum and fizz, often mimicking natural sounds, as in the first few minutes of the first untitled improvisation which sound much like rain on a flat surface. Squeaking and ominous rumbling then accumulate and threaten to get out of control. There's a definite feeling of chaos just beyond, as hums grow and divide and electric pops intrude, which are peeled away to reveal a skipping, skittering plasticity with an electronic pulse with odd bell-like sounds. It's often difficult to imagine how these sounds are being made, and that's half the fun.

The second improvisation has an odd metallic cloud hanging in it, and a wall of squeak and wail gives way to a quiet chord with low bass hum and delicate feedback. Way underneath I can hear birds. The changes then come a bit too quickly to describe in detail. There's an awful lot going on and things happen very quickly. Textures appear, shift and rub against each other in a myriad of ways. Sonic surprises and an occasional LOUD crash or bang keep the attention from wandering.

Lastly they work with one of John Cage's "number pieces". These late compositions were all written in a similar way, with timed brackets indicating when and for how long a sound is to be played. Each player gets to choose what sounds they will be using and where they will enter and exit within their allotted times. There is usually a time limit to these pieces, and many players have chosen to present them as loops, repeating the structure a set number of times. I believe that is what's happening here as well, as events seem to repeat over time, but shift slightly in relation to each other. Overall, this piece is a bit more subdued, with events following one after another over a bed of birdsong and occasional quiet voices. Spare piano notes hover and turn into quiet feedback, crackles like fire arise and dissipate, and odd metal brushings hang about in the corners. On headphones this is a feast of detail. No wonder it's made so many people's 2011 'best of' lists.”
Jeph Jerman, Squid’s Ear

“This disc captures well, I think, something I really enjoy in the playing of Farmer, Hughes and Cornford, certainly – I'm not really familiar with Kilymis' playing, though Organized Music from Thessaloniki is indeed a fine enterprise – which is the balance between an almost tentative stillness and quietness (the potential, at least, for that to be there) and an almost visceral wildness – as when, on the first improvisation, a sudden blart of feedback rudely blares out like a mistake, is ignored, and doesn't recur; or the fact that, at the end of that improvisation, everyone else's gentle electronic ebbings away are overlaid with Farmer's loud and physical and tactile turntable-surface frictions. It's an aesthetic a million miles away from capital n Noise Music – though bits are noisy, and many of the sounds produced would be considered 'noises' by most 'straight' listeners – but it's not in the least prissy or monastic in its restraint, delighting in the rasps and whirrs and burrs of its ugly beauties before settling into a kind of contemplative ambience in which the distant, twittering frequencies of birds or passing planes act as spectral, barely-registered presences, sitting there waiting for the musicians to stop dropping things on zithers or making whooshing noises with electronics or manipulating the insides of pianos. Maybe that's partly a quality of the room itself – I've seen Farmer and Hughes, this time as part of the Set Ensemble, with Bruno Guastalla and David Stent, perform a different version of the Cage piece which makes up half of 'No Islands', once in rehearsal, with the door open on a balmy spring afternoon, and once again in the evening, where a different focus or tension (and the presence of audience) was brought to bear on proceedings. In both cases, though, the room – a square black box, quite tall in relation to its width – seems to inspire a kind of openness, a relaxed focus, perfect to the simultaneous focused activity of both Four6 and improvised music: set away from the main body of the Oxford Brookes campus, on the side of a hill, above allotments and trees, inside it feels as if one could create a safe and sequestred world of focussed experiment, and yet at the same time feel open to what occurred outside, in entirely un-cloistered freshness. I guess this information is anecdotal, but, after all, Keith Rowe is always stressing the importance of the room, or space, in which one performs, and it's that combination, of person and environment, that allows music like this to breathe. As too you should listen to it in a space where you can breathe, to let the many wonderful things here soak in – for there's a delicious and perverse richness at times, as when (this on the second improvisation) a generally sober drone is packed over with all sorts of strange and wonderful little interventions: a rumbling stomach imitation; someone (Farmer no doubt) emptying something out of a bag; a whoop-wailing theremin-like sound which actually made me laugh out loud on first hearing, at its voice-likeness, its incongruity, its near-parodic yet curiously touching emotional tint. 'Four6' is the quietest thing on here, though the door to the studio is now open and the birds outside are in full and frequent voice; and maybe I prefer the (relatively) wilder territory of the improvisations, but, as the disc rides out on those continuing birds, a piano-belltoll, a siren (outside intervention), a bowed zither zing, a turntable scrunch, another piano strum, and a fade-out, all this making its way into the otherwise silent living room here at 1AM, I'll take the Cage piece too. This is, as they (who?) might say, a sweet record. “      David Grundy, eartrip magazine

“It's difficult for me to figure out what to write about this release, other than to say I like it a lot. The quartet (electronics, turntables, chorded zither and amplified piano) occupy the kind of quiet-yet-scurrying territory that's not so uncommon but do so exceptionally well, breathing air and vitality into an area that often gets overcrowded. They perform two improvisations and then Cage's "Four6", the latter in a bird-heavy environment and beautifully paced. The entire recording bristles with intelligence and care--I'll leave it at that. An excellent job--listen.”
Brian Olewnick, Just Outside