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The two works by Bryn Harrison featured on this disc are articulated as a veritable musical essay on memory and perception. This English composer, born in 1969, has drawn on the sources of philosophy and psychology, as well as his peers, to patiently shape the theoretical and aesthetic inspiration behind his obsessive repetitive writing. The listener who immerses himself in it must accept in advance to experiment with the frontiers of his perception and to rub shoulders with the sonic materialization of the question of difference and similarity. You won't emerge unscathed.
André Boucourechliev gave this clear, brilliant and clinical definition of music: "[...] a system of differences that structures time under the category of sound"(Le Langage musical, 1993). Repetitions in Extended Time (2008) and How Things Come Together (2019) offer a dazzling demonstration of this. However, the structuring of these two works, performed respectively by the ensembles that created them, Plus-Minus directed by Mark Knoop and Ensemble Contrechampsunder the baton of Vimbayi Kaziboni, questions the functioning of our memory and transforms our habitual perception of time, rendered here perpetually cyclical, without beginning or end. Even though the lines, harmonies, combinations and colors on the score are often strictly identical, we never hear the same thing. The inspiring image is that of the flow of a river, or the steady stream of a waterfall. Harrison refers to Heraclitus' assertion that "you never bathe in the same river twice". And so, while the Plus-Minus ensemble repeats the same formula over forty minutes through five continuously slowing sections, our ears never cease to provide us with new sensations, and we have the impression of "having traveled a very long way without having traveled very far", with the same elements: a circular continuum articulated around the harmonic clouds of a piano and two electronic keyboards; the rhythmic instability of a bass clarinet and electric guitar; and the uneven glissandos and trills of the strings. This extreme music proves infinitely rich, despite the drastic economy of its basic material.
Bryn Harrison - Time Becoming from Neu Records on Vimeo.
How Things Come Together seems even more varied, yet its constituent elements are once again extremely reduced. Bryn Harrison plays with moments of suspension or disintegration, with highlights of certain families and associations of timbres from the twenty-three instruments, and with new perspectives on the materials. Repetition is omnipresent, but is confronted by certain sounds that are sometimes momentarily frozen in time. As the composer explains in the rich booklet that accompanies the CD, the foundation of his artistic approach came from a seminal experience: the composition of Piano Set, six miniatures for piano (2005), strictly identical, but which gave the audience the impression of having heard six different pieces, both because we ourselves are transformed by repetition, and because our sound memory is never infallible, but also because a musician cannot repeat strictly the same thing without slight variations. Immersing himself in the reading of phenomenology, exploring Hume, Husserl, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, the composer has never ceased to delve into this vein, while nourishing his inspiration from the experiences of listening to Feldman, Cage, Messiaen and so many others. Sixty years after the first American experiments, he proves that the world of repetitive music is still a crucible of inventiveness and one of the most important sources of musical creation today.
Album here: Time becoming, Neu Records
Bryn Harrison's sonic atmospheres, perfectly served by the exceptional 3D recording that is the trademark of Barcelona-based Neu Records, are far removed from the limpid consonances of Riley, Reich or Glass. They are based on sound aggregates that are often dense, troubled and grating, amplifying the radicality and force of the sonic experience. Last but not least, the presentation of the disc on the label's website is very well done, and even includes the original scores.
Guillaume Kosmicki
Recorded in Zaragoza, Spain, in 2019 with Plus-Minus Ensemble and Ensemble Contrechamps, produced by Santi Barguño, Neu Records
