Back to the organThe listening chronicle

Reviews 22.12.2021

Robert Curgenven, Sarah Davachi, Lawrence English, FUJI|||||||||||TA, Kali Malone or Claire M. Singer: little brothers and sisters of Eliane Radigue and La Monte Young, these musicians have in common to bring the organ back to the fore. Organic organists, they officiate at the service of a music of stasis that synthesizes minimalism, drone, ambient and sacred music.

It's always a rather vain thing to make end-of-year assessments and rankings. Especially in these times, which have been turned upside down by the health crisis, by this pandemic that cuts up the years - much more violently than the usual summer vacation - into a series of segments where the notions ofyesterday and tomorrow, ofbefore andafter, become so fluctuating that they end up losing all consistency.
We can nevertheless observe that in the field of what we will call experimental electronic music - that is, music in which the works are not written but recorded - and more precisely in the genre in itself that drone music has become, two of the most beautiful records released in recent months (in 2021, therefore) have given pride of place to an instrument usually associated with the field of sacred music and written music. That instrument is the (pipe) organ; and the discs in question - by the Canadian Sarah Davachi - have been released in the last few months. Antiphonals by Canadian Sarah Davachi (b. 1987) and Observation of Breath by the Australian Lawrence English (b. 1976) - are the latest occurrences in a more 'heavy' trend that dates back to 2016-17. This trend is heavier, and more global, since it brings together, in addition to another Canadian - Kara-Lis Coverdale (born in 1987, and organist at St John's Evangelical Lutheran Church in Montreal) - and another Australian - Robert Curgenven (born in 1974, and living in Ireland) - the American Kali Malone (born in 1994, living in Sweden), the Japanese Fujita Yosuke, alias FUJI||||||||||TA, and the Scottish Claire M. Singer. A family - and we are certainly forgetting some - split up but whose home port could be in Switzerland, and more precisely in Lucerne, where the very active independent structure Hallow Ground is based, which has published several of these musicians...

World instrument

What can we read in this return to the organ? Is there anything to read into it at all? What does this rediscovery of the organ by young artists, most of whom have received extensive training in electroacoustics, tell us, but most of whom also approach this instrument as an "autodidact", as they would a common synthesizer? First of all, she tells us that the legacy of La Monte Young, who invented static minimalism in 1958 with his Trio For Strings- true minimalism, if we are to believe what Michel Chion and Juliette Garrigues write in theEncyclopedia Universalis, based 'on slowly evolving continuous phenomena or on micro-phenomena often created by electronic means'- has not yet ended.
A heritage filtered - so to speak - by three of Young's most distinguished disciples - glorious elders still going strong, extolling the virtues of this 'continuous sound'(drone) which in French translates as bourdon (and which is also the name of an organ register called 'soubasse'):
* Eliane Radigue (born in 1932) first, the first to have explored the continuous sound, and its multiple pyschoacoustic impacts, on the synthesizer, in this case the ARP 2500: Sarah Davachi - who has signed a few pieces for solo organ, but who prefers to mix the sound of the instrument with a multitude of other instrumental textures, acoustic or synthetic (including the ARP 2500) - talked about it last year on thequietus.com, as well as the Alvin Curran of Songs & Views from the Magnetic Garden, as one of his favourite sources of inspiration.
* Phill Niblock (b. 1933), who experimented with the powers of microtonality on a wide variety of instruments: his organ music - two noisy, magmatic, hallucinatory pieces - was recorded in 2019 by Hampus Lindwall, among others.
* Charlemagne Palestine. Born in 1947, this composer has since the beginning of the 1970s directed his quest for the 'Golden Sound' towards the piano and the church organ, as witnessed by Schlingen BängenThe first of his works, "The Piano", was premiered in 1978-79.

These three figures are spontaneously summoned by the ever erudite Lawrence English. To Radigue and Niblock are dedicated the two pieces that make up LassitudeTo Radigue and Niblock are dedicated the two pieces that make up his first organ opus, already recorded on the instrument preserved in the Old Museum in Brisbane. As for Observation of Breath, it is placed, according to his own words, under the seal of the "maximum minimalism" dear to Palestine. Claire M. Singer, for her part, has commissioned works from Éliane Radigue and Phill Niblock for Organ Reframed, the festival she is organising at the Union Chapel in London, where she works as an organist...
It is true that the organ is a vintage, 'life-size' synth. A world instrument, which incorporates all sounds. As we all know, everything always ends up in the organ.

Organists

If they are attached to history, this young generation nevertheless has a very relaxed and intuitive way of approaching the organ. This does not mean that they are not erudite or thoughtful, that they do not ask themselves questions about the "cultural" (essentially religious) charge that remains attached to the instrument, and about the way in which it should be played...
Kali Malone, for example, explains that she prefers the dry sound of a conservatory hall to the reverberant acoustics of the places of worship where organ records are generally recorded. This search for neutrality extends to her playing, since she also says that she records each of the voices of her "canons" successively, in a monodic manner, rather than playing the notes simultaneously, in a polyphony of chords where the sensitivity - or even the sentimentality - of the performer would risk getting the upper hand...
It is perhaps this appearance of objectivity, this restraint that characterises these musicians in their approach to an instrument that attracts them, perhaps because to the richness and plasticity of the sound, it combines an incomparable physicality. This notion of physicality is at the heart of the work of Robert Curgenven. But it is also obvious when listening to the records of Kali Malone or FUJI||||||||||TA, when listening to the breath that is both aeolian and telluric that the pipes produce, to all the noises that the organist is fatally condemned to emit when activating the pedals or the registers. Integrated into the recording, all these "parasitic" sounds, which highlight the contrast between the demiurgic power of the instrument, the immortal purity of this sound and the fragility of the performer, which also accentuate the chamber music dimension, the intimacy of the ensemble, only make listening more exciting. They lend an additional subtlety to these buzzing timbres whose incessant iridescence are so many little epiphanies, inviting us to return to that place from which we should never stray too far: within ourselves. And that only makes these combinations of notes all the more fascinating, where the harmonics become so fluctuating that they end up losing all consistency...

David Sanson

Related

buy twitter accounts
betoffice