Duos for Doris features guitarist Keith Rowe and pianist John
Tilbury, two-thirds of the current AMM lineup, but in place of AMM's
layers of thick description (an approach nicely summed up by the title of
their album Laminal), these duets offer a scrupulous thinness.
Rowe describes this as a "music of zero" in his session notes (posted on
Erstwhile's website): "A music that might be nothing in itself but
juxtaposed to another: together transformed." This process takes place
as much in the listener as in the music itself. Brian Olewnick, who was
present at the recording session, contributed a notable early review of
the disc for the online journal Bagatellen, one characterized by
a vigorous, often violent imagery and diction that convey the impression
of a disc characterized by furious activity. And yet my first impression on
hearing it was closer to "OK, so where's the music?": one wouldn't easily
divine from his review that the presiding dynamic level is on a finely-
graded scale from p to pppp, with a few momentous exceptions. Yet his
review is not therefore inaccurate: the lamination of the musical
experience comes not so much in the performance itself as in
relistening. For a visual analogy, think of a piece of mica, whose
individual layers are each brittle, translucent and almost colorless: it is
only as layer is added to layer that the mineral gains character and
substance. What is at first almost not there is gradually materialized as
it is successively folded back on itself. If Olewnick's review has
something of the princess and the pea about it, this is only because in
this music, the pea actually becomes more sensible with each additional
layer of mediation.
Mediating layers have been piling on at an alarming rate: the disc comes
with a mountain of backstory, and continues to touch off further
narratives even after its release. It took Erstwhile's Jon Abbey two yearsof coaxing and organizing to arrange the recording session, originally
scheduled as a two-day session in January 2003, at the auditorium in
Vandoeuvre-les-Nancy, France, where AMM's Fine was
recorded. These plans were disrupted by the death of Tilbury's mother
Doris at the age of 95, three days before recording was to take place.
Wishing to fulfill his commitment, Tilbury agreed to come for an
abbreviated, one-day session. The disc is dedicated to his mother's
memory; these personal circumstances are reflected in the fugitive and
shadowed nature of the music. Another layer of circumstance was added
by the fearful political moment, as Bush's America and Blair's England
entered the last frenzied stage of threats and self-justification
preparatory to the assault on Iraq. The disc has since become further
entangled in issues of political dissent because of l'affaire Tilbury at The Wire. (An article by Olewnick discussing both Tilbury's music
and his decision to cease performing in the USA, as a response to the
vicious imperialism of the Bush regime, had much of its political content
removed by The Wire's editors. Tilbury's subsequent angry letter to the
editor touched off further discussion in the journal's pages and
elsewhere.)
The album contains three tracks, arranged in descending order of length
over two CDs: "Cathnor" (70 minutes), "Olaf" (45) and "Oxleay" (17). The
dramatically decreasing lengths are symbolic of the music itself, which
so often gives the impression that it is steadily receding. Spread across
these discs are some of the most extended, nuanced and lingering
decrescendos ever recorded, the last of them running from a point
halfway through "Olaf" right to the end of "Oxleay." "Cathnor" recedes,
rather than builds, to a climax: there's a false alarm early on - two or
three sharply-struck notes from the piano around the 20-minute mark -
but from this point the tide instead begins to withdraw, with incredible
slowness. Rowe's menacing encroaching crackle thins out and then thins
out again, into an ultrafine hiss, and Tilbury finds less and less occasion
to intrude; by the 39-minute mark there's barely anything left at all,
beyond Rowe's little shapeless tufts of string-noise - the sound of
someone waiting, not impatiently but watchfully. Now, after three-
quarters of an hour, the piece's violent catharsis arrives: its open
expressiveness, however frightening, is also a relief compared to what
precedes it. It comes with a resolving minor-key coda from the pianist;
here Rowe's bowed guitar is so traditionally elegaic it's virtually a
substitute for a cello part.
Though it too has several punctuating events and one sharply-jutting
peak just before the halfway point, "Olaf"'s overall sound is shaped by
Tilbury's use of preparation to turn the piano strings into tuned
percussion (unlike most prepared-piano specialists, he mutes rather
than augments strings: he seems comparatively uninterested in wilder
sounds like buzzes and rattles). What is left when the music's tide
recedes are long passages where morse-code messages are softly
tapped out back and forth inside the piano. It is with infinite slowness -
the process takes up the entire second half of the piece, in fact - that
these coalesce into a final, anguished statement from the (now
untreated) piano.
"Oxleay" is a continuation of the preceding track in mood and in
dynamic, with Rowe marking the evolutionary stages by gradually
stepping down the background hiss (at this stage he's barely touching
his guitar). The pianist's hard-won expressiveness is diffused in
homeopathic stages, diluted and then diluted again as it approaches a
condition of stillness. At the end comes a small surprise: in the final
seconds, when you expect a clean tapering-off or a cosmetic fade-out,
the music actually gathers a little force toitself, enough so that the
track's ending seems a trifle abrupt.
It's easy enough to end a review with a glib "Recommended," but this is
hardly a disc amenable to such bubble-packaging, for all the elegance of
its presentation. Traces of the tedious figure of the agonized Romantic
artist give me pause in Rowe's liner notes - the heroics of the claim that
"failure beckons"; Tilbury's citation of Clifford Curzon's "People do not
know the cost of a phrase," with its mandarin adversion on "people" and
its apparent implication that the (personal) cost of a phrase must
necessarily be high. In this vein one could complain about an excess of
momentousness in the music. I might have mounted that critique at one
point; listening to the album again, I'm surer that this is a misjudgment.
But I'm not certain: and, come to think of it, I'd better go put it on the
stereo now for another listen....
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