The front cover of this CD carries only the title SubString
Bridge, plus the name of the guitarist and a black and white photograph
of part of a bridge. Turn the CD over and you have the programme listing,
but references to mysterious things like "computer interactions"
and a collection of composers many of whom are not among the best known
are daunting. I don’t think many people would buy this disc on impulse
having found it in the rack. The reviewer carries a heavy responsibility
under these circumstances, and therefore the disc, which is a frustrating
mixture of excellent things and others which seem near-worthless, is
worth considering at some length.
An important element of the programme is the remix
technique, familiar in the world of popular music, where an existing
recording is subjected to electronic modification. In the works on this
disc the sound of the guitar is distorted and filtered, regular computer-generated
drum and other beats are added, as well as other sundry noises. Reading
Mats Bergström’s notes makes clear that he is very interested in
this technique and it features on around half the programme.
The first work on the disc is Close Up by Anders
Hillborg. It’s a sort of moto perpetuo, featuring rapid guitar figurations,
repetitive, apparently random, and the whole accompanied by electronic
drum beats. The composer writes "…this piece has been generated
using very carefully controlled processes regulated by prime numbers
and with almost no intuitive influences." The most constructive
thing I can find to say about the piece is that it sounds like it. The
most interesting thing about it is that it lasts for only eighty seconds.
The guitarist’s intention from the first time he saw the score, which
was not originally written for guitar, was to record it with electronic
embellishment, which he did with Magnus Frykberg. He later rerecorded
the guitar part, and later still Frykberg produced a remix of the whole
thing. Very confusing! Like the original, the remix, which appears on
the disc under the title Close Enough, is free of any discernible
musical interest.
SubString Bridge, for guitar and computer interactions,
by Åke Parmerud, lasts for five hundred and thirty seconds. According
to the composer the guitar part is both traditional and idiomatic "in
many respects". However, he made a conscious decision to give the
guitar part "a low profile", concentrating instead on "sonic
expansion" through "interactive computer processing".
It’s all very high-tech, but in the event it reminds me of those LPs
of electronic music we used to listen to in the sixties: many – though
not all – of the sounds are beautiful in their own right, plinks and
squeaks though they are, but the work appears formless, the music wandering
from one more or less inconsequential event to another and fading away
at the end. Many of the elements listeners hope to find in a musical
work are absent. To pick some of these at random: there is no drama,
no conflict; there is no sense of forward movement; there is no recognisable
emotional content, neither tragedy, nor pathos, nor joy, certainly no
irony; there is no sense of a musical or spiritual journey, no feeling
that musical material has been conceived, moulded and worked on until
it takes its final and inevitable shape. The composer would probably
find me unreceptive, which is certainly true, or even philistine, which
I would probably try to dispute. Yet not the tiniest part of this work
communicated itself to me in such a way as to justify its own existence,
and in attempting to explain it in the CD booklet the composer is both
garrulous and opaque.
If only he had been as economical as Arne Löthman,
who provides just sixteen carefully chosen words to introduce his five
minute Diptych. He draws attention to the fact that the second
of the two short pieces is more extrovert than the first, which is certainly
the case, even if the essentially introspective nature of the work is
still present. This is beautiful and affecting music beautifully played.
There is no electronic element.
The reflective mood is continued in the four short
pieces which make up Takemitsu’s All in Twilight. The title is
taken from a work by Paul Klee and the composer makes reference to "pale,
pastel-like colours." Like much of this composer’s music it is
essentially undemonstrative, though it exploits widely the instrument’s
many possibilities. It was composed for and first performed by Julian
Bream who plays it on his 1992 EMI recital Nocturnal. Recorded
more distantly than Bergström, Bream’s tone is at once less glamorous
and more beautiful, and the recital as a whole brings playing of consummate
mastery. Taken on its own terms Bergström’s reading is also very
convincing.
The word ‘minimalism’ is becoming unacceptable nowadays,
politically incorrect, like blackboard and blind. Perhaps composers
are rather wary of having their efforts compared to minimalist ventures
– the infamous piles of bricks and unmade beds – in the visual arts.
The word is very evocative, nonetheless, of much music having as its
stylistic origin the works of certain American composers such as Terry
Riley and Steve Reich. It is not minimalist in the sense that there
are not many notes in it. On the contrary, there are millions of notes
in almost any given Reich piece. The point is that there are not many
different notes. Tiny melodic and rhythmic tags are used, constantly
repeated and with next to no development, to construct long periods
of music. Electric Counterpoint is an excellent example of this.
The soloist plays live, accompanied by a recording of himself – here’s
one I made earlier – playing up to twelve other guitar tracks. The pulsing
opening brings the soloist, with little crescendos, in and out of the
pre-recorded texture. It’s extremely rhythmic music, and the third of
the three movements in particular contains a considerable element of
dance. It’s also extremely, perhaps surprisingly, beautiful. True, the
repetitive nature of this music may not be everybody’s cup of tea, but
I hope listeners who respond negatively to Electric Counterpoint
would be consistent in also rejecting the first great minimalist work,
Ravel’s Bolero. Reich’s piece sticks maddeningly in the mind
for hours after listening to it, exactly, come to think of it, as Ravel’s
does. And Mats Bergström plays the work with extraordinary virtuosity,
quite the equal of Pat Metheny (Elektra Nonesuch) for whom the work
was written.
Feeling proud to be so open-minded and up to the minute
as to enjoy the works of Reich I have therefore no hesitation in shamelessly
writing off the remix by Trio Escort as a load of old tosh. Their remix,
wittily entitled Escortic Joynt, follows the established method
of taking Bergström’s existing recording of Reich’s piece and adding
synthesised beats and other noises to parts of it. Reich’s music fades
in and out from time to time, but for fairly long stretches of an already
interminable ten minutes I think very few people would know that it
was supposed to be based on Reich’s work. The booklet note, written
by the remixers, is pretentious rubbish. Amongst other gems they state
that it was "…easy to build on the dance element, and equally easy
to bring out the meditative aspect of the work." Both these qualities,
fully present in Reich’s most poetic original, are undermined in the
remix. Quite what the point of this kind of exercise is I can’t say.
If the remix is meant to complement the original in some way then what
we have here is a meagre attempt in which the original is only diminished.
If the aim is to create an independent work of art why base is so closely
on something which already exists? Reich has apparently given his blessing.
He should have damned it to Hell.
The horrible, scratchy electronic sounds with which
this piece ends for some reason lead directly into the last work on
the disc, Johan Söderqvist’s Epilogue, which is a bit of
romantic film music complete with strings, preceded and followed by
electronic warblings.
Not quite the last work on the disc, in fact, as the
computer whiz-kids amongst us have a video track as well, a "short
version" of SubString Bridge, accompanied by images of an
unshaven Mats Bergström looking moody and soulful on the bridge,
sometimes playing his guitar, sometimes not. I feel helpless before
this kind of thing, and others must judge for themselves, but I can
only say that for me the visual element was even more devoid of interest
and merit than the music.
William Hedley
Mats Bergström, guitar