Amina Alaoui: Arco Iris

Amazing, my last post dates from almost three weeks ago. I can scarcely believe it. Of course, we spent a week in the Easter holidays at my parents' place, where I barely listened to music. But still, the feeling of time speeding up as we go is something that strikes me more often these days. So, I'll try to give a roundup of my listening experiences over the last few weeks in a slightly more compact form than usual.

I'll start with the recording that I've been listening to most recently. Arco Iris is a recent ECM album by Amina Alaoui, the specialist in arab-andalusian music, whom I got to know via the Siwan project with Jon Balke. Over the last few years I have enjoyed ECM's contributions to the classical, jazz and crossover catalogue immensely. Lately, however, I've started to think that Eicher formula was starting to wear. ECM has always benefited from its niche status but now it's maybe getting too big and exposed for its own good. But then comes along an album such as Arco Iris where everything just fits and one is happy that the old magic hasn't disappeared.

It starts with the cover: a tantalising image of vast and elementary spaces, awash in a palette of bronze, gold and shimmering metal, that kindles a desire for the infinite (photo: Alejandro Torres). The album is almost exclusively devoted to Alaoui's own music, set to her own words or those from early or late medieval poets and mystics. She sings, as is her custom, in arabic, Spanish and Portuguese. Despite the mixture of literary sources, fado is the unifying thread that runs through the whole album. The ensemble that supports Alaoui is of much more modest scope than the full-fledged baroque orchestra plus various soloists on Siwan. Here we have Saïffallah Ben Abderrazak on violin, Sofiane Negra on oud, José Luis Monton on flamenco guitar, Eduardo Miranda on mandolin and Idriss Agnel on percussion. All these musicians are astonishingly accomplished and provide a masterful foil for Alaoui's tantalising voice. The music, produced by Eicher, has been recorded in the studio of the Swiss Radio and Television in Lugano. But the ECM team has created something very different from a typical studio ambiente for this album. The sound is fairly warm and reverberant without losing focus, however. We have the impression that we are listening to a performance in a small chapel, or in a cloister garden. There is this combined feeling of space and intimacy with fits the music just right. It's truly ravishing. The music itself then. There are 12 tracks totalling to more than an hour's music. Those familiar with Siwan will recognise Alaoui's style of florid and passionate extemporisation on arab-iberan themes. Her voice launches into amazing arabesques. In the booklet she writes:

The challenge of the fado singer is having the audacity that comes with freedom and savouring the risk of learning to walk on the moon, an extraordinary balancing act in which the old landmarks no longer suffice. I set foot on unknown ground. Teeter to the right and left. Body and voice suspended in atmosphere. I spin round and then slide, lose my way and try not to fall. Drawn in on the breath of strange, dizzying arabesque, which pulverises all symmetry and all sense of centre as it moves. It is a curve of abstract and relative truth, a sinuous improvised line, which spirits away the finite and flirts with the infinite. Pure equilibrium on this lunar field. Yet music as mysticism knows this modus vivendi. 

The mood is generally intimate and reflective, but there are long tracks (Flor de Nieve, Ya laylo layl, and particularly Las Morillas de Jaén) that are more lively and dramatic. The accompaniment is, as already said, stellar. The timbres of the different string instruments mingle in the most delicate fashion. Negra's oud sounds wonderfully mysterious. I'm particularly impressed by José Luis Monton's pyrotechnics (but always at the service of the music) on his flamenco guitar. It meshes beautifully with Miranda's mandolin. Idriss Agnel's percussion is most discreetly but effectively present. Abderrazak's violin breathes langourous and poetic lines.

As said: on this album everything just fits: the artwork, the recording, the liner notes, the music, the voice, the ensemble. My confidence in Eicher's project is fully restored.

Nils Frahm: Live Concert, Felt - Ansatz der Machine: Heat

Last Saturday (Feb 18th) there was an opportunity to hear Nils Frahm live, just next door at the Leuven STUK arts center. The evening was kicked off by Belgian band Ansatz der Machine who presented their recently released CD Heat. An intriguing setup with 8 band members on instruments as diverse as mandoline, guitar, steel guitar, French horn, sax, violin, percussion and synths. A discrete female vocalist complements the opulent electro-acoustic background. Heat struck me as a coherent, accomplished and sophisticated effort, a darkly suggestive (and occasionally very loud) score to an imaginary David Lynch-movie. Definitly worth rehearing.

Nils Frahm, then. What to expect live from this intriguing pianist, composer, improviser? I didn't dare to imagine how fragile fabrications such as his Wintermusik and Felt would fare under glaring stage lights. I'd seen a few live performances of his on Arte TV, none of which really captured the magic of his studio recordings. However, the Leuven concert was a captivating experience enlivened by Frahm's boyish enthusiasm and his unforced communication with the audience. Frahms worked with two keyboards (computer-enhanced buffet pianos), set perpendicularly to one another, his back to the audience. In addition, a synthesiser on top of one of the pianos. The set was different from anything I'd heard from him before. Sure he started with Said and Done (from The Bells), which he has been doing for ever ('a running gag' as he calls it) as it helps him to master his stage fright (again in his own words). But improvisiatonally he transformed it into something barely recognisable from the recorded version. I'm sorry I didn't tape the concert as I have difficulties remembering what he exactly played. But it was an enchanting mix that brought one dimension of his art very clearly into relief and that is its fundamentally hymnic character. Frahm's music is deeply celebratory, a youthful and poetic homage to the wonder of being alive. It puts him in the league of fellow pianists like Jarrett, Tsabropoulos and Mehldau. It seems to me that there is a minimalist streak in his music that is coming ever more clearly to the fore, stressing rhythmic complexities brought about by phase shifts, and slow but very effective modulations. Harmonically his music is rather 'safe' and sometimes I wish he would stray off into more adventurous territory. But there is no denying that Frahms has an uncanny ability to stay at the right side of the delicate line between  poignant art and mawkish kitch. One of the songs was played on synthesizer only. In another he asked the technical guys to progressively dim the light until he was playing in pitch darkness and then to gradually re-illuminate again, as if we were living through an artificial sunrise. Another surprise was the penultimate song in which he suddenly was joined by an alter ego at the keyboard, sharing an intricately embroidered 4-hand toccata amongts the two of them. For the final song he requested a suggestion from the audience but as a coherent and audible response was not forthcoming he proceeded with an extemporisation on the beautiful Ambre from Wintermusik. After the concert he dashed to the back end of the hall (where altogether we had been sitting for almost three hours on our bums!) to personally sell his CDs. 

Paddy McAloon: I Trawl The Megahertz - Nils Frahm: Felt - Autumn Chorus: The Village to the Vale

I fell into the ambient trap again. Well sort of. And not that I'm particularly minding. How did it happen? A few weeks ago, after having listened to Prefab Sprout's Let's Change The World With Music, I ordered Paddy McAloon's I Trawl The Megahertz. It took ages to get here and I'd forgotten about it when it came in the mail. What a surprise when I dropped it into the CD player. The album starts with a 22 minute long extemporisation. Female voice over a minimalist chamber music accompaniment (soloists of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, apparently). A long, dreamlike story. A sequence of poetic vignettes from a life. It fits and doesn't fit together as dreams are wont to do. And then the story behind it. Somewhere in the late 1990s McAloon was diagnosed with a medical disorder that (temporarily) impaired his vision. Pretty much immobilised he resorted to listening to radio shows. He started recording them, picking up isolated phrases or even words, splicing them, weaving them into the backbone of a narrative, which he proceeded polish and pad. Then he started to set the words to music. And so, by trawling the ether, the album was born. The long title track - narrated by mysterious Yvonne Connors - is followed by eight other, shorter tracks, most of them instrumental, some with voice. Paddy himself is only heard on the beautiful ballad Sleeping Rough. I need some more time to make up my mind about this weird album. The sophistication of the recording and the overall mood reminds me somewhat of Pat Metheny's Secret Story, although the music is at first sight very different. But just as the latter I Trawl seems to sway between enchantment and kitsch. An Amazon reviewer says you need to hear I Trawl The Megahertz at least a hundred times in order to get to the bottom of it. I'm certainly willing to give Paddy McAloon the benefit of the doubt. So I'll be returning to this album soon.


Ever since I got to know Nils Frahm's Wintermusik and The Bells, I'm holding this young German composer, pianist and improviser in high esteem. Again, we're in the shadowy realm of high art and bathos but Frahm seems to have an uncanny feeling for staying on the right side of the fence (which colleagues such as Dustin O'Halloran and Max Richter are not always able to). I'm always deeply touched by his music. This little video, in all its simplicity, I haven't quite been able to forget. Next week, Frahm is coming to Leuven, again, and I was happy to get one of the last available tickets. I hadn't listened to Frahm's latest album, Felt, and I have been trawling YouTube to get an idea of what this has to offer. I haven't been able to dig up all the tracks, but what I've heard did please me and provided me with solace whilst I was pulling together this big, complicated, unwieldy report during late night shifts this week. Felt is a very intimate affair, oozing a velvety nocturnal atmosphere that keeps you wrapped nice and warm in your aural cocoon. Allegedly the album came into being quite serendipitously. Frahm was looking for ways to play his piano very late at night when he had the idea to dampen the strings with a piece of ... felt: "Originally I wanted to do my neighbours a favour by damping the sound... If I want to play piano during the quiet of the night, the only respectful way is by layering thick felt in front of the strings and using very gentle fingers." The music was recorded by putting the mikes as closely as possibly to the hammers of the piano, with Frahm playing the instrument pianissimo with the most delicate touch. The result is a whirring, microscopic, intimate soundscape from which the piano sound emerges in a dreamlike fashion. Some tracks feature other instruments too, such as tintinnabuli, synths or tapes. The atmosphere is beautifully caught. The 8-minute final track, More, is for the time being my favourite. The rhythmic buoyancy of its first section connects to Wintermusik, but the improvisatory passage that follows upon it transports me back to the more elated Bells. There is a fine coda which reminds me of the music we used - what is it: three years ago? - to accompany our final slide show in the masterclass with Lorenzo Castore. Truly memorable, that experience. I look forward to listening to the full album very soon. And I hope the live performance will not disappoint me.

Listening to Nils Frahm's Felt I started to look up some other ambient-feel music. I hit upon the beautiful YouTube channel of untitledesigner: a feast for the ears and the eyes! Another find was Benjamin Vis' now defunct blog Nieuwe Geluiden. The first tip I picked up from BV was a hit: Autumn Chorus' The Village to the Vale. The album is a first and is only available for download from Bandcamp. This band of 4 Brightonians produces an expansive, richly layered and mellow sound that strikes me as a slightly friendlier version of Sigur Ros. It's post-rock that is drenched in nostalgia and an intimation of transitoriness. A British lineage that goes back to Pink Floyd and the Moody Blues is very much in evidence as well. I would have sworn that Marcus Mumford, from the folkrock band Mumford and Sons, was taking the lead vocals, but it's not the case. The resemblance between the voices is uncanny, though. I ran through the album a couple of times and fell particularly for the wonderful finale, consisting of the 16 minute track Rosa and the final Bye Bye Now. The long stretch is impeccably paced, lending it an almost symphonic feel and taking the listener on a tantalising journey that feels like reading a Murakami novel in one go. Amazing what these guys pulled off in their first album. This is a definite keeper. Thanks, BV.

Dustin O'Halloran - Lumière

Continuing with the soft stuff, although I'm starting to get an itch. Soon Bartok will strike again, with a vengeance, I am sure.

This is a recently issued album by Dustin O'Halloran, who hails from the same musical ecosystem as Max Richter, Peter Broderick, Nils Frahm and Johann Johannsson. O'Halloran seems to have garnered a loyal following with two previous CDs with solo piano work (I haven't heard them). And he has produced a film score for Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette. Here he mixes piano with string quartet in a suave soundscape that would present a perfect foil for a dentist's waiting room. Max Richter is never far away. Ann thought it reminded her of Cliff Martinez's soundtrack for Soderbergh's Solaris, and she's right. But Solaris is a far more rewarding work. Lumière is a little bit too much of chocolate box romanticism to keep one involved. There are a few moments here and there of genuine, touching introspection. But for the best part it doesn't really catch fire.

Nils Frahm - Wintermusik

Originally compiled and produced as a Christmas gift for family and friends, Wintermusik is certainly meant to be exquisitely beautiful, but it does not sound like it wants to be a crowd pleaser.  Nils Frahm plays three instruments - piano, celesta, reed organ - with beguiling simplicity. Dynamics are pp throughout, tempo is steady and slow start to finish. This is a mood study, mere texture and harmony. It is the musical equivalent of a Kertesz picture: a modest, plain, but subtle and magical slice of life as it slips day after day through our fingers. Or take this little amateur video that somebody slapped on top of the first track of the album: a train ride through a wonderfully open, snowy landscape at dusk. Captures the wistful atmosphere to perfection. If Frahm can do this when he is 28, what will he be able to offer at 82? I am very sorry I won't be around to hear it.

Max Richter - Memoryhouse

Max Richter himself then. He's a German-born British composer (1966), who has come on the radar with his evocative score for Ari Foldman's Waltz with Bashir. I've been skirting Richter's orbit for many years without actually making the connection. He studied with, amongst others, Berio, and was co-founder of the contemporary music ensemble Piano Circus. I remember their recordings on the Argo label. In 1996 he collaborated with the dance band Future Sound of London on their album Dead Cities. I actually have that in my collection (thanks to PC who made it part of our exchange project). In 2002 Richter produced his first solo album, Memoryhouse, which went out of print but was reissued a few years ago on the Fat Cat label.

I will be brief about the album itself. It's skillfully composed, lush film music for a non-existent motion picture (apparently it has been used for a BBC documentary on the nazi extermination camps). With its sweeping melodies, rich orchestration (at times) and general mood of loss and nostalgia it would do extremely well as a aural foil for a pompous period drama. However, I find it lacks subtlety. Some of the tracks (Sarajevo) are way over the top to my taste (think Gorecki's Third in overdrive). So, it is only suitable for moderate consumption. There is, however, one track which I find truly spellbinding and that is Maria, The Poet, 1915. It simply superimposes a recording of Maria Tsvetaeva declamating a poem in unbelievably stirring and musical Russian on a slow, darkly-melancholic, oceanic, undulating string melody. It's not subtle either, but it really moves me everytime I hear it!

In its genre, Memoryhouse has something to offer. I am quite certain Richter will grow into one of the most prominent film composers around. I hope he will flex his muscles on more serious undertakings too.

Nils Frahm - The Bells

I got to Nils Frahm via a little detour. A few weeks ago I saw an impressive movie. Waltz with Bashir is an animation movie directed by Ari Folman that recounts the horrors of the 1982 Israeli campaign in the Lebanon. I was not only struck by the film but also by the music, written by Max Richter,  a composer unbeknownst to me. I poked a little bit around and hit a seemingly rich vein of many other musicians I hadn't heard about. One of them is Nils Frahm, a young German pianist, born in 1982. The Bells is a solo piano album, improvised and recorded over two nights in November 2008 in a Berlin church. Five and a half hours of music was condensed into a 40 minute recital. Instigator behind the scenes was Peter Broderick, another young and eclectic musician I hadn't heard of before.

Frahm's recital is impressive. Whilst harmonically, formally and gesturally the music doesn't break any new ground, I feel it is never banal or cloying. We are somewhere in the territory explored by Brad Mehldau, Keith Jarrett or Vasilis Tsabropoulos. Frahm does not have the stature (yet) of these giants in the contemporary solo piano niche, but what ties him to these men is the basically uplifting and hymnic vein that runs through the whole recital. His tone - lean, but full and deep - makes it easy and rewarding for the listener to connect. In some tracks (Said and done, Down down, My things) he really reaches for the level of exultation that we find in some of Mehldau's most brilliant extemporisations. The recital is short but it is well sequenced. There is not a weak moment in a natural flow between rapture and introspection which ends with the rather modest and laconic Somewhere nearby. Throughout one senses a disciplined and authoritative musical imagination, a passion that is kept in check by a desire for understatement and a genuine identification with the instrument.

The recording has a lot of presence. 2 mikes at the piano and 3 more to record the resonant acoustics of the church. At one point the bells of the Grunewaldkirche intrude gently in the musical proceedings. But they are only a natural complement to an affirmative musical fabric in which their celebratory intonations are woven deeply into. 

I look forward to hearing more from Nils Frahm.

Jon Balke & Amina Alaoui - Siwan/Ralph Towner - Anthem/Trygve Seim - Different Rivers

After the intense listening experiences with Mahler's Seventh and the BFO Wagner concert, I felt like a pause. For a moment I wanted something less demanding, something simpler. And so I ended up rummaging in my collection of ECM cds, selecting three different recordings to carry me through the previous weekend.

What happens to be common to all of them is a desire to blur the boundaries between genres. Towner, with his solo guitar, straddles classical and jazz. Trygve Seim and his jazzband explore territory connecting jazz and folk. Jon Balke and Amina Alaoui offer an adventurous combination of Western baroque music and Arab-Andalusian songs from the Muslim period. And all of them flirt with the boundaries between the written and the improvised.

Siwan is likely the most tantalising project of them all, emerging from an eclectic literary and musical constellation. Amina Alaoui is a formidable scholar and artist, and one of the most gifted interpreters of the Gharnati tradition: the songs that survived at the Granada court, the last holdout against the Reconquista, and have survived centuries through oral transmission. Jon Balke is a Norwegian composer and jazz, folk and fusion pianist who won fame with his Magnetic North Orchestra. It is Balke who composed the music for the Siwan album, with Alaoui stepping in for poem adaptation and melodic co-composition.  Jon Hassell is an American experimental trumpetist. Kheir Eddine M'Kachiche is an Algerian violinist and long-time accompanist of Amina Alaoui.They are backed up by a full-fledged baroque ensemble led by Bjarte Eike. Moorish and Iberian poets from the turbulent 11th and 12th centuries offer the literary raw material for Alaoui's songs. There are two excursions to 16th century Spain with Lope de Vega and St John of the Cross, the mystic who established the order of the barefoot Carmelites.

The journey starts with a purely instrumental invocation led by Kheir Eddine's mysterious violin. The following, short song O Andalusin connects most poignantly. Richly harmonised it opens a vast and colourful panorama on a world that was on the verge of disappearing. Alaoui's voice is powerful and strikingly husky. The unfolding music is generally in a slow tempo, mournful (Ondas do mar de Vigo), longing or pensive (Ashiyin Raïqin) in tone , with discrete ostinato percussion sometimes lending an air of inevitability (Itimad). There are more lively intermezzos too with songs that sound strikingly contemporary (Jadwa, A la dina dana). Alaoui switches from Arabic to Spanish and Portuguese with admirable facility. The unfamiliar blend of sonorities (baroque orchestra with harpsichord, lute, theorbo and recorder, Balke's synths, Hassel's nasal trumpet, oriental percussion) works wonderfully well. The hypnotic finale is built around two long extemporations (10 and 12 minutes long, respectively): Thulâthiyat ('trilogy') is based on a poem by the great Sufi mystic Husayn Mansour Al-Hallaj (857-922) that describes the stages of the ascetic's path. Alaoui writes in the liner notes: "At first the consciousness remains external to the essence of ecstasy. It becomes an astonished spectator, then becomes disoriented, and finally joins the paroxysm, dispossessed by the ego in ecstasy: a ceaseless transformation through vital alternation without ever achieving permanent stability." The song opens with a percussion-underpinned recitation and steadily gathers momentum to a hypnotic climax.

Toda ciencia trascendiendo is based on a gentle, sombre march rhythm wrapped in adventurously modulating unisono strings and M'Kachiche's melancholy violin. Alaoui recites in an almost matter of fact way St John's Couplets written in a state of transcendental contemplation in which he gives an account of how he found his way to a 'perfect realm of holiness and peace (...) beyond all science'. Only in the final line of each couplet, 'toda ciencia transcendiendo', Alaoui lets the voice soar to spine-tingling effect. A lively instrumental coda with Hassel's stratospheric trumpet hovering over insistent percussion, brings the album to an end.