Michael Pisaro/Reinier van Houdt - the earth and the sky (lossless)

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ErstClass 001-3

The first release on the new ErstClass imprint, an epic collection of Michael Pisaro's work for piano from 1994-2016, 11 pieces totalling 223 minutes. The pieces are performed by Dutch pianist Reinier van Houdt (Current 93, Walter Marchetti, Robert Ashley, etc.) with close oversight by Pisaro as well as his own musical input at times. The gorgeous 8-panel digipak was designed by Yuko Zama (also the lead producer), and the 8 page booklet features liner notes by Marc Medwin.

For CD format, go to this page.
TRACK LIST

DISC 1
1.  half-sleep beings (5:03)
2.  Akasa (12:47)
3.  distance (1) (9:46)
4.  the earth and the sky (35:58)
5.  pi (920-994) (6:58)

DISC 2
1.  pi (2352-2420) (7:16)
2.  Fade (22:20)
3.  Les Jours, Mon Aubépine (13:43)
4.  fields have ears (2) (32:12)
5.  C. Wolff (3:37)

DISC 3
1.  green hour, grey future (73:25)

(released October 17, 2016)
CREDITS

Reinier van Houdt: piano
Michael Pisaro: compositions, electronics

recorded at the Wild Beast, CalArts, California in May-June 2015
recorded and mixed by Michael Pisaro
mastered by Taku Unami

booklet photos by Tashi Wada, Michael Pisaro and Reinier van Houdt
design by Yuko Zama

produced by Yuko Zama and Jon Abbey
REVIEWS

Bill Meyer, Dusted
More than sheet music, more than the orchestra, maybe even more than the force of 100 years of ingrained tradition, the piano is the 2001: A Space Odyssey monolith of classical music. It’s the instrument that imposed a tuning regimen around the world, the instrument so omnipresent that you can hear it and yet not hear a damn note it plays, so vividly communicative is the shorthand of prior acquaintance. You just hear “piano.” So it makes sense that the first release from the determinedly goalpost-moving Erstwhile Records’ new classical imprint, ErstClass, should face that monolith head on.

But keep in mind that the label is really just a conduit and that the music is all Michael Pisaro’s. Pisaro is an American composer strongly associated with the Wandelweiser movement (which he explains here), whose music is often noted for its quietness, although it is by no means all quiet, and for its willingness to extrapolate a post-Morton Feldman aesthetic of stillness, duration and unabashed beauty. This music is perhaps best understood not by these attributes, but by a shared commitment to get at essentials. Short or long, sparse or dense, acoustic or electro-acoustic, it is guided by a determination not to be burdened by anything that doesn’t need to be present. This goes hand in hand with a determination to completely engage with what does need to be there. Pisaro’s music has often employed sound sources (electronic tone generators, field recordings, electric guitars and pounds of rice) and transmission methods (text scores, months-long email huddles with performing musicians) that are new to classical music practice, and he functions well outside classical boundaries — consider the arranged and manipulated natural sounds used on Crosshatches and Continuum Unbound. But he has the academic background and intellectual/technical acumen necessary to operate within said boundaries. He can be as classical as he needs or wants to be, and he’s been dealing with the flagship instrument of European-rooted classical music for a long time.

The Earth And The Sky draws together 11 pieces composed between 1994 and 2016, which is no small feat when you consider that Dutch pianist Reinier van Houdt recorded his performances in 2015. Hey, this is the 21st century — there’s no reason why a composer can’t use recording technology to continue composing after some tracks have been laid down. Van Houdt sticks mainly to conventional piano sounds, exactingly recorded with a multi-microphone set-up that balances the sounds of instrument and room. Pisaro contributes recordings taken from the grounds where the recording took place, radio noise, and sine waves, which are Pisaro’s signature sound element. The latter seem to vibrate from within the piano’s notes, mutating them into pulsing entities, plumped objects, or simply enhanced editions of themselves. What Pisaro does to those notes parallels what he does to classical music. He plays it straight, jolts new live into it and modifies it at the genetic level. Van Houdt is an apt confederate in this endeavor. He came to the conservatory already steeped in experimental practice, but learned there to love Chopin and Liszt, and his choices are guided to this day by what he likes to play. Now there’s a radical notion — play something because it feels good. But that appreciation of the sensual qualities of a note and the silence that surrounds it is the life force that makes this often sparse and expansive music beautiful. Van Houdt comes not to bury the piano’s essential piano-ness but to revel in it. Since he is doing it with Pisaro’s music, his revelry is distilled to essentials of solidity and space, movement and stillness. Pisaro and van Houdt come not to topple the monolith but to polish it until it reflects them, and my, doesn’t The Earth And The Sky shine. 


Michele Palozzo, esoteros
In an extraordinarily providential way I recently learned a splendid neologism coined by Prof. Sianne Ngai, who explained it in an essay published in a collection titled “Ugly Feelings” (Harvard University Press, 2005). The term stuplime is derived by Kant’s “sublime”, and in this new form it is relatable to artistic creation and fruition in the postmodern era: we could define it as a state of perfect compensation between boredom and ecstasy. Later this idea was deepened and exemplified with great accuracy in “Boring Formless Nonsense” (2013) by Eldritch Priest, whom in turn quotes a testimony by Chedomir Barone about the long and grueling performance of “Piano Installation With Derangements”:

“I was perhaps a little over half way through the piece when I had a series of revelations. First I realized that I was no longer consciously controlling my hands, or even reading the music. […] Next, it occurred to me that I didn’t even know “how” to play the piano. […] Finally, I realized that nothing much made sense. I was smacking some wooden box with my hands for reasons unknown, and somehow sounds were happening as a result of my actions. Everything – the music, the piano, the concert, the people sitting there – seemed utterly foreign and utterly ludicrous.”

In this theoretical as well as “real-life” reference I finally found a cue to start anew reflecting on the (anti)expressive microcosm of the Wandelweiser collective, of which Michael Pisaro is among the first and leading representatives along with Antoine Beuger and Jürg Frey. Star-critic Alex Ross calls them “composers of quiet,” accentuating the post-Cage ascendance of their compositional experiments, undoubtedly a legacy of the twentieth-century American school and of Fluxus pioneers; But conceptually there is a lot more than this, and perhaps even more awareness in the goals pursued through bare scores, as close to Morton Feldman’s “vertical thought” as to Bernhard Günter and Steve Roden’s lowercase aesthetics.

In these cases we should definitely speak of art as uneventfulness, conducted at a slow pace by a sense of attraction and absorption into nothing. There’s no more longing for the utmost inclusiveness of reality in the musical universe, and vice versa, but instead the creation of a parallel plane on which sound can appear both transient and immanent, characters that end up eliding each other.
Truth is, a similar art requires much more than it seems: it really isn’t simply (if only it were simple!) about paying attention, emptying one’s mind and concentrating every perceptive effort towards the sound itself, but accessing a dimension where sound transcends itself and stops to mean, even as a mere psycho-acoustic phenomenon.

This seems to be the level immediately after Feldman’s objectification, which remains the primary reference for Pisaro’s solo work (1994-2016), performed here by close collaborator Reinier van Houdt. The being-time already yearning for the surpassing of musical dominance, absolutizing its constituent elements, in longer scores appears as a distillate of being, not as an affirmative gesture but as an extraneous and elusive presence.
Notes and bichords, no longer qualifiable as dissonant, non-consequential or geometrically exact, become just like dust, connected by means of osmosis to their “ghosts” (the natural harmonics of “Akasa”) or the almost absent hum of radio waves – captured by Pisaro in the surrounding area of the recording site –crossing the clearest sky you could imagine (“The Earth And The Sky”).

In the two “Pi” segments the iteration of a single tone, in the first case, circulates through a range of acoustic processings, while in the second it aims to generate an artificial resonance mimicking a reflection untouched by the actual gesture, albeit minimal. In “Fade” resonates Ligeti’s “Musica Ricercata”, stripped of its original dramatic tension and sprawled between long intervals that make it look like a cycle of crystalline études, each one concluded in itself. With a more regular progress, “Les Jours, Mon Aubépine” and “Fields Have Ears (2)” are directly related to the masterpiece “Triadic Memories”, the Feldmanian meditation par excellence.
Finally, with a dedication to van Houdt, “Green Hour, Grey Future” is the latest composition (whose title also inspired the clear-cut colors of the artwork) and occupies the entire space of the third disk: it’s the first gradual opening to a more widely shared form of expression, a post-romanticism retracing Harold Budd’s ambient progressions, sometimes aligned with inverted resonances, short waves and other low frequency electronic inserts, hardly noticeable without the help of good headphones.

There couldn’t have been a more solid cornerstone than the earth and the sky for the new ErstClass series, ideally representing the primary elements originating after a complete tabula rasa over musical tradition. The heavy historical load hanging on the piano has completely dissolved: with the same approach to any remaining classicism, Wandelweiser goes back to the neutral root of the instrument – perhaps never really explored – and in a (radical) way it always puts on the table the contemporary dilemma concerning the very idea of artistic expression. Many people still reject the fact that such a research has the right to go on, yet it is (also) on this matter that the new composition obsessively questions itself, looking for nothing but with a sense of orientation more pronounced than it may seem.