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TRACK LIST
1. Ghosts of the Site (07:00) 2. Event Storm (20:00) 3. The Poem of Names (17:00) (released February 5, 2018) CREDITS
Shades of Eternal Night [2015-2017] composed, recorded and mastered by Michael Pisaro field recordings from Syros, Greece and Southern California in 2015 and 2017 piano performed by Reinier van Houdt, recorded in The Wild Beast, CalArts, June 2015 cover photo of Ermoupoli, Syros by Michael Pisaro inside image by Michael Pisaro design by Yuko Zama thanks to Keith Rowe |
Shades of Eternal Night (GW 015) is largely derived from piano recordings by Reinier van Houdt. It contains several field recordings made on Syros (Greece) as well. The piece is in three sections as follows:
I. Ghosts of the Site (7'00) II. Event Storm (20'00) III. The Poem of Names (17'00) REVIEWS
Nathan Thomas, Fluid Radio Ping. Ding. Ting. Ching. Cling. Clang. Bong. Dong. In between, faint dragging, shuffling, scrunching, shifting, sloshing, gleaming. This is ‘The Poem of Names’, the final track from Michael Pisaro’s “Shades of Eternal Night”, each sharp metallic tone a different name, each of them exceeding words the way a belly exceeds a tight t-shirt. Later on there are wispy ambient chords, on each sounding bearing more and more audible traces of their origin in rapidly hammered piano notes. This piano, played by Reinier van Houdt and recorded during the sessions for 2016’s expansive “the earth and the sky”, forms the foundation of this more recent album: the piano, and more specifically the piano’s excess, the imprints it made in a particular acoustic space, the resonances and overtones that spill out from within its own body. ‘Ghosts of the Site’ is really all ghost — constructed from spectral aftertones, reverberations, and resonances divorced from their former bodies. ‘Event Storm’ is another aptly-titled piece, with rapidly-hammered piano battling with waves and wind, crashing and thundering, tossed about in a storm. It is all very theatrical, the ideal soundtrack to an epic like The Iliad (the album takes its title from one of the paintings of Cy Twombly’s symbolic re-telling of The Iliad in his FIFTY DAYS AT ILIAM, and features field recordings and cover photos made on the island of Syros in the Aegean Sea). The piano cycles through various pitches and tonalities, eventually breaking through to a major key before stopping. The section of calm that follows is deceiving, because the storm returns with a vengeance towards the end of the piece. The fact that Pisaro came to The Iliad via Twombly, rather than directly, suggests something about the mutability of ancient Greek myth. Though on the surface they are melodramatic tales of gods and monsters, heroes and battles, they possess a remarkable ability to adapt, like viruses mutating as they transfer from host to host. Even landscapes have become infected: it is hard to look at the album’s cover photo of the town of Ermoupoli, with its white buildings and pastel-coloured roofs leading down to the Aegean, and not think of the Greeks storming Troy, or of Odysseus bound the mast of his ship as his ear-plugged companions row past the Sirens. Our perceptions, our cultures, our ways of making sense of the world are caught in the aftershocks of ancient events that spread through art and poetry as a sort of excess of historical time. Maybe it is these traces, as much as those of the piano, that Pisaro is interested in corralling and encouraging to mutate once more. (May 2018) Bill Meyer, Dusted The compositions on Michael Pisaro and Reinier van Houdt’s previous collaboration, The Earth and Sky, dated from 1994 through 2016. This seemed remarkable given that van Houdt recorded his performances in May and June 2015. But it turns out that Pisaro had only begun to work with the recordings that the Dutch pianist had made of his pieces; not only did he make a few more compositional decisions after the sessions, he went on to make van Houdt’s recordings one of the essential elements of Shades of Eternal Night. But where The Earth And Sky used post-production to make adjustments to performances of pre-existing compositions, methodologically Shades of Eternal Night is closer to Pisaro’s other 2018 release, Étant Donnés. On that CD, Pisaro used other people’s recordings as malleable raw material. Likewise, the piano is raw material for acousmatic compositions on Shades. The term acousmatic refers to the experience of hearing a sound without seeing what caused it. In the mid-20th century, when musique concrete was a new and radical thing and nearly all recorded music still derived from playing instruments more or less at the same time, that experience was a paradigm shift. Now it’s how things are done, which makes it ripe for re-visitation by someone who well knows how radical the sundering of sound from source once was. Van Houdt’s playing is just one component of this construction. Pisaro also recorded environmental sounds in Greece and California and subjected all of the ingredients to plenty of filtering, culling, refraction and extraction. These processes hollow out the piano’s voice and plant incongruous, sometimes hard to tame sounds into its midst. In particular, wind is usually a field recorder’s bane, but Pisaro uses it like an auditory stand-in for the unseen but equally withering actions he has visited upon the keyboard’s output. The piano proposes drama and emotional intensity; surf accepts the challenge and throws it back at that puny box of strings. The title Shades of Eternal Night implies the presence of death, but the music’s inhuman elements suggest that natural actions will survive humans without even noticing that they’re gone. While Pisaro uses highly evolved technology to handle this material, he’s more like a magician, applying the painfully limited knowledge of man to secure an audience with powers far more powerful and enduring. (6/8/2018) Michele Palozzo, Ondarock (Italian) Due uscite che si controbilanciano, quelle che sanciscono il ritorno in attività l'etichetta Gravity Wave di Michael Pisaro, compositore del collettivo Wandelweiser ed esploratore infaticabile del terreno di confine tra musica minimale, suono naturale e silenzio. Una sensibilità che sta conoscendo una propria piccola fortuna anche nelle sale da concerto americane ed europee, oltre a un’ampia discografia che ne attesta il crescente riconoscimento a livello internazionale. E se da un lato “Étant donnés” rappresenta la deviazione dalla norma (ammesso che così si possa definire, nel caso di una musica talmente libera da schemi tradizionali), “Shades Of Eternal Night” è una nuova pregnante opera in tre movimenti che mette in dialogo lo strumento classico per eccellenza, il pianoforte, e field recordings effettuati da Pisaro nel sud della California e in Grecia, durante uno dei suoi consueti viaggi per il mondo. Le parti strumentali sono affidate a Reinier Van Houdt, il quale si era già occupato di registrare l’integrale per piano solo di Pisaro, pubblicata due anni fa su Erstwhile (“The Earth And The Sky”, 2016). Ma molti dei suoni che possiamo ascoltare nei tre quarti d’ora complessivi dell’opera possono essere solo in parte attribuibili allo strumento: per quanto misurata, la sua identità nei brani pubblicati in precedenza era inequivocabile laddove “Shades Of Eternal Night”, in luogo di una piena presenza della sorgente acustica, sembra favorirne l’eco, come un’ombra resa alternatamente lontana e vicina attraverso manipolazioni di volume, velocità e definizione. Ciò che ne risulta è simile a una lunga sonata assemblata in studio, tesa ad avvicinare con ogni mezzo a disposizione l’idea di un ascolto “fenomenico” ed elementale. Ne danno piena evidenza, dopo il soffuso drone introduttivo di “Ghosts Of The Site”, i venti minuti di “Event Storm”: un vero e proprio paesaggio sonoro prima della tempesta, scosso dal vento, dallo scroscio del mare e, sullo sfondo, da cascate d’intensità impressionistica provenienti dal lato sinistro della tastiera; minaccioso sulle prime, eppure vieppiù assorto in una serena contemplazione di un prorompente accadimento naturale, dove al montare dei tuoni nel cielo il pianoforte risponde con uno spostamento verso le note alte, sino a sfiorare per la prima volta l’apice di una struggente melodia neoclassica. Dalla pittura figurativa – benché pervasa da una vibrante anima turneriana – “The Poem Of Names” passa improvvisamente all’astrazione, concentrandosi per diversi minuti sul suono di pennelli che sfregano con decisione sulla tela, amplificata per mezzo di microfoni. È un suono che inizialmente può ricordare i fruscii di Keith Rowe, mentre “agisce” la sua chitarra in posizione orizzontale come un crepuscolare action painter: il suo nome è sì citato nei ringraziamenti, ma per l’utilizzo di un sample nel quale il pioniere dell’improvvisazione britannica percuoteva un’incudine, già presente nel recente duo con Pisaro (“13 Thirteen”) e nella parte finale del magnum opus “The Room Extended”. Altri suoni percussivi più leggeri, inizialmente acuti, si fanno strada in quello che per gran parte del tempo appare come un movimento rado e inconsequenziale, finché l’ombra del pianoforte non riemerge, per pochi secondi, con una luminosità che si riverbera proprio nel contrasto coi brevi tratti incolore che la precedono. Come già “Étant donnés” (dall’ultima opera installativa di Marcel Duchamp), anche “Shades Of Eternal Night” eredita il suo titolo dall’opera di un artista del Novecento conservata al Philadelphia Museum of Art: si tratta di una di dieci sezioni dell’opera Fifty Days At Iliam di Cy Twombly, che a sua volta si ispira alla traduzione di Alexander Pope dell’Iliade di Omero; disposti in ordine sequenziale, ciascuno dei dieci quadri sintetizza con parole e figure elementari alcuni momenti cruciali del poema epico, dove in più occasioni “l’eterna notte” ricopre i caduti in battaglia; nella tela titolare, una nuvola grigia acquarellata si eleva serena in uno spazio vuoto di colore bianco/rosato. Il cerchio si chiude, rivelandoci “Shades Of Eternal Night” nel suo essere un’allegoria simbolica della morte in senso individuale e assoluto, artistico e umano, nonché un’opera molto più profonda del suo immediato livello esperienziale – già di per sé mesmerico. (29/03/2018) |
