Anyone who has heard the Beatles’ Revolution No 9 will be familiar with musique concrète: a compositional style based around the manipulation of existing recordings and found sounds, one pioneered by the likes of Pierre Schaeffer, Edgard Varèse and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Sovereign Bodies/Ritual Taxonomy is very much a sound collage in this vein: a jarring sonic montage assembled by Belfast-based composer Jamie Thompson featuring snatches of free jazz, opera, hip-hop, electronica, spoken word and broadcast news. It sounds like someone maniacally dialling between multiple stations on multiple radios.
Crucially, however, these disparate snippets of music have been specifically recorded for this project. And, as the album progresses, you realise that it is not random or formless, but a virtual audio drama themed around asylum and migration, displacement and assimilation, detention centres and perilous boat journeys. The few male voices here represent bureaucratic authority; the rest are female voices of resistance. The spoken-word poet Felicia Olusanya serves as a kind of narrator; the voice of operatic soprano Amy Ní Fhearraigh is put on to dubplates and manipulated by turntablist Mariam Rezaei; saxophonist Catherine Sikora Mingus howls over a doomy gothic chorale.
These moments of sonic freedom are set in gloriously odd contexts. Musical totems of Englishness, such as The Lark Ascending, Nimrod and Jerusalem, are sonically mutilated and shrouded in electronic effects. Hymns are superimposed over jazz-punk freakouts. There are re-creations of speeches instructing refugees to “integrate and ingratiate”, and interrogation methods used against asylum seekers. One operatic “aria” is actually Ní Fhearraigh reciting data from a now-discredited piece of linguistic software used by the Home Office to detect the accents of asylum seekers and ascertain where they come from. These 90 minutes are epic, infuriating, recklessly disorientating and oddly compelling; woozy horror laced with the sublime.
Also out this month
American pianist Sarah Cahill is now on her third instalment of The Future Is Female (First Hand Records), a series of albums of music written by female composers. This volume, At Play, includes a 200-year-old sonata by Hélène de Montgeroult and a 100-year-old piece by Cécile Chaminade, but more interesting are the spikier modern solos by Pauline Oliveros and Hannah Kendall, and the four meditative Piano Poems by Regina Harris Baiocchi.
The Harp Chapter I (Floating Notes Records) sees Kety Fusco multitracking on various harps, over ambient washes of sound created by live electronic manipulation. Most compelling is the steampunk techno she creates by treating her wooden harp with hairpins, wax and sticky tape, like a prepared piano, to create percussive effects.
Anthology: Contemporary Music for Saxophones (Divine Art) sees Anthony Brown perform newly commissioned works for the sax. It includes duets with a punky guitar on Steve Jackson’s III and a piano on Graham Ross’s Bartók-ish Caged Bird, but the highlight is Julian Argüelles’s stately, almost baroque-sounding Sonata for Two Saxophones.
