Christopher Hobbs, John Adams & Gavin Bryars
Ensemble Pieces
Christopher Hobbs, John Adams & Gavin Bryars
Ensemble Pieces
Boomkat Product Review:
Featuring contributions from Derek Bailey, Cornelius Cardew and Brian Eno, this 1975 Obscure-released album matches up two crucial experimental compositions from Christopher Hobbs with a spoken word/orchestral suite from John Adams and a pitchy doom jazz diversion from Gavin Bryars.
'Ensemble Pieces' isn't the best known record in Eno's Obscure catalogue, but it's one of the most outstanding, playing like a who's who of the era's experimental minimalists. Systems music pioneer starts things off with 'Aran', a percussive piece he wrote for his four-piece ensemble Promenade Theatre Orchestra using random note sequences and toy instruments. This expanded version, for 12 performers, adds drums, triangles and woodblocks, with the two toy pianos sounding like broken clock chimes as they jerk playfully around the central harmonium drones. And Hobbs' second contribution, 'McCrimmon Will Never Return' uses the harmonium again, this time to shadow the complex, microtonally-cured sound of Scottish bagpipes. Playing four harmoniums at once, Hobbs slows down the tempo, revealing interactions and resonances that usually get lost in the chaos.
Legendary American composer Adams demonstrates his range with the three-part 'American Standard', a piece written for "a flexible ensemble" that splices tape recordings of a radio talk show with sustained orchestral tones on 'Christian Zeal and Activity', hauntologically re-interpreting Duke Ellington's 'Sophisticated Lady' on 'Sentimentals'. But the big one here is Bryars' 15-minute masterpiece '1-2, 1-2-3-4', a unique piece he wrote for a crew of instrumentalists and vocalists that were handed headphones and a portable tape deck they were expected to play along to. It's a fascinating experiment - with Cardew on cello, Eno on vocals, Hobbs on piano and Bailey on guitar, among others - that's oddly randomized by its process. The cassettes would run at slightly different speeds and start at variably different times, so the piece falls delicately in and out of time, warming up as the players get more familiar with exactly what it is they're doing. It's jazz, in its own way, but dilated to a point where it might be an amateur rehearsal, or it might be intentional basement ambience. So good, really.
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Boomkat Product Review:
Featuring contributions from Derek Bailey, Cornelius Cardew and Brian Eno, this 1975 Obscure-released album matches up two crucial experimental compositions from Christopher Hobbs with a spoken word/orchestral suite from John Adams and a pitchy doom jazz diversion from Gavin Bryars.
'Ensemble Pieces' isn't the best known record in Eno's Obscure catalogue, but it's one of the most outstanding, playing like a who's who of the era's experimental minimalists. Systems music pioneer starts things off with 'Aran', a percussive piece he wrote for his four-piece ensemble Promenade Theatre Orchestra using random note sequences and toy instruments. This expanded version, for 12 performers, adds drums, triangles and woodblocks, with the two toy pianos sounding like broken clock chimes as they jerk playfully around the central harmonium drones. And Hobbs' second contribution, 'McCrimmon Will Never Return' uses the harmonium again, this time to shadow the complex, microtonally-cured sound of Scottish bagpipes. Playing four harmoniums at once, Hobbs slows down the tempo, revealing interactions and resonances that usually get lost in the chaos.
Legendary American composer Adams demonstrates his range with the three-part 'American Standard', a piece written for "a flexible ensemble" that splices tape recordings of a radio talk show with sustained orchestral tones on 'Christian Zeal and Activity', hauntologically re-interpreting Duke Ellington's 'Sophisticated Lady' on 'Sentimentals'. But the big one here is Bryars' 15-minute masterpiece '1-2, 1-2-3-4', a unique piece he wrote for a crew of instrumentalists and vocalists that were handed headphones and a portable tape deck they were expected to play along to. It's a fascinating experiment - with Cardew on cello, Eno on vocals, Hobbs on piano and Bailey on guitar, among others - that's oddly randomized by its process. The cassettes would run at slightly different speeds and start at variably different times, so the piece falls delicately in and out of time, warming up as the players get more familiar with exactly what it is they're doing. It's jazz, in its own way, but dilated to a point where it might be an amateur rehearsal, or it might be intentional basement ambience. So good, really.
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