Showing posts with label Classical. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Classical. Show all posts

Vyacheslav Guyvoronsky - String Quartet (2014)


I'd like to start this review with a quote from Guyvoronsky himself:

"It is always controversial for an author to reveal the meaning of music conceived, because each association is very personal for listener that sometimes completely contradicts authors’s intention."

The aforementioned quote which appears in the inlay of the record very much refers (although from a different angle) to the same notion of instability of a text in channelling what the author himself has in mind, discussed widely in the poststructuralist theory. Of course one might say this is no text -- now, that is why I said from a different angle. Derrida's idea of  a text on its own can be easily observed in other forms of art, including music and cinema. For instance, Slavoj Žižek's critical review of Chaplin's "City Lights" corresponds to Heidegger's use of Tolstoy's "The Death Of Ivan Ilyich" for demonstrating the idea of finitude and its relations to Dasein. In both examples, the philosophers escape the consensus about the works in order to traverse the unseen; in first a happy ending, and in latter the moral ending.

With the other string quartets I've listened to from musicians originally involved in free jazz being radically insane; namely Elliott Sharp's collaborations with Soldier String Quartet; while expecting no mathematical experimentations like those of Sharp with the Fibonacci numbers, I did except Vyacheslav Guyvoronsky to have doped an extent of say, mania. Yet on the whole the record proved otherwise. Guyvoronsky's intentions how obscured, the sonic result remains on a leash, just like its concept of a life of an ordinary man (think Ivan Ilyich, ironic?) -- yet not banal. It has the freshness of Varèse and steadiness of Charles Ives.

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John Zorn - The Mysteries (2013)


No matter if you're into free jazz or grindcore, you must have heard about John Zorn if you're into experimental music in general. Being involved in countless number of projects, and varieties of different music genres, Hemophiliac, the Lounge Lizards' song 'John Zorn's S&M Circus' and Naked City's soundtrack to Michael Haneke's "Funny Games" were the main three keys to the door of discovering Zorn for me. His latest solo record called "The Mysteries" has been released about two weeks ago and it's in the vein of his previous efforts like "Magick", "Redbird", "Chimeras" and "From Silence To Sorcery": a minimal take on contemporary classical music. In the first listen it reminded me of Philip Glass' "Music With Changing Parts", with an additional guitar line, however it goes beyond that, and in the second and third listens, I came to think of it as a meditation on the theme of everything enigmatic. Conceptually, it seems to be partially based on Gnosticism, making references to the Naassenes, Yaldabaoth, and Catharism, in the song titles, yet due to being completely instrumental, I believe it is more of a meditation on those ideas as a basis, rather than a musical tractate.