Beautiful improvised duets from Jennifer Allum and Ute Kanngiesser. Each recording was made in a different part of St Augustine's Bell Tower, Hackney - the ticking of the church clock mechanism carrying on delightfully in the backround, joined occasionally by the occasional bell chime or car alarm.
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Jennifer Allum / violin
Ute Kanngiesser / cello
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Recorded on 29th May 2012 at St Augustine's Bell Tower, Hackney, London by Enanuele Costantini. Mixed and edited by Sebastian Lexer. Design by Myah Chun. With thanks to David Ryan for facilitating the recordings, and to Hackney Historic Buildings Trust for giving access to the tower.
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Review -
"The music on the first track has a nice and sometimes even powerful interaction of high almost whistling tones interwining like a slow rhythmless dance, a cautious circling around a tonal center, with vibrating notes floating in mid-air, then gradually losing even the faint substance they had to become even more ethereal and ephemeral, slight wisps of music supported by silence. The second track, "Clock Room", has more gravitas, with a more forceful attack of the bows, even if that is still fragile. The pièce-de-résistance is the half hour long "Bell Room", in which the outside world quietly invades the music, and is integrated, carefully lifted into a new level of fragility and refinement. Each note has value here, and when silence takes the foreground, with the distant ambulance the only sound to be heard, deep tones from the cello and super-high tones from the violin create a mirrored drone-like repetition, full of menace and anxiety. Many people will wonder about this music, and probably that's good. It has its own voice, its own story, its own aesthetic. It may take some time to get into it, but as usual the effort is worth taking." - London Jazz News.
Available as a 320k MP3 or 16bit FLAC download.
Tracklisting:
1. Pendulum Case - 15:27
2. Clock Room - 9:06
3. Bell Room - 30:28
Jennifer Allum is a violinist who improvises and plays experimental music.
While she was a post graduate student at Goldsmiths, London she began to attend Eddie Prevost's weekly improvisation workshops where she met musicians like Ross Lambert, Ute Kanngiesser, Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga and Daichi Yoshikawa. She also began working with composers such as Christian Wolff, Tom Johnson, Michael Pisaro and Michael Parsons around the same time too.
More recently she has played and recorded with The Seen, including performances of John Stevens 'For Sake Of Joy Of Study Of Oneself Together' featuring Stewart Lee as narrator.
She has a number of other recordings available, and her most recent is with John Butcher, Eddie Prevost and Ute Kanngiesser on Ftarri records. Other releases are available from Matchless Recordings.
Ute Kanngießer is a London based cellist and composer from Germany. Over the years, she has carefully deconstructed her classical roots and almost exclusively performs unscripted, improvised music. Much of her work has evolved in relationship with other art forms such as film, poetry, dance and site specific work. She is interested in the vast expressive possibilities of her instrument in relation to body, space, and others, always looking to rediscover or redefine what is musical/lyrical in this moment in time.
Recent releases include Blue Monday - a collaboration with writer Zara Joan Miller - on New York label Reading Group.
