On the last CD from OgreOgress productions – Christina Fong’s rendering of John Cage’s “One6“ & “One10“ – the violin was the sole voice. On this second CD Christina Fong plays viola in addition to violin, and she is joined by Glenn Freeman on percussion and Karen Krummel on cello. This moves the Number Pieces music into an entirely new and different soundspace – especially exciting when this talented group of musicians plays the instruments.
The first track gives me a vision of Santa Claus – maybe a bit intoxicated from some good old cognac in his sleigh – moving across a starry winter sky, descending to take a brake for a while in the famous ice castle of Kiruna, Lapland, making dirty remarks to the young Saami women. This probably wasn’t Cage’s intention when composing “Three2”, and most likely not Glenn Freeman’s ambition either, when he got his percussive vibrations vibrating, but in art you never know where you end up – it might be in an ice castle in Kiruna with a drunk Santa…
This first piece on the CD also gives me other associations, to some of the “Winter Music” (1968) of Swedish electronic music pioneer Ralph Lundsten.
The second piece – “Twenty-Three” – is more in line with this company’s first CD, in its long, drawn-out strings of layered sounds, giving the impression of a static, vibrating ray of light in an oscilloscope in a dark underground nuclear command center, where, at every moment, the fate of the world trembles under the sword of Damocles. However, the fabric of sound is much richer here, on account of the combination of violin, viola and cello, giving this piece the opportunity of acting almost like a string quartet. That may not be too far off, either, considering some of the string quartet music of Italian eremite Giacinto Scelsi. Mr. Walter Fändrich and his viola come to mind too, as I recall his 1991 CD “Viola” on the ECM label. This piece of twenty-three minutes is varied in all its static posture, though, and there’s no way you can get bored. All these minute changes in the outstrechedness sharpen your auditive talents, and you learn to listen, deeper and deeper, as the piece moves on.
Piece no. 3 on this CD makes room again for Glenn Freeman and his percussion. The sounds are deep, threatening, weary, like the heavy murmur of war, joined by the sirens of warning. The rustle of tiny bells (maybe) in the foreground, connect again to Santa in his icy castle, but as soon as you’ve began to try to fit him into the war scene the short piece ends… It’s called “Six”, and duration is just three minutes.
The last piece – “Twenty-Six” – lasts twenty-six minutes, and features Christina Fong alone, but apparently in layers recorded separately. The effect is artistically full-fledged, and it’s time to sit back, sip something, and maybe end up in your own Santa vision, depending, of course, on what you sip… The music here is very sober, clear, intellectual, but also inspiring, visionary – and maybe that combination isn’t so farfetched after all. In any case, this CD fulfills everything you might have hoped for on hearing this crew’s last issue, and we’re just waiting for more recordings, that we also know are in the works.
All the pieces presented here are first recordings.
On the CD itself this citation can be read, in a spiral:
“The amazing thing about that piece was that it made you spend all that time with yourself. The truth is that language is the most treacherous instrument the human mind has ever invented. The highest of truths? Language is like a map: we spread the map of the world before us and we smugly pretend to know its experience. The Number Pieces are really teaching us something, aren’t they? We are too used to so-called explanations, and have come to think, when an explanation of a thing or a fact is given, there is nothing more to ask about it; but the point is that there is no better explanation than actual experience. It was a week or so later, while I was walking in the woods looking for mushrooms, that it all dawned on me. I wasn’t asleep and I wasn’t bored, but I also don’t know what I was. What can it be?”
