notes on dazwischen
1. eddie prévost
2. ian stonehouse
3. john tilbury
Notes 1.
I have known Sebastian Lexer for the best part of ten years. I first met him when, after leaving his native Germany, he came to study music at London’s Goldsmiths’ College (where he first came into contact with John Tilbury). He, along with some of his contemporaries, decided to join the weekly improvisation workshop that I had begun to convene. Since then we have become good friends and colleagues. I have seen how he works in respect to his chosen instrument, his thoughtful collaborations with others and how he negotiates with the newer technologies that are making an impact upon our musical world. It is this latter aspect that is the most obvious concern of Sebastian’s first solo CD. And the texts which make up the booklet that accompanies this CD deal with the consequences of Lexer’s exchange with computer and piano. John Tilbury considers some of the conventional musical antecedents that have informed Sebastian’s musical thinking, his approach, the consequent arising effects and implications. Ian Stonehouse reviews some of the more technical considerations. Both writers, who also know Lexer well, naturally carry assumptions about Sebastian which inform their narratives but which may be hidden from the reader. So, I take this opportunity to advise readers and potential listeners to this album, a little about Lexer the artist and Lexer the man.
In becoming part of the improvisation workshop, Sebastian began to embrace and expand upon a line of musical enquiry that arose in the musical philosophy of AMM. However, he also began to appreciate that a musical community is much more than a collection of clever and ambitious individuals. With little ‘official’ resources devoted to this kind of musical life he acknowledged that it was necessary, as well as potentially more rewarding, to invest in the society of improvised musicians. To this end – as well as being a valuable colleague in ensembles like 9!1, in which Lexer features to good effect and (in my opinion) elegance – he has always been generous with his time and services to others. As a musician, as a recording engineer, as a supporter and as an organiser. To wit: his ongoing Interlace Series at Goldsmiths’ College. This began in 2002 and continues to this day.2
Music for Lexer is something which reveals and expands his (and our) humanity. I have lost count of the moments that I have found his music intrinsically moving as well as supportive of others. He takes the sounds and the aspirations of this fleeting genre of music and makes them beautiful. For me he embodies the model musician. This CD may be Sebastian Lexer’s first as a soloist but no one should infer that this is in any way a beginning. This music has the mark of a mature reflection upon the materials and the issues at hand. I am confident that Sebastian will imprint upon the ensuing development of a music, and social movement, of which he is an emergent creative part.
Eddie Prévost—May 2009
1. none (-t) 9! (featuring: Nathaniel Catchpole, Jamie Coleman, Alex James, Ross Lambert, John lely, Sebastian Lexer, Marianthi Papalexandri, Eddie Prévost and Seymour Wright.) 2002. Matchless Recordings MRCD54.
2 the website and audio archive of the concerts http://interlace.incalcando.com
Notes 2.
Derek Bailey once said that “Improvisation is not knowing what it is until you do it, composition is not doing it until you know what it is” (Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation by Ben Watson, 2004). Sebastian Lexer’s approach to improvisation arguably resides between these two points, as the title of his CD implies (dazwischen = in-between). Since taking to Max software in 2000, after being introduced to it by Dr. Katharine Norman in the Electronic Music Studios at Goldsmiths, it’s only very recently that he’s been able to fully contextualize what he is doing from a broader social-political perspective, as demonstrated in a presentation he gave at Goldsmiths in March 2009. The technology he employs – laptop, Max software, microphones, speakers (set inside or very close to the piano), and an array of control devices – afford him the opportunity to curate a range of sonic events carefully constructed out of, and augmenting, the sounds generated from within and around the piano itself. The software can generate and hold within itself an array of possible futures that he may choose to investigate, transform, struggle with, or abandon. The importance of the technology, and how he has customised it as an improvising musician, is that it gives him the space to listen and respond, on the cusp of (not) knowing and (not) doing, whilst maintaining – as he has claimed - a fundamental pianism.
The ‘patch’ that he has developed within the Max software environment (Max is an object-based programming language) was originally titled Instant Events, though latterly it has been rechristened piano+, succinctly encompassing the entirety of his extended piano technique. The piano+ patch can be set to record what he is doing in and around the piano, or, on occasion, what fellow performers and their instruments are also doing, analysing and “reporting pitch information, loudness, density and so forth”. It can then process these sounds through techniques such as granulation (as on time and rapprochement), ring modulation, extreme filtering (defining edges) etc., and the results replayed instantly or stored and triggered later by other events, such as the detection of certain pitch values or volume thresholds. Although he has acknowledged a degree of control freak-ery, maintaining final authority as to which sounds will emerge, this is not at the expense of allowing the unexpected to unfurl, flourish and inform the direction an improvisation might take. Rather like a Calder mobile, a series of small deliberate sounds placed far away counterbalance the presence of a sudden larger gesture close to. It’s a contingent process, and the notion that he is curating these sonic events is an appealing one, not unlike his role as organiser of the Interlace concert series since 2002.
Alto saxophonist Seymour Wright, a regular collaborator, has stated that he has “a certain moral responsibility… to look beyond the scope of orthodoxy (even of current saxophone unorthodoxy)” within his work as a performer (The Wire, March 2009). Similarly, Lexer seeks to circumvent certain laptop orthodoxies, often manifest through over‑amplification and the tyranny of the loop. He cites a remark from composer/performer Dave Smith, made during preparations for a performance of Paragraph 5 from Cardew’s The Great Learning in Leipzig, 2000 – “no sheep mentality!” Lexer’s performance technique and use of processing is overtly measured and subtle, often on the edge of audibility, perhaps something of a trademark, but perfectly in keeping for someone who has studied with John Tilbury and been part of the generation of musicians to pass through Eddie Prévost’s improvisation workshop. The final track, opposition, seems to capture what’s most unique about his approach, a mix of immaculate restraint and serendipity, teasing out and extrapolating the smallest details into a fragile yet captivating music, a virtually seamless conjunction of technology and performance.
Ian Stonehouse—May 2009
Notes 3.
Right from the beginning a sensitivity
is brought to bear on the sound sources. Tapping. Rooting around for sounds. Prospecting for sounds. Testing the ground. Sound-diviners. We are experiencing the birth pangs of melody.
Trio: piano, percussion and strings The piano is of course a string instrument, no need for hammers, and on Lexer’s piano the strings are coaxed electronically to produce a full repertoire of sustained sounds of varying character: wavering, insistent, intermittent, uneven; long sounds which gain in richness and complexity, hitherto unimaginable. Technology allows the sound to go on for ever.
And yet, the piano carries with it an enormous amount of historical baggage. Every sound is redolent of the past. On the one hand, Lexer’s eclectic repertoire of study in previous years may well have stood him in good stead as an improvising musician: Beethoven, Scriabin, Crumb, Cage, Schubert, Debussy, Liszt, Feldman, Takemitsu. On the other, by means of his computer the music is able, if desired, to transcend the instrument and its history.
I am impressed by the varying degrees of intentionality and the spatial deployment of sounds (isolated, remote, etc.) which enrich Lexer’s music. Shades of Cardew and Wolff. For example, in an ensemble the piano sound can be effectively subsumed, not obliterated, into the context; different degrees of presence, from the soloistic to a situation where its contribution is barely perceived but none the less telling – overheard rather than heard, working in the nooks and crannies, fleetingly emerging from time to time.
Lexer aims to expand performance by making studio techniques available on stage and including electro-acoustic techniques in live performance – making the physically impossible possible. Decay and the way it is extended and metamorphosed through electronic treatment.
Lexer’s music comprises and juxtaposes the whole repertoire of tones, and noises, associated with the piano. All those sounds just faintly associated with the piano are brought into focus and brought to musical life. The piano creates its own delicate accompaniment of quasi aleatoric, electronic noises; these subsidiary ‘noises’ are always interesting. Lexer’s piano is a kind of Pandora’s Box; this intrigues me.
On track 5, Abscissa and Ordinate, the ending is long drawn out with moments of considerable beauty. The economy of tones is Feldmanesque. The music slows right down, against a hum and a sustained sine tone in the background.
Reflecting on the difference between studio recordings and concerts, whereas the studio acts as a cocoon, even providing the safety net of rectifying ‘false starts’, the concert situation offers no such comfort; moreover, it can play a key role in how the music begins, indeed, how it continues, e.g. peremptorily, or even in anger. The opening of the final track, for example, suggests this ‘concert’ character, with its assertiveness, its sharp, piercing sounds and spontaneous outbursts.
Ken Edwards’ poem, There’s something in there, from which I quote, captures the materiality of the piano (which is what I admire and enjoy so much in Lexer’s music); that is, the wood and steel from which it is forged, their provenance and the processes they undergo. Even in its natural state such material possesses and suggests certain sound qualities. In the Steinway factory in Hamburg, where some of the sounds in the piece originated, one can observe and hear the gradual ‘instrumentalisation’ of the material (human agency at work) – the piano both as a sound object to be exploited and as an (historical) instrument to be played.
There’s something in there
At least…there may be. Who can say more than that?
It comes in there, or is there, sometimes. It’s suggestive of…
No-one can say what it is.
What?
What is out here is found. It was found in the woods. In the dark woods, in the midst of it all. Like the poet, in the midst of a journey, it steals away.
It’s out here. It’s made of steel.
Steel in the woods. It curves, all the way in.
A steel cave, and what’s in it.
There’s definitely something in there.
Let’s say a probability.
Perhaps the (acoustic) piano cannot survive. Certainly in its 19th century incarnation it is threatened by obsolescence, overtaken by a confident, predatory new technology. (New venues boast state-of-the-art electronic, computerized pianos, but rarely a Steinway, or a Bösendorfer).
Samuel Beckett prophesied its demise in Watt:
“The piano is doomed, in my opinion, said the younger.
The piano-tuner also, said the elder.
The pianist also, said the younger.”
I no longer share Beckett’s gloomy prognosis. In the hands of Sebastian Lexer, with his piano and his computer, good music is being created. Can there be any other criterion?
John Tilbury—May 2009
Months ago, around the time Sebastian Lexer finished one stage of his PhD studies he told me that now he felt that the technical side of his academic research into the Max MSP system he had been developing was complete, he felt himself in a position to be able to stop adjusting and improving the tools he used for his music and to begin using what he had, working with the materials in their current state to find their potential and their limitations through their creative application. On Dazwischen, his first solo album just released on Matchless Recordings Lexer has realised this in wonderful fashion. He has taken the piano, its form, its sound and its history and applied his Piano+ digital framework around it, extending that potential further, making, as John Tilbury states in the disc’s liner notes, the physically impossible possible.
I don’t fully understand the workings of Max MSP, or Lexer’s Piano+ patch, but essentially it seems to work like this; Lexer plays the piano, I hesitate to say normally, because he spends half his time inside the hood rather than addressing the keys, but in a manner improvised music listeners will be familiar. The sounds inside the piano are then captured by one or more microphones that instantaneously feed the signal into a laptop, where some of the sounds are processed and then output through a set of speakers. This all happens in an instant, and the nature of the processing is controlled by Lexer via a small control box usually perched just above the keyboard. So the listener gets to hear both the original acoustic sounds plus the electronically altered sound (where Lexer chooses to use them) almost instantaneously.
Just as the danger for a software developer is to be forever amending and never applying, so the danger for a musician using new technology is that they may get carried away with its potential, ignoring the qualities of the original naked instrument and forgetting to make good music in the process. For an improvising musician the application of software to an acoustic instrument then adds the further challenge of not slipping into the pre-determined structures that technology leans towards, something made even harder when working solo, without the external impetus of collaborative input. I suspect that Lexer understand these challenges well, and his struggle with these oppositional polarities may be referenced in the album’s title, which translates as “in between.” Throughout Dazwischen’s six tracks the music never sounds anything less than completely organic and unforced. The use of processing is never hidden, Lexer makes no attempt to disguise his processes, and while in many places the digital sounds are subtle, elsewhere they sound nothing like a piano. Everything comes together with exceptional compositional balance, and the hardest thing for me to accept on my first listen to the CD was that I was only hearing the work of one musician. The combination of acoustic and electronic sound, and their often very different natures suggest two musicians at work, or some kind of overdubbing in use, but in fact these six pieces were recorded in single takes, incredibly all in the same studio session on one day in November 2008.
Lexer has a long friendship and musical relationship with the current members of AMM, Eddie Prevost and John Tilbury. Both have acted as tutors to Lexer in the past, Tilbury formally at Goldsmiths College, Prevost as the leader of the weekly improvisation workshops that Lexer has attended for the best part of ten years. Both provide liner notes to the album, and their influence on its music is abundantly clear. Lexer’s most remarkable talent is his sense of space and the compositional placement of sounds within it. His choices of acoustic or electronic sound, pitch, and timbre seem immaculate throughout Dazwischen, combinations of acute harmonies and bruising counterpoint but always just the right decision, with just the right amount of silence before or after. If this was completely composed music it would be a remarkable work. That the music was so beautifully arranged in an improvisational setting is nothing short of stunning. This sense of timing, the ability to build tension just by placing two sounds alongside each other comes directly from the AMM textbook. Tilbury’s touch can be heard here, and Prevost’s ability to build a framework for a piece of music to move within. There are arc-like climaxes in most of the tracks, moments of explosive expression and charged, delicate lulls. Lexer’s own voice is of course the main driver here, this is no AMM pastiche, and certainly his use of technology takes things on beyond the work of his teachers, but the spirit remains, the subtlety, the ability to mould moments of fantastic emotive expression from often just the most elemental of resources.
Each of the tracks has its own character. The opening Time begins with a combination of the lightest of touches and crashing, slightly affected chords that take me straight back to Tudor’s Variations II but feed through into wailing tones and a digital chattering. Defining Edges combines prepared piano notes with tiny percussive ticks and deep, echoing throbs. The deeply troubling Tone sees Lexer pick out little clusters of notes, only to eradicate them with massive crashes and blasts of noise. While there is not a weak track on the album the closing twelve-minute piece Opposition is the icing on the cake. Here the music begins with thudded piano notes and their slightly altered electronic echoes shifting in jarring rhythms, but after a while things curl in on themselves, slowing to a gentle, deeply charged pace as a continuous tone appears in the background, perhaps for the only time on the album. Over this a beautiful arrangement of Felmanesque notes and ghostly moans mixes with rattling, scraping, and later a sinetone. The last six minutes of this piece of music are truly wonderful.
Sorry for the hyperbole, sorry for not knowing the words to describe how this album has felt for me over the past couple of days. I have listened to it in excess of twenty times now. I’ve no idea what others will make of it, but for me it hits all the right spots, over and over. Dazwischen is the perfect combination of the acoustic and electronic, the new and the old, the familiar and the challenging. It is for me easily the best album I have heard for quite some time. Its impact on me has been remarkable. While walking along the Oxford canal path today I found myself stopped still, feet rooted to the floor, eyes closed, as the dramatic surges in Tone played themselves out. I had at that point already heard the album a dozen or more times already. I probably looked stupid but thats what great music does to me.
By Richard Pinnell | August 20, 2009
The Watchful Ear
www.thewatchfulear.com
This first solo album from Sebastian Lexer, a longterm member of Eddie Prévost's London improvisation workshops, is a rare instance of the piano being exhaustively reworked, from the keyboard to the interior. In standard use, the instrument is a marvel of polite engineering, its 88 strings carefully muted and rigorously controlled. In the hands of Lexer, it's a vast web of potential tones and resonances, elegant yet frequently menacing. Exploring it takes a whole range of strategies - carefully bowing strings, messing with the dampers as if picking locks. It's a tense investigation best undertaken alone.
Lexer's piano playing involves several microphones (as did Peter Evans's equally exhaustive 'Nature/Culture' from earlier in the year), strategically placed speakers, as well as a custom software patch recording and feeding sounds back into the mix, sometimes using granular synthesis (hence Lexer's distinctive instrumental credit, 'piano+'). Sparingly used, this sampling escapes the predictability so characteristic of looping and layering - sounds are triggered by certain volumes and pitches, as if occasional memories are seeping back into the room, and the ring modulation applied to some of the samples gives a faint tinge of insubstantiality. In "Rapprochement", long metallic shivers from bowed strings are held frozen in the air before a creaking lower register note suddenly groans into life, a moment as cinematic as a houseguest pausing on the threshold of a haunted mansion. On "Defining Edges" and "Tone" Lexer is mainly at the keyboard, but the piano seems to have been rewired so unfamiliar tones deep inside the machine, somewhere between wood and metal, are being tapped and sustained.
While reed instruments are all about air and pressure, the piano is essentially about sustain. The silky elegance one usually associates with the instrument is a result of careful engineering, so that one string sounds seemlessly after the previous one. On "Dazwischen", the whole mechanism is opened up to the forces of chance and chaos, picking up all kind of ethereal vibrations - a true ghost box.
Derek Walmsley, The Wire (October 2009)
"Dazwischen" is a word that stands for "in between", which is rather explicative of what Sebastian Lexer does. A former music student at London's Goldsmith College, where he came from Germany, the composer has been developing his skills under, and collaborating with, fundamental tutors such as John Tilbury and Eddie Prevost, both contributing — together with Ian Stonehouse — to the particularly interesting and informative liner notes contained in the CDs booklet. Indeed this is his first solo recording after years of intense exploration and live performances . Make no mistake: we're talking about a masterpiece, definitely one of the best debut releases in this sonic area.
To specify the microcosm through which he builds a world of concentrated occurrences, subtle overtones and vibrating halos, Lexer utilizes the definition "piano+". The instrument is augmented by a laptop fueled by Max software, the rest of the setup consisting of microphones, speakers ("set inside or very close to the piano") and several means for controlling the resulting processes. This system permits a considerable measure of control to the performer, yet extraneous or unpredictable elements — including those derived from eventual instrumental partners — also have a say. Once captured by the mikes and processed this generates a palette of timbres that gets further modified via extreme equalization, ring modulation, granulation and so forth. Parts of the ensuing sounds may be stored and re-triggered by subsequent events in a sort of acoustic cybernetic procedure that gives birth to some of the most beautifully natural resonances heard in a long time.
In Civilization Phase III, Frank Zappa had theorized — trying to reproduce it musically — the concept of "life in a piano". This image, in an entirely different context and with completely opposite results in terms of sonority, is exactly what flashed in my mind while analyzing this work. Lexer, although maintaining the basic tonalities recognizable, is especially able in evoking a vast range of sensations and colors — intimate abrasiveness to elegiac melody, concrete inconveniences to imposing reverberation — without losing sight of the value of a sequence of regular notes. In "Abscissa And Ordinate" a whole cosmos of prepared, computerized and unadorned pitches is marvelously synthesized, a single humming tone lingering for stretched segment of awesome suspension amidst meagre rings and delicate-to-hammering sparse hits. It's during these situations that one is tempted to proceed with the typically useless maths of association, yet this perceptive musician seems to have found the ultimate terrain for growing an artistic vision into a fully fledged individual personality, letting the audience preserve a clear mental picture of what happens despite the obvious incongruity of this music against the notion of negligent listening. In that sense, Dazwischen is an even more stunning achievement.
- Massimo Ricci 2009-11-17
http://www.squidco.com/cgi-bin/news/newsView.cgi?newsID=1077
Lexer’s Dazwischen must be viewed as one of the most important (and beautiful) CDs of improvised music released in the past year. Referring to his work as piano +, Lexer has developed a computer patch that (conjoined with multiple microphones and various forms of signal processing) allows him to record and modify sounds he makes in and around the piano. Given the nature of the signal processing, Lexer is “dazwischen” (in between), involved in a genuinely complex process that’s as much composition as improvisation, as much electronic as acoustic music making. Chain-sounds, bits of electronic grit and soundwaves mix with struck piano tones. Apparently acoustic piano sounds bend gently and elusively into the reign of the electronic. Listening to Dazwischen, a listener is in-between as well, suspended between knowing and not knowing how something is made, whether it’s recorded music being processed or live piano playing, and what degrees of intentionality and control (absolute, permutating?) are enacted in the ultimately resultant sounds of these luminously meditative pieces. The very slight alterations and additions to piano sound in a piece like “Opposition” possess both detailed precision and a fresh vision, reconstructing some of the possibilities of sound.
'Ezz-thetics' Stuart Broomer
Point of Departure April 2010