... still in the process of preparing for a post looking at Comp. 136 here, I came across a few updates in the course of my online research... enough, collectively, that they warrant a post of their own rather than being stuck on the end of another article like an afterthought:
1. McC recently tipped everyone off about a new album - a new box set, really - featuring B's trio with Roland Dahinden and his wife, Hildegard Kleeb, recorded a full decade ago at Wesleyan. Four Compositions (Wesleyan) 2013 is supposedly out already (Discogs lists the release date as 1st August), but I had never had the slightest bit of luck in finding it for sale anywhere online; at time of writing two Discogs users claim to have it already, but those could of course be promotional/review copies... who knows. Anyway, poking around again last night, I found a couple of leads which suggest that the physical product does at least exist, even if it might take a little while to make its way out of the Czech Republic. The very first release on a new label, Prague Music Platform, the album is real and not some weird wind-up*: we now have an actual website to prove that, after all. I even managed to find another Czech site which appears to list it for sale; mark you, both the label's own site and this other one reckon the release date is this month, not the beginning of August (this makes more sense). Indeed, the vendor's site gives the date as just yesterday, which certainly helps to explain why it's not been possible to find anyone up until now that's carrying it... and the same date, 22nd September, is confirmed here - another Czech online retailer, which also offers short sound samples of the four disc-long tracks.
These, by the way, suggest that the music sounds awfully like Diamond Curtain Wall Music, and nothing whatsoever like Falling River Music - regardless of what the label's promotional blurb might say. Yes, we've already established that it won't necessarily be easy to tell DCWM apart from, say, the new Lorraine strategies, which also make use of interactive software; and I recently examined the way in which DCWM itself does not always have the "classic" sound. That said, these clips would tend to indicate that the 2013 recordings in the Czech box set do have the classic SuperCollider sound; and besides, since when does FRM use computer software at all? In my fairly limited experience of that system, it's always been organic (- or primarily organic, anyway: the 2003 duo recording with Chris Dahlgren includes FRM strategies, and Dahlgren is credited there with both bass and electronics; but then he always was credited that way, pretty much any time he played in B's groups**). The label's site goes into a bit of detail about what FRM is and how it's employed in performance, and I've already highlighted the fact that recorded compositions in the 360 range*** might turn out to be either DCWM or FRM in practice; I certainly can't say for sure that these 2013 trios don't use both systems. But it would be a bit embarrassing for all concerned if Dahinden's memory has just failed him on this and the performances didn't actually use FRM at all. (I have it in my head that this project was driven by RD... although I am now wondering exactly where I got that idea...)
Anyway, coming soon... maybe! I'll be hanging on to my money until someone a bit closer to home starts offering it for sale, I think.
2. No idea who this guy is, but a user called smartpatrol on Rate Your Music has put together a list of B's compositions#, in numerical order, together with albums where each one can be found. (This was something Jason Guthartz had previously been doing at Restructures, but it was a work in progress even before the site was yanked from the internet.) I haven't yet had a really good look at it, and I don't suppose for a minute that it's comprehensive, but kudos to the guy for even attempting this. (I've just started doing something similar myself, but I'm nowhere near the point of being able to put it online.) Incidentally, the "excellent videos on Braxton for the uninitiated" that he links to there are the same two which I flagged up last year, albeit I did rather bury my own links in the middle of something else...
3. Late last year I wrote a little bit about a (mallet) percussionist by the name of Payton MacDonald, without realising at the time that he had actually recorded a whole (digital-only) solo album of B's pieces; this was released in 2021, but I didn't know about it until it appeared on B's Discogs page(s) earlier this year. I checked out some of it last night, because it includes a version of Comp. 136... It's quite clear that this musician is very serious about his art and craft, and for that matter the "Explorations" project itself is evidently something which goes way beyond the scope of just looking at B's music: this, after all, was volume 16, and he's already (at least) up to vol. 72, so anyone who is really into their marimba sounds could get lost in the man's work and never emerge from it. Even if your interest is mainly in B's music, the album is worth a serious listen; albeit the degree of musical training necessary to appreciate all the work that went into it is whole dimensions beyond what I could pretend to...
4. This last bit is something which will get covered in (some) more detail later down the line, but: McC recently mentioned an album of B's music performed on solo bass - yep, that's right, solo bass... he hadn't heard of this before. I hadn't either... yet as it turns out, it was recorded more than a decade ago. Anyway, I added it to my Discogs wants list, and was surprised to see a copy suddenly make itself available - as it went down, I ended up buying it... shortly before McC himself got his own notification for it (oops). The artist, James Ilgenfritz, naturally enough didn't get famous off the back of this very interesting recording - not even famous in our rarefied circles, hence the fact that neither McC or I had heard of him - but he was a student of Mark Dresser's - which is where he originally got the idea. Anyway, like I say - later##.
That's all for now - back to the research...
* A full explanation of this bizarre (and abstruse) practical joke can be found here.
** Dahlgren played bass both with and without added electronic effects when I saw him play in B's quintet at the (old) Royal Festival Hall; it was (is?) evidently a speciality of his. Come to think of it, Jay Rozen often used electronics in these settings too. In any case this is still different, still "organic" insofar as the sound is directly controlled by a human musician, not computer-generated.
*** Not all of them, of course. 362 is the very last GTM composition - it's surely not a coincidence that the last one bears a number precisely double that of the first one
# Technically he's created a list of "composotions", but I think we can assume what he meant... it's still amusing that a guy who is clearly a fellow detail-freak has managed to miss such a glaring typo..!
## That's now two solo recordings of B's music that I've picked up this year - I will probably tackle both of them at once when the time comes.
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