The playlist: electronic/experimental – Tristan Perich, Sabrina and more

Tristan Perich – Parallels

Parallels, Tristan Perich’s composition for tuned triangles, hi-hats and 4-channel, 1-bit electronics, is newly released with a full score tucked into the inside pocket of the oblong CD case. New York-based Perich explains that looking at his score “exposes the music behind the recording”.

As things stand, you might reckon that Parallels sounds more like Philip Glass than some of Glass’s own recent projects, but my tip is to focus your listening on the intimately knit counterpoint between electronically generated arpeggios and the shadow-boxing activities of the “live” percussion underneath. The music crackles into life in the hinterland, with the percussionists, Todd Meehan and Doug Perkins, colouring and sculpting alternative shapes to the perceptible surface.

Tristan Perich – 1-Bit Symphony

... and who could fail to be charmed by Perich’s 1-Bit Symphony, the project that initiated his concept of 1-bit electronics in 2010? Each handmade object features an electronic circuit installed in a CD jewel case which you, the listener, spark into active service by plugging your headphones into a jack mounted in its spine. CD cases normally house music, but never like this: functional packaging is transformed into a sound-producing artefact. But, if you’re thinking of buying one, forget it. Perich handcrafted 50 and they’re long since sold out.

Jonathan Meades – Pedigree Mongrel

Operating out of east London, Test Centre are in the throes of what might seem like an implausible release project: a sequence of spoken-word LPs by writers whose words are amplified and enhanced by electronic soundscapes devised, mixed and edited by Mordant Music. Their three previous releases featured Iain Sinclair, Stewart Home and Chris Petit, and the architectural critic and writer Jonathan Meades slots seamlessly into this psycho-geographically minded mood music. As Meades reads from his back catalogue of memoir and reportage, the surrounding sound environment deals up appropriately brutalist outbursts while acting as a frame made from humming drones from which, paradoxically, the words keep slipping. Will Self next, presumably.

Sabrina – Study for Three Demonic Dances

Stephen Moore is the main lyrics man and Walter Cardew assembles the music, with input from Moore. But who is Sabrina? Not someone you’d like to hang out with, that’s for sure. Sabrina is a persona scooped out from the darkest recesses of Moore and Cardew’s brain – a dispossessed maniac who skulks around hipster London flaunting his itchy sexual desires, which are rarely satisfied, at least in company: “For I am A Leaker! And woe to those who drink not from my cup,” Sabrina yells. This lurid, psychologically frenzied music is paradoxically organised very diligently, Cardew imposing overall harmonic order on top of material generated variously through improvisation and cut-and-paste montage. And dark undertones of the blues put you in mind of New Orleans Vodou, as if Sabrina were the bastard offspring of Jelly Roll Morton and Lola.

AMM – Later During a Flaming Riviera

Walter Cardew’s father Cornelius was a pioneer of British experimental music – a maddeningly contrary figure who went from 12-tone modernism through free improvisation and graphic notation to selling his soul and creative juice to the pursuit of far-left politics as a Maoist apologist and member of the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist), not to be confused with his subsequent affiliation to the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist). Cardew Snr’s golden period was in the late 60s when he’d shaken his Stockhausen fixation and was feeling his way towards new sounds as pianist (and occasional cellist) with improvisation group AMM and devising Treatise, his graphic score masterwork. This piece by AMM, recorded in 1967, remains an imposingly stark vision of the future.

Alex Ward Quintet – Glass Shelves and Floor

Clarinetist, guitarist and composer Alex Ward features alongside AMM founding member percussionist Eddie Prévost in Antoine Prum’s recent documentary film about the British free improvisation scene, Taking the Dog for a Walk, narrated by Stewart Lee. Ward’s own latest release is Glass Shelves and Floor, a deft and utterly mesmeric composition for five improvisers that deploys a combination of conventional music notation, verbal descriptions, harmonic-led improvisation and carefully inserted pockets of complete freedom to generate a multi-headed compositional structure. Composing for improvisers might seem pointless, but Ward’s demands keep these musicians on their toes, the improviser’s instinct to play cunningly re-rooted.

Limescale – French Archive

Ward began his career in British improvisation at an implausibly young age as a protege of guitarist Derek Bailey – a musician who aimed to torpedo any formal structures or settled ideas about music, and who would no doubt have balked at the idea of having proteges. Limescale was Bailey’s last ongoing project, and featured Ward on clarinet, Tony Bevan on bass saxophone, THF Drenching (AKA Stuart Calton) vocalising through a Dictaphone, and Sonic Pleasure (Marie Angelique Beulah), who produced sound by hammering bricks into the ground. As a valedictory offering, Limescale summed up everything Bailey represented. Bevan’s stuttering bass saxophone combined with Sonic Pleasure’s sound rubble was an anti-rhythm section par excellence. Nothing felt fixed or preset, allowing Ward, Bailey and THF Drenching licence to spill notes everywhere.

Kay Grant & Hannah Marshall – Live in 2012

Ward’s regular improvising colleagues include American singer and vocalist Kay Grant and UK cellist Hannah Marshall, who appears on Glass Shelves and Floor. Here, filmed together at London’s Vortex club in 2012, Grant and Marshall create an extraordinarily nuanced sonic tapestry, Grant’s linear inventions circling Marshall’s cello, the wood of Marshall’s bow mirroring Grant’s clicking, ticking vocalisations.

Florian Hecker & Mark Leckey – Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera

Florian Hecker is the German electronic music composer obsessed with how sound might be teleported around space; Mark Leckey is the Turner prize-winning artist who paints with video and sound. The material on the newly released Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera was originally heard at Tate Modern in 2010. Hecker reimagined the voice part of Leckey’s 2010 performance piece GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction, deconstructing his voice, re-synthesising and reordering the raw vocal data to stimulate a new structure. Leckey’s oddly disembodied voice is experienced through a prism of twitchy, volatile patterns.

Mark Fell – Shamanic Bear Session

Mark Fell’s long-running electronic music duo SND with Mat Steel dates back to the late 90s, but during that time Fell has kept up a flow of solo projects – albums that penetrate techno beats using algorithmic procedures and generative mathematics. I’m grateful to Finland-based tweeter @FrozenReeds for retrieving this “lost” Fell album, available for free download, from the backwaters of his website. An offshoot of Fell’s Multistability project, Shamanic Bear Session was released originally as a limited edition, but this dazzlingly chimeric music deserves your attention. Fell at his best.