Boring Like a Drill

Some archival releases are historically important, restoring a significant musical movement to present-day consciousness. Others can throw accepted history into a different light, making the past a deeper, richer source for new inspiration. As a modern musical experience, listening to historic recordings of the avant-garde is often an excercise in intellectual curiosity, or a dark form of amusement: the interpretations and performances are often unpolished or uninformed, at worst incompetent and, even at their best, often drily literal (and sometimes no worse for that). It’s a rare and exciting event when the archaeological trip works equally well as a compelling new release.

Gentle Fire: Explorations (1970 – 1973) is a superlative example of all that is best in archival box sets. Paradigm Discs has form for presenting ‘lost’ music at its most potent; this set has been years in the making and all the work has paid off in spades. In late twentieth century avant-garde music, the British group Gentle Fire is often mentioned but seldom heard. Active in the late 60s and early 70s, they remain best remembered for a small vinyl legacy: their recording of Stockhausen’s Sternklang and a German LP of pieces by the New York School. CD reissues are piecemeal and/or capriciously expensive. Explorations is three CDs of Gentle Fire recordings which, as far as I can tell, have never been publically available in complete form. Even if you are familiar with the 70s LPs, everything’s an ear-opener.

Disc one tackles familiar territory: previously unreleased performances of Cage, Stockhausen, Christian Wolff, Earle Brown and Toshi Ichiyanagi, all from 1970 or 1971. The typically rough-hewn electroacoustic sounds of the period are all present and correct, yet it all sounds less stark or abrasive than other contemporary avant-gardisms, even compared to their own LP. The only repeat here is Brown’s Four Systems, given an ingeniously austere realisation with Hugh Davies applying band-pass filters to a droning string ensemble (other group members Graham Hearn, Richard Orton, Richard Bernas, Michael Robinson and Stuart Jones filling in on whatever instrument is needed). There’s more detail in the Electrola LP, but the recording here is more focused on a coherent musical statement than on numbering off each of the score’s elements. It’s this emphasis on using open scores to produce a fully realised piece of music instead of “exploring possibilities” that sets Gentle Fire apart from other experimental music groups of the time. The disc starts off with a small surprise, with Christian Wolff’s For Jill instructing the performers to concentrate on combinations of selected notes into chords – an unusually traditional material compared to his better-known group realisations. An ensemble of home-made instruments by Davies et al nudges Wolff’s score back into the uncanny.

Two selections from Stockhausen’s Aus den sieben Tagen (Aufwärts and Treffpunkt) show the strength of the ensemble’s musical vision. They’re not afraid to “lead the tone wherever your thoughts lead you” as enjoined by the score, even as Stockhausen heavily directs those thoughts towards convergence. Their idea of “always return to the same place” is a lot more conceptually open and makes the piece soar in unexpected ways. Similarly with Aufwärts, where unlike with at least one other ensemble, they would not agree with, let alone solicit, Stockhausen’s guidance on what “the rhythm of the universe” might be. (Incidentally, there’s a great article in The Wire going over Gentle Fire’s history with the surviving members, including the whole “working with Stockhausen” experience.) Ichiyanagi’s Appearance threatens to get aggressively harsh but never lets up the suspense, with judicious use of ring modulators and sinewave generators creating a bleak, ominous landscape out of trumpet, cello and electric organ. Cage’s Cartridge Music does get appropriately rowdy, amping up small sounds into a cavernous roar. It’s a live recording and the audience is plainly amused by the antics required to produce some of these noises, thus fulfilling Cage’s wish that electronic music be at least as theatrically satisfying as live acoustic performance.

The second two discs are the real revelation, featuring compositions by individual group members and two large “group compositions”, each one shocking in how they interect with both their own time and ours. The pieces bring a healthy dose of the Cagean, Fluxusy extremes of the US avant-garde into the distinctly more genteel British millieu. It was a fertile period, sort of post-Cage but pre-Nyman, and Explorations expands this field hugely, beyond the usual assumed constraints of process music and the assumed freedoms of AMM. That skill for mixing acoustic and electronic comes into its own here. Stuart Jones’ Ruthie’s Piece sounds almost contemporary, using isolated piano sounds with heavy ring modulation against soft cello harmonics to create what could pass for 21st-century ambient. Richard Bernas’ Almanac For September is a more restless work but it also sets muted piano against cello harmonics, using purely acoustic means to alter tone and resonance in ways that resemble electronic processing. In Michael Robinson’s 2 Pianos Piece the composer is joined by Richard Bernas in a lop-sided process of repetition and augmentation that would fit alongside works by John White or Christopher Hobbs. Graham Hearn’s Centrepiece takes a rudimentary idea of “soloist with tape loops” and interprets it as a haunting, evocative soundtrack of muffled organ lost amongst the remnants of run-out grooves on old records. It’s a long, long way from the academic exposition of novel compositional structures.

The two group compositions push into new territories, with performance verging on installation. Group Composition VI (unfixed parities) from 1973 has the ensemble electronically transmitting and modifying speaking voices, filtering and disrupting speech with modified telephone equipment to create a dense, barely intelligible verbal soundscape. Its sonic novelty is ripe with the implications of technology, reproduction and intervention, information overload, alienation and spatial dislocation. As a dispassionately prophetic work, it’s a thrilling and disturbing space for meditation. In fleeting moments it recalls various Alvin Lucier compositions. Group Composition IV originated on the Pyramid Stage at the first Glastonbury festial in 1971 and is here recorded at the Roundhouse in London the following year. It features the gHong, a large assembly of suspended metal rods which can be played collective and coaxed into a wide array of complex sounds, augmented by various additional instruments, including Davies’ own homebrew springboards and a VCS3 synthesizer. This recording takes up the entire third disc, sounding and resounding for over an hour of deeply textured sounds that are simultaneously monumental and delicate. It’s a glorious thing.

Sound quality ranges from good (the concert recordings) to great; the cleanup work is seamless and transparent. The CD version comes in a slick box and a hefty, well-edited booklet with plenty of pictures, full documentation of who did what where and when, and a complete reprint of Hugh Davies’ essential essay Gentle Fire: An Early Approach to Live Electronic Music. Exemplary. I think a second pressing is on the way.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H Tags: Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, Gentle Fire, Graham Hearn, Hugh Davies, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Michael Robinson, Richard Bernas, Stuart Jones, Toshi Ichiyanagi

Musicclub.eu 28/12/20

The first ever survey of the seminal British experimental music collective, Gentle Fire, 'Explorations (1970-1973)' offers a remarkable and previously unavailable glimpse of their activities during the early 70s, covering their pivotal interpretations of the scores of Stockhausen, Brown, Cage, Ichiyanagi and Wolff, as well as an incredible immersion in their works and "Group Compositions". An unprecedented and historically important work, spanning the duration of 3 CDs, from Paradigm Discs, meticulously selected from the Hugh Davies archive, is one of the most important missing links in the history of British experimental music to emerge in living memory , and not to be missed. Of all the avant-garde and experimental music contexts that emerged during the 1960s and 1970s, few were more radical and more actively forward-looking than those of Britain. Often principled, ideological and politically oriented in their relationship to improvisation, musical interaction and freedom, a vast number of members, embracing numerous discreet practices, have come together to work collectively on projects such as AMM, The Scratch Orchestra, Company, Spontaneous Music Ensemble, London Jazz Composers Orchestra, The Music Improvisation Company and an almost infinite number of jointly billed projects. Of these, among the most exciting and least discussed was Gentle Fire, a group consisting of Graham Hearn, Hugh Davies, Michael Robinson, Richard Bernas, Stuart Jones and Richard Orton, which ran from 1968 to 1975. Having produced only one LP, 4 systems, Music For Amplified Toy Piano, Music For Carillon, Edges, for EMI Electrola in 1974, the oversight can be understood. Thankfully, Paradigm Discs now strives to change that, bringing this long overdue seminal group back with an absolutely jaw-dropping 3-CD investigation, Explorations (1970-1973), almost entirely made up of never-before-released recordings produced during the early 70s. As creatively thrilling and historically important as they come, it's nearly impossible to believe this hasn't been with us forever. Formed in 1968 by Graham Hearn, Hugh Davies, Michael Robinson, Richard Bernas, Richard Orton, and Stuart Jones, Gentle Fire has been widely regarded over the years for its interpretations of the works of Christian Wolff, John Cage, Earle Brown and Karlheinz Stockhausen, especially as this is all that has been publicly available to date. Others were a central component to ensemble practice and the attention that is justified in it, a substantial part of their efforts centered on the works of its members and the collective, now delivered to our ears for the first time by Explorations (1970 - 1973), meticulously selected from the material preserved in the archives of Hugh Davies since the first tape recording. Taken together, they represent what is arguably the biggest missing link in the history of evolution of British experimental music emerged in living memory. Explorations (1970 - 1973) is divided into 3 sections, one per CD. The first, recorded between 1970 and 1971, logically begins in the realm that the ensemble is best known for. Contains 4 studio recordings and 2 concert recordings of graphic and text scores, features striking renders of 2 parts of Stockhausen's Aus den sieben Tagen and one piece each by Earle Brown, John Cage, Toshi Ichiyanagi and Christian Wolff. Everything, as exciting as the next, illuminates the groups with a lasting arrangement for lyrics and graphic scores that have great elements of interpretative freedom for them, and therefore where the composer provides a skeleton and steps back allowing the musicians to take the reins. Perhaps most importantly, Gentle Fire stands out for being one of the few ensembles of their time to have been in regular communication with the composers of each piece, making these recordings of their interpretations particularly valuable and arguably among the closest to their initial conception of any available. Second and third Explorations CDs (1970-1973) take us deep into previously unavailable realms, focusing on the absolutely unique and jaw-dropping works of Gentle Fire. CD2 dates back to 1973 and was recorded during a 2-day residency at Radio Bremen. Contains 5 pieces covering a wide variety of styles, most noteworthy is a 23 minute version of Group Composition VI which is their only text based piece and uses elaborate and filtered speech, plus 4 key works that used graphics and symbols, tape loops and other physical apparatus designed to model the unfolding of musical material, and defined the ensembles a stunning approach and sound. CD3 includes a recording of their appearance at ICES 72, a legendary festival that took place at the Roundhouse in London, miraculous.

Point of Departure

If listeners know about the group Gentle Fire at all, it is likely due to Hugh Davies’ participation in the ensemble. From their inception in 1968 through 1975, the group devoted themselves to grappling with the interconnections of the realization of text and graphical scores, group improvisation and the integration of live electronics with conventional instruments and invented instruments. And while they performed often, collaborating with composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen (with whom Davies had served as personal assistant), Christian Wolff, and Alvin Lucier and working in a variety of contexts, from galleries to concert halls to parks to the Glastonbury Rock Festival in 1971, until now, hearing their music was next-to-impossible. Their sole LP, documenting performances of pieces by Earle Brown, John Cage, and Christian Wolff is long out-of-print. Other than that, an excerpt of one of their group compositions appeared on the compilation Not Necessarily “English Music” which accompanied Volume 11 of the Leonardo Music Journal along with an article about the group by Davies. But Paradigm Disc has rectified that with a deluxe 3 CD set along with a booklet that reprints Davies’ article “Gentle Fire: An Early Approach to Live Electronic Music,” detailed notes about each of the pieces and an extensive collection of period photographs.

Gentle Fire operated in a wider context of a generation of musicians who developed collectives under the influence of and in response to the music of composers like John Cage, Stockhausen and Cornelius Cardew, experiments with the use of live electronics by musicians like David Tudor, university electronic music studios and organizations like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop along with the increasing availability of synthesizers, sound generating equipment and plans for simple electronic circuits. Groups like Sonic Arts Union, Composers Inside Electronics and activities around the San Francisco Tape Music Center focused on performing works by their own members while MEV, Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza and AMM were primarily engaged in charting their own approaches to collective improvisation. Gentle Fire incorporated aspects of all of these groups, performing music by contemporary composers with whom they developed ongoing working relationships, pieces developed by each of the members expressly for the ensemble and developing a collaborative approach they categorized as “Group Compositions.”

The group came together as an outgrowth of an electronic music studio and workshop sessions set up by Richard Orton at York University. Over the course of their existence, it featured Davies on invented instruments, live electronics, clarinet, and khène; Richard Bernas on piano, percussion, and voice; Patrick Harrex on violin and percussion; Graham Hearn on piano, recorder, VCS-3 synthesizer, and percussion; Stuart Jones on trumpet, cello, and electric guitar; Richard Orton on live electronics and voice and Michael Robinson on cello and piano. Utilizing acoustic instruments, found objects, oscillators, filters, modified circuits, feedback, and tapes, the group forged an approach toward the dynamic live transformation of sound. The three CDs in this set, divided into performances of work by other composers, works composed by the group, and an extended live recording of a “Group Composition,” provides a fantastic overview of the scope of their music.

The first disc is comprised of performances of text and graphic scores by Wolff, Stockhausen, Earle Brown, Cage and Toshi Ichiyanagi. In each of the pieces, one is struck by the process of sound making that each of the members fully embraced. Wolff’s “For Jill” and Cage’s “Cartridge Music” performed on amplified objects delves into the creation of sound from their inherent resonances and timbres. Their performance of Wolff’s piece has the delicate cross-play of a Gamelan while “Cartridge Music” roars and clatters with amplified textures shot through with shredded feedback. Brown’s “4 Systems” subverts sustained notes played by two violins, viola, and cello through the use of live band pass filtering and electronic modulation, transforming a string quartet into quavering shudders and oscillating drones. Ichiyanagi’s piece traces the navigation of Hammond organ, trumpet, and cello across fields of real-time refractions of ring modulators, routing, and sine tones. Also included are two pieces from Stockhausen’s text series Aus den Sieben Tagen, each abstracting the elemental sounds of instruments into clamoring countervailing sonic fields. “Treffpunkt,” in particular, stands out with its eddying layers of density and dynamics for tabla, amplified springboard, electric guitar, trumpet, synthesizer, and cello.

The second disc picks up with pieces by ensemble members Jones, Robinson, Hearn and Bernas along with one of the Group Composition pieces. “Ruth’s Piece (for 2 cellos, 2 pianos and 2 ring modulators)” is based on the grouping of two cello/piano duos that play independently from each other. Ring modulators, built by Davies, were designed such that the inputs and outputs produce all the pitches in an overtone series, creating ghostly harmonics that layer in and out of phase with each other with a deliberate patience. Robinson’s “2 Pianos Piece” starts with a minimalist feel, utilizing static fixed tempos and repeated sets of notes. But as the piece progresses, there is an organic flux as the two parts are transposed and stretched while tenaciously maintaining the same tempo and dynamic. Hearn’s “Centrepiece (for tape loops and Hammond organ)” takes a decidedly more low-tech approach. Hearn made tape loops of the feed-out tracks of LPs and distributed those amongst a number of players. For this version, the loops skip and pop against a low, simmering, lyrical Hammond organ improvisation mixed quietly into the overall piece. Snippets of the LPs circle around and then disappear as pops, crackles, and grit degraded a bit by tape playback envelop the ethereal organ part.

The disc closes with a performance of “Group Composition VI (unfixed parities) (for voices, modified telephones, and live electronics),” a remarkable melding of cast-off technology and DIY ingenuity. The liner notes describe how Davies came across a bunch of discarded General Post Office telephones which he hacked. Using the earpieces as microphones, the mechanical dials were modified so that they would interrupt and chop the signals which were sent to speakers dispersed around a space. In performance, the group would sit around the table, conducting mundane conversations which would be picked up, hacked and abraded by the modified dials. Over the course of the 23-minute performance, one has the sense of listening to the drifting vacillations of radio signals weaving their way in constantly morphing skeins of glitched and marred voices.

The third disc is devoted to a performance of “Group Composition IV (for gong and mixed instruments)” from the 1972 International Carnival of Experimental Sound. Performed in a derelict Victorian building originally constructed to house a giant turntable to rotate steam locomotives, the cavernous acoustics were perfect for the performance. The group had constructed an instrument they dubbed the gHong over time, suspending specially fabricated large metal grills and springs from a wooden framework which were amplified with a combination of contact microphones and various cheap, modified mics deployed to capture specific frequency ranges. In performance, they mixed and blended the various amplified sources. Over the course of the 65-minute piece, the resonant clangs, groans, and creaks of the gHong create a sonic framework as tabla, cello, recorder, synthesizer, amplified springboard, trumpet, and cello are interwoven into the orchestral collective work. Clearly influenced by their endeavors with various scores, the piece unfolds with resolute pacing as layers amass and shift, sounding like the amplified drift of tectonic plates. This is music that sits, eschewing any sense of progression while still fostering an internal sense of form over the extended duration.

Within a few years of the 1972 performance, the group would disband as the various members went off to pursue other activities. Davies was the only one who would continue delving in to strategies for live electronic music, the others moving toward academics and, in Robinson’s case, a career in investigative journalism. Their lack of concern for documenting their work resulted in their becoming an obscure footnote in the development of experimental music at a particularly changeable time. This set rectifies that, and maybe, at long last, a reissue of their LP might even come about. Michael Rosenstein

Tempo

Most accounts of experimental music in England tend to be quite London-centred – the Scratch Orchestra, Morley College, Cornelius Cardew, Gavin Bryars, the Experimental Music Catalogue and so on – but this three-CD set of recordings by Gentle Fire tilts that history a little to the north. Gentle Fire was a group of five, sometimes six musicians, playing a mix of acoustic and electronic instruments, and developed out of the collaboration between Hugh Davies and Richard Orton, each of them responsible for the establishment of a university electronic music studio, Davies at Goldsmiths’ College, Orton at York. Davies and Orton formed a duo in 1968 to play live electronic music and then Davies became part of a larger group whose other members were all students at York: Patrick Harrex, Richard Bernas, Stuart Davies, Michael Robinson and Graham Hearn; Harrex left the group in 1970, Orton the year after.

To declare an interest, from 1977 to 1983 Richard Orton was my PhD supervisor at York University. In the early 1980s Gentle Fire were invited to re-form temporarily for a performance of Stockhausen's Sternklang (with Intermodulation they had been one of the two English groups to play in its premiere) and Richard asked me if I would like to take part. Then the performance was cancelled, leaving me as a Gentle Fire member-never-to-be. It was typical of his modesty that in all our conversations Richard barely mentioned his role in Gentle Fire; I certainly mentioned the group to him because a Gentle Fire concert in Liverpool in 1975 had been one of the most perplexing new music encounters of my undergraduate years. These CDs, however, especially the first one, demonstrate how influential he must have been, his engagement with the music of the New York School composers balancing Davies's relationship with Stockhausen.

The first CD presents recordings of music by Earle Brown, Cage, Ichiyanagi (Appearance), Stockhausen (two pieces from Aus den sieben Tagen) and Wolff (For Jill). Two are live recordings made at the 1971 Dartington Summer School – Cage's Cartridge Music and Stockhausen's Aufwärts – and in gaps between outbursts of noise in the Cage there's audible evidence that not everyone in the audience was taking the music entirely seriously. But it's a splendidly dirty performance and Gentle Fire are on fine form throughout, with Brown's Four Systems a particularly rich sonic treat. Four of the group form a string quartet whose sound is then filtered and modulated with a pulse generator: it's an elegant and powerful realisation of the score, with the string quartet as the white of the page and the electronics as the notations.

The second CD features compositions by ensemble members Bernas, Hearn, Jones and Robinson, followed by Group Composition VI (unfixed parities). Of these the Group Composition is perhaps the most typical of its time: the musicians read ‘mundane conversations or business transactions’ into the earpieces of 1950s telephones that had been modified by Davies to become microphones with unstable resonances. It's 23 minutes long. The other pieces are reminders that music history is not always as linear as we might think. Bernas composes his Almanac for September with proto-spectral piano and cello harmonics. Robinson's 2 Pianos Piece is minimal, indeterminate and dissonant, the players nagging away at two interlocking whole-tone clusters. In Centrepiece Hearn overlays jazzy Hammond organ chords with tape loops playing back the scratchy grooves from the middle of LPs, like something the Beatles might have tried during the White Album sessions. Only in the ring-modulated cello and piano sounds of Jones's Ruthie's Piece does the feisty energy of the first CD re-assert itself.

Listening to the third CD is like developing a film that has been lying at the back of a drawer for decades. There are five tracks, each a live recording of Group Composition IV made in the Chalk Farm Roundhouse in London in August 1972. Gentle Fire were one of the acts there on the second night of the International Carnival of Experimental Sound (John Cage had presented the UK premiere of HPSCHD on the first night) and they based their performances around a large resonant instrument that they had designed themselves, the gHong. It sounds wonderful: three metal grills (the inspiration had come from the grill in Richard Orton's oven) so large that Michael Robinson could only assemble the complete instrument in the street outside his flat, their sound extended with a ‘cluster of large steel springs’ (a Hugh Davies trademark) and amplified through contact microphones. But that's it. In some of the performances there are instrumental arabesques around this central resonant entity but they are more or less incidental. It's no surprise to read that Group Composition IV had been unveiled at dawn during the first Glastonbury Festival earlier in 1971.

Gentle Fire: Explorations is a meticulously documented production, lovingly curated by Clive Graham. The sound quality of the recordings is consistently good and the presentation of the CDs is exemplary, each in an individually designed sleeve and boxed together with a 48-page booklet. The booklet includes Hugh Davies's 2001 Leonardo article about the ensemble, there are detailed descriptions of the music and how it came into being, and the text is interspersed with crisply printed black-and-white photographs. The photographs in themselves offer a fascinating insight into one version of musical life at the beginning of the 1970s: not just the haircuts and the analogue electronic gear, but also the friendly policeman listening in as the musicians test out the gHong resonances on the pavement and, above all, the sheer informality of it all; the world before marketing. Gentle Fire: Explorations is in a numbered limited edition of 500. Get one if you can. (Christopher Fox)

The WIRE (Feb 2021)

Working with graphic notation and real-time electronics is enough to condemn a group to obscurity in Britain. The ensemble Gentle Fire existed between 1968–75, played at Glastonbury and at the International Carnival of Experimental Sound, Harvey Matusow’s two week beano of new music held at The Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, North London. They also collaborated regularly with Karlheinz Stockhausen and their aesthetic sympathies were closer to the thinking of John Cage and David Tudor in the US than anything to do with, say, AMM. Not that their history can be divorced entirely from UK free improv. Alongside his work with Gentle Fire, Hugh Davies was part of The Music Improvisation Company with Evan Parker, Jamie Muir and Derek Bailey. Other Gentle Fire members included Richard Bernas, Graham Hearn, Michael Robinson, Richard Orton and Stuart Jones, all multi-instrumentalists who wrote new material for the group, while also performing Cage, Stockhausen and Earle Brown. And where AMM (also Musica Elettronica Viva in Rome) improvised using electronics, Gentle Fire made what they termed group compositions. Five decades later, this triple CD retrospective – complete with chunky booklet and evocative time-capsule photos – delivers as exhaustive a survey of their contribution as archives will allow. As part of an extended introductory essay, published originally in 2001, Davies discusses the nature of the group’s multi-instrumentalism, concluding that when things threatened to settle comfortably, or become stale, “we would even swap instruments in order to avoid cliches”. That speaks of uniquely interconnected personalities, who made essentially the same group sound no matter what instrument they happened to be playing. The first disc – Earle Brown’s 4 Systems, Christian Wolff’s For Jill, Toshi Ichiyanagi’s Appearance, Cage’s Cartridge Music and two sections from Stockhausen’s Aus Den Sieben Tagen – offers a kaleidoscope of sounds thoughtfully chosen but talking urgent dialogues, the audience’s guffaws of amazement (occasional laughter too) during the Cage testament to the churning physicality and intellectual moxie of the music. Disc two focuses on compositions by group members, from the disruptive minimalism of Michael Robinson’s 2 Pianos Piece to the endlessly moreish rhythmic mazes provoked by Richard Bernas’s Almanac For September. The two group compositions included – numbers IV and VI – tell us that the distinction between group composition and improvisation was more than semantics. VI erected a structure out of speech patterns, recreating banal phone conversations, sent scattering by the interruption of electronically modified phone dials; IV massaged sounds from a giant homemade metal instrument, the gHong, devised by Robinson – the music governed by vibrations and resonant spectra rather than improvising in any conventional sense. (Philip Clark)