Most of the works on Christian Mason's new portrait disc make claims to nature. Their material may be reasonably traditional in gesture and timbre, but these pieces position themselves less as objects of contemplation inhabiting their own centres of gravity than as translucent scrims over the pre-existing world: glosses on birdsong, or more generally on the gesture and pacing of the sounds of the natural world, or on the resonance of its empty spaces.
The first track stakes the claim boldly: A kingfisher dives into the sun ¦ is a completely unexpected opening to what presents itself as an album of instrumental solo and small-ensemble music. Mason describes it as an ‘electronic soundscape’, but what it in fact is is a gently extended field recording: birdsong, masses of chirping insects and rushing water blend seamlessly into a digital field of similar but artificial rustles, creaks, hisses and chirps, each plane becoming a version of the other and each local sonic morphology becoming a version of the others. Distilled from a longer video instillation co-created with James Stephen Wright, we are in the presence here of an extremely subtle art (subtle as in understated, and also as in the Italian sottile, as in delicately thin), which can be heard through and beyond. It sets a premise, unambiguously and with great force, that resonates through the rest of this record.
A kingfisher melts, seemingly seamlessly, into itself, and then into the early piano solo ¦ just as the sun is always ¦ In this eight-minute work from 2006, one of the first entries in Mason's catalogue, the harmonies are resonance-based, the melodic material gently inflected towards a bespoke modal universe, the recognisably post-French gestures comfortably and respiratorily paced. The piece has an aquatic, sometimes slightly ornithological sensibility, but really its most remarkable quality, especially with A kingfisher still in our ears, is its transparency. We see through it – something to do with the virtually complete limitation to high registers, the resonant spaces, the pauses for breath or for the concentric ripples to recede. This is not to say ¦ just as the sun is always ¦ is insubstantial (and, anyway, one of the most valuable legacies of late-twentieth-century experimental music has been the undermining of received categories of what ‘musical substance’ might in fact be). Nor is it unmemorable; this very evanescence leaves a paradoxically strong impression. It is passive. It is whitely translucent; it lets the light through.
I wandered for a while ¦ (it is tempting to see these recurrent ellipses as a totem of openness, transparency, an abjuration of self-sufficiency, isn't it?), from 2019, is essentially a concerto in two halves for piccolo with accompanying cello, piano, bells and electronics. The first builds from spacious melodicism, underpinned mostly by bells and artificial resonance, towards an unexpected endpoint – ‘climax’ feeling very much like the wrong word – juxtaposing an increasingly birdlike piccolo with the real thing on tape and electronic simulacra. The second half opens up a five-and-a-half-minute spectral field over a low cello B♭, electronics humming, bells chiming and piano strings scraping, the piccolo still dancing melodically above.
General aesthetic impressions aside, from a purely musical perspective the first highlight of this collection is Remembered Radiance. This 11-minute trio for piano, cello and percussion stands out for its concentration, the patience of its discourse: piano chords and brief, inescapably ‘Feldman-esque’ gestures alternate for a long time, a very long time, longer than we expect, with a variety of prolonged, more or less pitched responses from the others. This strict dialogue breaks down by way of climax (the word quite appropriate here), then settles down on to a mid-register piano E and a high, quasi-electronic response. One idea, then, and a beautiful one, and all the more striking for its unusual lack of reliance on Mason's melodic sensibility.
There are two cello solos here: the early 11-minute Incandescence (from 2011, when Mason was in his mid-twenties) and Bird learning to fly, from six years later. Incandescence, for all its technical assurance, feels a bit limited; it is the sort of fantasia on open strings and natural harmonics we have all heard before, with occasional dramatically emphasised low Cs underpinning arpeggios and little melodic fragments in overtones. Only in the last minute or so does it assert an identity, in an increasingly frantic miniature scherzo-as-coda, where those harmonics are not lovingly lingered over but snatched at, made to resist a bit, their easily wearying tone turned a bit sour.
Bird learning to fly, the other cello solo, is an entirely different beast. Written for an instrument strung with four A strings tuned to overtones of the standard low C, it is also based around little melodic fragments, casually paced and allowed to breathe naturally, and it also features our familiar harmonic arpeggios and open-string cameos. But the whole thing is fundamentally alienated, timbrally strained, shot through with strangled ponticello echoes; those open strings are not asserted boldly as refrain but woven throughout like a fraying metallic thread. The six intervening years have made a stark difference, it seems, the fluency of Mason's huge talent coming in the later work to interact explosively with a more sophisticated sense of restraint, pressure and instrumental capability. The result is the most striking music to be found on this record, and a piece that deserves to be heard far more than I fear its daunting demands of instrumental set-up will allow.
In between these two solos is another early work: 2010's Heaven's Chimes are Slow, a short duet for flute and piano. An unfamiliarly spiky texture dominates the first half of this work, with much use of a staccato articulation that is not much heard elsewhere in these pieces; but here too the high point takes the form of a pealing of overtones over a low ‘cello’ C. By this point in the album this feels a little rote, a little routine, a little easy. But the brief coda that melts away thereafter gives a passing hint of the elusive, icy translucence that would become Mason's strongest language.
The performances here, by the Octandre Ensemble (of which Mason is a member and a co-founder), are extraordinary, particularly that of pianist Joseph Houston, whose gentle yet full-bodied touch carries the rhetoric of every track on which he appears, and cellist Corentin Chassard, who presents the pair of solos (particularly Bird Learning to Fly) with urgency and confidence. They present a small-scale portrait of a music that, at its best, is wonderfully pale and self-effacing, at peace with itself, watching the world alongside us.
