Colin Potter & Michael Begg — Fragile Pitches

For those whose roots are firmly planted behind a laptop in the studio, live albums may at first seem at odds with the assumed activity of constant refinement through engineering. However, the use of live improvisation is not only a more productive route to laying down tracks unshackled by the hesitation and fussiness encouraged by computer-based sequencing, but it also generates results both unpredictable and unachievable through any other means. These results are also more likely to produce organic and metaphysical qualities that are often lacking in the subjugated sterility of purely digital composition.

Indeed, this live element has played a part in both Michael Begg’s and Colin Potter’s recent work (and both worked together as part of Fovea Hex’s live incarnation): Michael Begg’s recorded work in Human Greed typically involved long gestation periods between studio-based interactions but is now evolving through the occasional live date that helps re-evaluate the distilled invocations as performance, encouraging new dimensions of words and video to join the proceedings. While many of Colin Potter’s recent releases have either been documents of live performances (both as part of Nurse With Wound’s captivating shows and his rarer but equally enchanting solo sets), or based around real time recordings of collaborative work including ‘The Simple Plan’ (with Paul Bradley) and ‘Above the Sky’ (as Monos with Paul Bradley and Darren Tate) both released earlier this year.

But for ‘Fragile Pitches’ there is an additional collaborator whose presence strongly influences both concept and execution: the space. Michael Begg and Colin Potter are not sitting in a room, but a cathedral, Edinburgh’s St. Giles' Cathedral to be precise, whose nave, transepts, font and pulpit resonate and transfigure the spectrum of sounds they cast out into ominous cyclones of austere sonorities filling the place of worship.

The first of two sets begins with ‘Carnethy’ (that, like all tracks, is named after regions in and around the Pentland Hills, just south of Edinburgh, hinting at a widening of the specificity behind the site), which stirs up the grandiosity of ceremonial intent that has pervaded the place for 900 years. Large, bold orchestral drones and stretched horn fanfares coalesce while fragments of all the church choirs that have amassed there throughout history continue to resonate in what can often feel like a journey from darkness towards brilliant light. Calmer moods are conjured through a steady strumming and scraping of piano strings accompanied by chiming guitar chords that float on a hazy bed of celestial air, combining to suggest a folk tradition abstracted by modern technology. Later what seems like a combination of the natural rhythms of rainfall and a crackling fire reveals the similarities in each rendering them almost interchangeable and acting as a re-occurring motif of natural elements.

Set two picks up the extended bass notes of a wind instrument that intoned throughout the interval as part of an hour long pre-recorded ambient piece (which is available with the first 120 editions of ‘Fragile Pitches’). Rising air infuses a building synth that drowns the audience’s chatter leading to strong string tones that soar and glide over rumbling incantations. Over the next forty minutes, circular, tidal movements slowly change into intense, ringing carillon chords setting off the defensive trills and squawks of unknown creatures at night. Shimmering curtains of constantly moving timbres play the same note over avalanches that ultimately reveal a solemn waltz on the wind before it disappears along with all other reverberations into the cathedral’s interior, swallowing like a black hole.

It is no wonder that ‘Fragile Pitches’ remains an untreated live recording. In documenting their site-specific contribution to Edinburgh’s Hogmanay season last year, Michael Begg and Colin Potter have avoided the temptation to tweak their triumphant interactions. In doing so they have afforded all those not able to experience the work in situ with the chance to meditate on the affecting effects of an ancient architecture subsuming aural electronic illusions.