Jürg Frey/Prague Quite Music Collective. — Longing Landscapes
Longing Landscapes takes in three modern ensemble works written by Swiss composer and clarinettist Jürg Frey. Each is played with great patience, wonderful subtlety, and often emotional depth by the Prague Quite Music Collective.
The CD album appears on the always-worthy Sheffield-based Another Timbre, who seek out the most creative & interesting in modern composition. The CD is presented in the label's house style, a minimal white mini gatefold. On its cover is a monochrome picture of a landscape- this is both dark in contrast, yet somehow hazed- it feels like a good visual fit for both the release's title, and much of the material within.
We open up with the 2023/ 2024 piece “The Sound Never Has Walls”-which is for clarinet, electric guitar, violin, and double bass. The just under twenty-minute work has a very drifting, at times episodic quality- with the musical motifs/ drones, seeming shifting pace between slow, very slow, and broken up with silence. We get presented with a series of tone patterns/ sound shapes- these move from layer shifting drone patterns, onto sparse and skeletal guitar patterns underfed by foreboding string scrapes, through to glum and slowed hovering dwells, and rising almost earthy folk simmers. I must admit it’s a piece that took a little time to warm to, but I think I was overthinking/overanalysing it too much- so when I just sat with & accepted, it made perfect sense, managing to shift through quite a few different moods.
Next we have 2024 “Fleetingness” which comes in at just over the twelve and a half minute mark. This is for eight players- from both Prague Quite Music Collective and Asaisimasa- taking in bass clarinet, cello, electric guitar, percussion, violin, Viola Da Gamba, and Double Bass. This piece opens with an urgent/ unbalancing blend of a short tolling feedback tone( reminding me of a reversing vehicle), several single string picks, and sliding/ fleeting drones. As it progresses, more sound details appear & shift, like slowly bounding/ brooding percussion, simmering tone trails, a selection of glum picks- be they high, mid, or low, and waving pitch detail. This stands as my favourite piece here, as I love the way the original tolling elements keep appearing, in sometimes a very fleeting manner, hence of course the piece's title.
Finally, we have the 2022/2023 title track, which is the longest work here at nearly thirty-six minutes. It’s for bass clarinet, electric guitar, violin, and double bass. It opens with a blend of slowly tolling pitches, grating string slides, and very sparse strum- all of which is both hazily fragmented & frail. As the piece continues, it sort of gently hovers, ebbs, and simmers along- utilising darts & shifts of each of the four instruments' sound pallets. At points melody and shape start to form, but these never get fully defined or clarified- though as it progresses it seems to get more forlornly fraught, in a rather lower case manner.
As a release, Longing Landscapes shows that, as a composer, Frey is still willing to take risks, both with his compositions and his listeners' perceptions. Like much of this composer's work, this album/collection is very much of a grower/ waiting for it to click release, but when it does, it most certainly rewards.