Seth Cluett — Objects of Memory
The opening piece, ‘Objects in Stillness’, is the first of three scored works of seven to eight minutes each. Its single-page score distributes extended notes across bassoon, viola, guitar and percussion with an overriding instruction for the playing to be “glacial, suspended, and brittle, with the softest surface”. Clogs, the quartet it was written for, take to the task with a refined, measured sensibility as their acoustics merge naturally with four sine tones. The result is a fragile flow that melts cold, metallic undercurrents into a warmer, organic drift, curiously highlighting the constant movement of pulses and bends, yet never still.
Named from a line in Beckett’s Molloy, ‘A Radiance Scored with Shadow’ is played here by the New York quartet So Percussion. Cluett’s score required them to combine amplified paper, a can of compressed air, a cymbal, a bass drum and a bowed vibraphone to sound “like a machine made of crisp snow and steam” while trying to avoid “any form of groove”. The combination of frequencies deftly distilled from the paper and air’s high-end rustle to the bass drum’s soft, low-end punctuation is deliciously balanced as they gently form a corporeal suggestion of the room in which Beckett’s protagonist observed the moon’s silvery passage.
The final scored piece on the disk, ‘A Murmur which Redoubles’ is for guitar quartet and tape and inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Foucault’s essay “Language to Infinity”. Here the Catch Electric Guitar Quartet from Amsterdam is presented the challenge of playing “like voices from the apartment below” as they interpret the piece proximal to a tape of fixed sines. It’s a wafting yet suspenseful outcome as the soft electronic tones and ebowed strings merge, peppered with the odd pulsing passage or singular pluck. It proceeds in a seemingly random way into a dappling light before disappearing as slowly as it arrived.
The CD concludes with two long pieces of around twenty minutes a piece, one the soundtrack to an installation, the other a live recording. ‘Doleros’ was first presented at a gallery in Brooklyn in 2008 as an 8-channel surround sound installation that recreated the experiences available at Ringing Rocks Park, a boulder field in Pennsylvania, where visitors are encouraged to explore the sonic properties of its geology. Cluett’s piece layers field recordings from the site over yet more sine waves that pave a long and ominously drifting path through the light taps and knocks of hammer on stone. Sines return once again on the last piece titled, slightly absurdly, ‘Untitled (Objects of Memory)’. They join an array of modified, portable cassette players and controlled feedback to cultivate gently gliding drones that fold into each other, naturally evolving and extending like a seedling in rising sunlight, sometimes strong, other times almost imperceptible but never sudden.
Objects of Memory is quite possibly one of the quietest albums you could choose to listen to, and yet contains enough activity to make its presence felt. It often reminds of Alvin Lucier’s experiments but lacks his purity and is more suggestive of movements in the natural environment than stillness. While one can’t help feel that what is presented here is more likely to be appreciated by academic peers than casual listeners, the combinations of sounds display such immersive and delicate qualities that they have a charm of their own separate from their weighty concepts.